The Principle of Excellence: A Framework for Social Ethics

The Principle of Excellence

The Principle of Excellence A Framework for Social Ethics

Nimi Wariboko

Lexington Books A division of

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wariboko, Nimi, 1962– The principle of excellence : a framework for social ethics / Nimi Wariboko. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-3638-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3640-9 (electronic) 1. Excellence. 2. Social ethics. I. Title. BJ1533.E82W37 2009 179’.9—dc22 2009025185

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to my friend Ikechi Emenike with whom since 1987 I have been engaged in conversations, thoughts, and actions about founding a solid footing for excellence in Africa.

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Contents

Preface Introduction PART I:

ix 1

WHAT IS EXCELLENCE?

21

Chapter 1: The Making of a New Meaning of Excellence

23

Chapter 2: Exegeting Excellence

47

Chapter 3: The Core Features of Excellence

81

Chapter 4: New Being: Participation and Imitation

97

Chapter 5: Justice, Love, and Hope

113

PART II:

133

SOCIAL-ETHICAL FRAMEWORK

Chapter 6: A Framework for Social Ethics

135

Chapter 7: Social Practice as Boundary of Possibilities

163

Chapter 8: Excellence and Economic Development

181

Epilogue

207

Acknowledgments

217

Bibliography

219 vii

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Contents

Index

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About the Author

239

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Preface

The primary purpose of this study is to explore the nature of excellence as human infinite longing aimed at the creation of the good community and dynamic transformation of humanity. The quality of the communal good and the truth and beauty of self-transcendence are judged by the extent to which conditions of possibility exist for all citizens to creatively actualize their potentialities. The virtues of justice, love, and hope are ways of being for excellence. This book argues that excellence, striving for the creative realization of human potentialities, is the paradigmatic virtue the exercise of which leads to achievement of human flourishing. Excellence redefined as the movement toward what human coexistence is not-yet is the mother lode of virtues crucial to all forms of human flourishing, hope, courage, love, and justice. This book shows us how to craft a social-ethical framework and methodology around the complex, historical, and multilayered character of human excellence. This new understanding of excellence is grounded on a Christology of excellence grafted into Paul Tillich’s doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth as the New Being. According to Tillich, Jesus in actualizing all his potentialities reveals human nature in all its possibilities, and we can take our bearings from the man Jesus as the model of what human nature is, what it is for human beings to be in existential conditions, and what humans can become in an orientation to the divine. The overall result that emerges from this exercise is a bold attempt to rethink the nature and task of ethics and to situate the moral category of ix

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excellence at its core. In this light, excellence is no longer the virtue of doing something well or the mean of two extremes, but the clearing that allows human creativity to manifest and persons to creatively resist obstacles to human flourishing in all forms of sociality. The concept of excellence is thus liberated from the excessive concern with order and good citizenry and instead serves as a liberatory principle for interrogating all present social organizations in the name of a better future. The invitation and challenge of this study, therefore, is to create the politics, eros, and ethos in our communities so that every person will actualize to the highest level possible his or her potentialities. The book aspires to meet this challenge by taking on the rigorous task of rethinking the meaning and the place of social practice, governance, and economic development in human flourishing. These three represent important ways of applying the new theoretical construct to real-life issues of creating the relevant milieu for the creative realization of human potentials. In fleshing out the vision of excellence-inducing milieu, I particularly engaged philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s ethical theory of social practice and virtues as well as theologian Mark Lewis Taylor’s notion of prophetic spirit of resistance. While MacIntyre’s theory of social practice leans toward order and control in the polis, the Taylorian notion of prophetic spirit focuses on the generation of new social practices that can deepen and widen being. I reconceptualize social practice to bring out its implicit directedness and attraction toward the norms of prophetic spirit. By creatively combining both perspectives, I push the scholarly understanding of social practice into new directions; and thus make it both a tool and hermeneutics for promoting or analyzing the critical conditions for promoting human excellence and flourishing. To demonstrate how the social-ethical framework of excellence I am proposing in this study can help move the discourse on economic underdevelopment, a well-known hindrance to human flourishing and excellence, I also engage the development theory of Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen. I extend his theory of development as freedom in new directions so as to locate it both in the doctrine of human nature (beings who have the “future in their essential being”) and the construct of excellence. The result is that I put forward a new philosophical perspective on economic development— that of development as excellence. Excellence as a clearing allows economic development to manifest and it is what is behind the search for economic freedoms as human capability development. There is a major implication of this study for administering economic development or promoting overall human capability development. The state is not to concern itself with organizing society to function according to a

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particular comprehensive conception of the good human life. In respect for pluralism and diverse ways of life, it is to restrict itself only to promoting human excellence and to let individuals and communities in the pursuit of the actualization of their potentialities decide their actual functionings. This lack of definitive preference for a single comprehensive moral vision should not be construed to mean a lack of any general commitment to ethical values. The state is not an agent without character and principles, improvising its decisions or governance. It is committed to respecting inherent human dignity and equality of all citizens (as bearers of God’s image and endowed with the right and duty to participate in the common good) and creating the conditions of possibility necessary for safeguarding human dignity. Such a state will not act in ways that block the unfolding of potentialities and the promises of God in the lives of persons or social groups within and outside its borders.

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Introduction

We must not follow those who urge us, being human, to reason and choose humanly, and, being mortal, in a mortal way; but insofar as it is possible we must immortalize and do everything in order to live in accordance with the best of ourselves. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics1 Our longing for the good is dismissed by Sartre as a “useless passion.” Human imagining, writes Camus, condemns us to misery, for it is absurd. We long for goodness, beauty, and kindness in a world perpetually marred by ugliness, evil, and injustice. . . . Our creative discontent, which drives us to imagine an alternative reality, is the image/imagination of God beating in our breast. . . . We are called to heal the world in the image of our most beautiful imaginings. The eros of imagination is the elixir of God running through the universe. —Rabbi Marc Gafni, The Mystery of Love2

Opening Intentions Being must always bear its becoming in resistance to those obstacles which block unfolding potentiality. The paramount goal of ethics is, therefore, to create the social framework that will support an upsurge of being in any society. The overall task of this study is to forge an ethics of liberation, the freeing of humanity from social and natural constraints that block the unfolding of being 1

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in history. I enter into the task through the lens of the moral category of excellence. In this study I redefine the concept of excellence such that it is no longer the virtue of doing something well or the mean of two extremes. Instead, excellence is understood as the clearing that allows human creativity to manifest and for persons to creatively resist obstacles to human flourishing in all forms of sociality. The concept of excellence is thus liberated from the excessive concern with order and good citizenry to serve as a liberatory principle for interrogating all present social organizations in the name of a better future. Human excellence is a process that unfolds over time as men and women aspire to live in accordance with the best of themselves. Its study can quickly launch the scholar into a thicket of ethical thinking and practice in any given community. In very simple terms—only tentatively—can we say that the “ex” in excellence points to placeness in a community. To know that a particular product (object, praxis, idea, or insight) excels is to know an already existing standard of the product and/or the community in which the product is located. It is also to asseverate that the community in which the work is situated is appropriately moved, impressed, or motivated to discover new possibilities in the product. To assert that a particular work exceeds an already existing body of work is to evaluate the new work and its placeness and worth within a particular sociocultural context as valuable. Excellence is always a social phenomenon: a combination of creative work and a receptive audience (community). This social phenomenon presupposes at least two other factors: there are persons in the community who long to reach the what-is-not-yet, wanting to realize fully the potentialities of what it means to them to be human, and a milieu that lets their creativity manifest. This study examines human excellence at five levels simultaneously: 1. It investigates the concept of excellence as a ceaseless striving of humans to realize their potentialities, to be free to come into their ownmost possibilities. 2. This striving toward what they are not-yet is presented as a version of the immortal longings of humans to transcend their humanity, to orient themselves to an infinite horizon. 3. It interprets excellence as an opening, a clearing.3 Excellence is the clearing for sheer manifestation of potentialities and by means of which a people can see what they are doing and where they are headed, and thus, situate their response toward the finitude that chafes against their skin. 4. Excellence is interpreted as a process involving the transformation of humans and the modification of forms of human sociality. 5. It is also about the interconnectivity of being, the eros of relationality.

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These five dimensions are deftly interwoven to produce a robust conception that sheds new light on the meanings of the good, truth, and beauty on one hand, and justice, love, and hope on the other. For the sake of clarity, these five ways of naming excellence need to be properly bundled to yield a well-integrated perspective. This much can be achieved if we resort to an analogy based on biological life. Life that is often described as a rope is indeed a weaving together of at least five distinguishable but inseparable threads within a common. Every organ or cell in a human body does its work because it has life in it. But there are no multiple lives in a single human being. Cut an organ or cell away and it withers and dies. The context (clearing) for the life and functioning of each organ or cell is life, the single life of the body. The single life is the clearing, the opening, within which each organ or cell actualizes its potential functionings. So it is for the rest of the body’s members and parts. Life is a dynamic unity of life (life force) and an organism’s particular members in their united functionings; and the unity of the members’ functionings occurs in life. This unity of unities alone is life in its circular motion, transforming itself within itself as it moves forward and returns, and carrying forward to a higher synthesis its precedent motions. The emergent synthesis sublates the earlier motions as life drives toward the new in the actualization of the potential functionings of all its parts.4 The reader may have already noticed that the analogy of life has yielded insights on three of the five dimensions of excellence: actualization of potentials, clearing, and transformation. The remainders are longing and eros. Now consider this: everything living always urges beyond itself, participating in its world and environment, drawing and giving elements to and from itself, and pushing ahead into space. Life has an eros to its world and it drives beyond the form in which it finds itself. Every life wants to grow; it intends to overcome both internal and external resistance in a way that transcends its boundaries and draws external resources to itself.5 Herein lay both the longing and eros (interconnectedness, relationality, participation) of life. Life is incomplete without these dimensions appropriately unified. In the same vein, no strand of excellence is actual or complete without the other three. These five strands of excellence, when taken together, form the quilt of excellence. A question arises at this point: What grounds the unity or togetherness and thus forms them into the multifaceted whole that excellence is made out to be in this study? The unity of these five constituents is rooted and secured by effort (action, techneµ) which lies within the capacity of humans qua humans, within the underlying core of human potentialities that are naturally expressed in “activities,” “acts,” or “actions.”6 This capacity indwelling in all of the identi-

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fied strands, severally and collectively, is the “agent” that conditions them into unity. All five strands are related to this capacity. The unity is grounded in the interiority of this expressible capacity in each of them. It is important to note that this unity is not just about the mutuality of these elements, but what is common to every one of them. Armed with this set of interpretations of human excellence, the study proceeds to outline a framework for thinking and doing social ethics in fresh ways. The framework shows how we can approach the subject of socialethical thinking, organize its methodology, and direct its focus to pressing social issues such as economic development. On another level the work presented in this book can be interpreted as an attempt to understand the nature of the human self. Here the human self is not interpreted as maker, as citizen, or the responsible self, but the excellent self. How do I live a full amazing life? How do I come to the creative realization of my vital potentials at the highest possible level? The excellent self believes that something of a great moral, spiritual, or cultural significance can become manifest in it and, hence, it is an embodiment and revelation of possibilities. Following Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, I will also call such a self the epiphanic self. The epiphanic self is the locus of manifestation of excellence that defines or completes human nature as it even reveals it afresh at a deeper level.7 Nothing is more human than the longing to expand our humanity by transcending our human limitations. The union of the eros to move toward what we are not yet and our extant limitations is a fecund clearing, a thing divine; in our mortal life it is something immortal.8 This union is the motive force behind excellence; it is the power of the claim of human excellence. Excellence is not an ideal of perfection that finds us inadequate and dehumanized, and wishing to depart from all the necessity of the human context. But it is an opening, a clearing, in the great current of life that affirms our characteristically human way of being. It is a clearing beyond perfection that allows us to explore the manifestation of our hidden potentialities, which affirms and fulfills our humanity. In the immanent quest for and experiencing of excellence, I will argue, we show ourselves to be pulled toward an infinite that provides the intelligibility of such a striving. Jesus (insofar as we are focused on his humanity as the man from Nazareth9) is a supreme and unique exemplar of the dynamic human self-transcendence toward the infinite.10 In order to properly investigate the notion of excellence being developed in this study we will look at the life of Jesus which reveals human nature in most (all?) of its possibilities. How does an encounter with the story of the historical Jesus of Nazareth enable us to evaluate our movement toward what is not-yet and to transcend our

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humanity in response to the universalizable particularity of his history? The dense particularity of his first-century life will serve as a lens to look at how a human being can transcend him- or herself by contact with (or bending toward) the more-than-human or by orientation toward an infinite horizon. I will argue that we need to imitate the orientation of Jesus to the infinite in a humanity-affirming manner. Imitating the dynamic openness toward the infinite that characterized Jesus’s life, or recognizing and responding to the inescapable transcendence toward the infinite which the striving for excellence entails, would require each one of us to make a profound ethical choice. The imitation or recognition evolves through a deliberate and radical shift in stance toward life: to attain self-affirmation and higher being in the light of the infinite. As Søren Kierkegaard has shown us in Either/Or, in placing ourselves in the infinite, we are choosing ourselves to become what we really are, affirming ourselves as subjects with an infinite dimension. With this choice all the finite steps in the great current of life toward the infinite get their value and significance. In this choice the ordinariness of life is not necessarily changed, it is only seen and lived, as Kierkegaard assures us, in the new dimension of infinite choice.11 In the last paragraph I stated that the striving for human excellence involves an inescapable tendency toward the infinite. This statement needs some unpacking, not only to elucidate it, but also to tighten more closely the connection between the infinite and the human quest for excellence in the existential conditions of life. I will work with two ideas for now to clarify the connection. First, I will develop the concept of excelleme: a transmittable unit of cultural information or quality in a well-marked domain of social practice whereby its presence enables an individual or work to exhibit excellence. An excelleme represents a building block of the practice through which “standard” of excellence appropriate to the practice is achieved in the course of realizing it (excelleme). And with other excellemes, it constitutes the excellence of such marked area of practice. The second is about human response to nothingness. Humans respond to nothingness by attempting to control the abyss of indeterminate possibility. The abyss (the inexhaustible ocean of possibilities) is uncontrollable. This is so because the abyss of possibility is always indeterminate: the pursuit and attainment of one possibility sets up the pursuit of the next one. The pursuit of the next possibility is insatiable, as every excellent accomplishment has to “suffer the excess of its own possibility.” The pursuit itself is indeterminately suspended between the being and nonbeing of human existence and it points to the human “courage to be” (according to Paul Tillich) and to “the nothing that interlaces all human existence” (as per Kierkegaard).

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Simply put, excellemes are units of cultural information through which knowledge and practice of excellence are transmitted from one individual to another. What unit of information (idea) is an excelleme in any given time and place can only be properly defined with regard to the whole field of excellemes in a given domain of life or the whole structure of excellemes. Every new excelleme contributes something to the domain or the definition of other excellemes in its field at a given historical juncture. Hence every new excelleme changes the definition of all excellemes. An excelleme is fully immanent to its mode of expression, excellence. There is a certain dialectics in understanding excellence. The opening that is excellence is the brilliance that ensues as a result of concentration of excellemes. We would have no idea of excellence if there were no excellemes. Yet one of the great problems of understanding excellence is how excellemes participate in excellence. An excelleme assumes the particularity of a region of excellence and at the same time raises the possibility of the universality of possible new forms or fields. This is so because every excelleme, though situated within the particularity of what it is trying to express, transcends its situation because it gestures toward a possible new type of excellence in the history that will follow. It gestures to break the form of which it is a part in order to release new path or form altogether. The production of excellemes is infinite. There is an excelleme and then there is an excelleme of an excelleme of a region of social practice. This is like a reflection on thought, the notion of reflexive redoubling (the idea of the idea of a body) that anchors the existence of “complex ideas.” As Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza reasoned, this process of redoubling does go to infinity.12 An excelleme of an excelleme (the improvement of improvement of a process or substance) is an excelleme. So there exists an excelleme that is the excelleme of the excelleme of the excelleme of an object (thought, idea), and so on. What we have shown so far is that there is a biunivocal correspondence between simple (initial) excellemes (as in simple, initial thoughts on a subject) and excellemes of the type “excelleme of excelleme” (reflexive excellemes, thoughts of those thoughts, reflexive thoughts). This second set forms a proper part of all possible simple excellemes and renders such an infinite set if there are excellemes that are excellemes of excellemes. Thus the set of all possible excellemes, being in biunivocal correspondence with one of its proper part, is infinite.13 What originates and anchors this causal serialism of excellemes? There has to be ultimately at least one excelleme that is not reflexive, that is not an excelleme of excelleme. This one excelleme is excellence itself as an opening within which all excellemes manifest. This alone guarantees the set of excelleme of excelleme as a proper set (part) of excelleme, the set of initial (simple)

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excellemes (improvements). That which does not allow itself to be excelleme of excelleme is the act of excelling itself, the opening, the clearing. The clearing or the act of “I excel,” “I can excel,” “I strive toward the not-yet,” is nondecomposable; it is impossible to grasp it as an excelleme of another excelleme, since every other excelleme presupposes it.14 As we shall repeatedly see later in the work, the existential foundation of excellence is the infinite striving of the human self for personal affirmation and participation in a wholeness bigger than itself. So ultimately, excellemes exist insofar as there is an opening, a clearing, the ego with the freedom to reach beyond itself. Let us now turn to the second point about the infinite nature of the quest for transcending humanity. All human movement is a movement into nothingness.15 Man and woman move to empty themselves of potentialities that only manifest the excess of possibilities over reality. They move toward the infinite, the abyss. This movement I will also call excellence (ex-cellere), the going beyond of existing heights, going beyond the high, beyond the limits, and the constant rousing of self-transcendence. This is a movement that “realizes and completes us as human beings.”16 It is fueled by the sense that it is possible to live a bigger, deeper, and fuller scale than what is currently available. This motivation is understandable in terms of the temporal structure of being in the world that Martin Heidegger so eloquently pointed out to us in his Being and Time.17 Humans are always projecting their future beings based on the sense of what they have already become and the range of possibilities available to them now. But the future, as Kierkegaard informs us, is indeterminate and will always manifest the possibility of excess. This notwithstanding, out of anxiety, human beings will still try to tackle the abyss of future. The pursuit of excellence, the approximation to the good, and the aspiration to fullness is humans’ most vexing restlessness. Since they came upon the face of earth they have incessantly chased the development of the potentialities slumbering in them and pursued the creation of the world in their own image. What slumbers in them is not merely given as facts of nature or determinate, impersonal “Form,” but is also forged by their own agency as autonomous formulators and generators of the forms of life they live by. And the manifesting of the potentials is shaped by the manifestation itself. This striving to manifest their potentialities is done, I believe, in order to secure their existence and freedom and to promote the good life. The end and means of this pursuit is the creation of possibilities, more possibilities for human flourishing. No doubt there have been and there are obstacles, detours, and failures in the movement. But then it involves the sense that human life reshapes its nature and attains greatness in this way.

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All this has implications for the way we approach the management of our community and its common good. At the minimum, excellence in communal governance practice will involve the creation of possibilities for community and participation by all its members so that their potentialities can be drawn out for the common good. A community should be adjudged good because it allows its people to develop their potentialities in the pursuit of ever-greater common good. How well a community does this will depend on how it allows individuals to develop their unique traits, capabilities, and potentialities and on how well these individual endowments are related to each other in the pursuit of the common good. An excellent community is the one that is adept at combining these two opposite tendencies or processes: a movement toward uniqueness counterbalanced by movement toward union. In such a community the orientation toward the not-yet permeates all of its social practices and individual lives. The goal of politics is the creation of possibilities for all to participate in the polity and to realize their potentialities and in so doing enable the community to realize its potentialities. Science is an engagement with nature so as to fully understand, realize, extend, and create possibilities buried in the potentialities of all beings and processes in the universe. Education (e-ducere) is to draw out and lead forth the potentialities of a person. The organization of market competition is also oriented in this way—it is agonistic. The Latin root of our English word “competition” is con petire, which means to seek together. In competition the participants help each other to stretch their skills as they meet the challenge posed by the other. What each participant is seeking is the actualization of its ownmost potentials and to help the other person come to his or her best.18 In the same vein, an excellent friendship is the type of partnership and fellowship in which each person aspires to bring to realization the latent potentialities of the other. The friends say to another, “let your actualization advance as mine does.” An individual’s life will be adjudged excellent if it is a life that is engaged in the pursuit of ever-greater development and creative realization of his or her potentials. This involves, among other endeavors, overcoming challenges to create, manage, and sustain possibilities for responsible personal development. In this light, the task of social ethics is to direct thinking on how to develop the best society for releasing of potentialities of all persons and institutions for the common good and for human flourishing. Alternatively put, the object of the ethicist is to create a society that is not only attuned to possibilities for full development of potentialities, but also enjoys excellence. Taking one’s stance in excellence is one veritable way of calling into account all of society’s institutions, laws, religions, relationships, and so forth. Do they facilitate the

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release of potentialities and the creation of new (alternative) possibilities for a more perfect human flourishing or do they require the suppression of them? Those which fail this test merit to be set aside. The ethicist is also to evaluate all emerging possibilities, amidst the range of all present possibilities, so as to project the direction of human flourishing of a particular community in relation to his or her sense of what its citizens have become. Corollarily, this book presents a framework within which we can understand human flourishing in terms of excellence and does so principally (but not wholly) within the context of Christian traditions. It analyzes the nature of human excellence, the longing to transcend humanity, as a form of the good that consists in a sort of resemblance to Jesus the Christ as the New Being. This argument about excellence that links it to Jesus as the New Being does not construe human excellence in terms of the presence of something qualitatively identical in all excellent men and women. Resemblance in this case is not about all persons having a single style of developing their capabilities. The argument proceeds and works, as I have already indicated, because excellence is conceptualized as a striving of humans to realize all their potentialities. Those aspiring to resemble Jesus are excellent by virtue of the relation of realization of potentialities to the notion of New Being; and excellence for them is not identical realization of potentialities in all of them. New Being, as Paul Tillich used the term, is about the full realization of human potentialities in a towardness or orientation to the Infinite, God. Excellence is thus located in the pursuit of New Beingness, and in this resemblance to Jesus as the Christ. Though the resemblance to Jesus is offered in this study as the proper lens to define and interpret excellence in the context of the whole fundamental idea of striving for full realization of potentialities, it falls short of stating that Jesus of Nazareth worked out all the potentialities of humanity. He only worked out all (or to an extraordinary degree) the potentialities of humanity with regard to spiritual and moral matters. The universalizable model of resemblance is his perfect orientation to the working out of human potentialities in him. With this orientation, he has set before us an example, but not a fixed and final state of the working out of all potentialities of humanity. For at least we know that we have made advances beyond what is ordinary and common in first-century Judea. Here my thinking is informed and supported by Yale University Christian moral philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams, and his argument is worth quoting at length: The idea of a person having all human excellence in unsurpassable degree . . . does seem to me inconsistent with the nature of human excellence. There

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is not much pressure for Christology to assert that much anyway. Few would be disturbed by the admission that there have been more accomplished athletes and greater musicians than Jesus. It is chiefly with regard to moral and spiritual excellence that people have been concerned to assert the unsurpassibility of Christ’s human nature. Even in this area, however, I think Christology would be well advised to conceive of Christ’s human virtue along the lines I proposed earlier for the virtue of the saints—as extraordinary indeed, and expanding the human repertoire, but as qualitative, positive, and open-ended, rather than as quantitative, negative, and a limit. There is no need for Christians to assert that the courage, love, and faithfulness, and moral and spiritual insight of Jesus define a limit to the excellence that human life can exemplify in those areas. Jesus is presented indeed in the Bible as saying that those who believe in him will do greater works than he has done (John 14:12).19

The attentive reader would have already noticed that excellence in this study has been given a focal meaning. The human life is excellent by virtue of its relation to one supremely good thing: the striving for realization of potentialities. Jesus is an exemplar of this pursuit and in his life excellence is not an abstract object but a concrete person. A central relation of a sort of resemblance to, imaging or imitation of, Jesus is, therefore, an equally valid approach to pursuing excellence. The preceding statement should not be construed to mean that my argument for the excellent life presupposes Christianity or strict followership of Jesus Christ at every point. In this study, excellence is conceived as a property and as an exemplar. To the extent that I present Jesus as the New Being, it is as an exemplar that I am conceiving of excellence itself. For true Christians excellence is not a pursuit of some abstract property (quality) of the good, but it is understood in relation to the concrete life of Jesus and a believer’s excellence is understood in terms of its standing in some relation (as a sort of resemblance) to Jesus’s life as paradigm of human excellence.20 Both the exemplar and property of excellence as presented in this study are not posited to give “the image of an anthropomorphic perfection” obtained by the removal of all constraints that the best of human life depends on.21 The striving for realization of potentialities is not merely about escaping problems and human limits (in the vulgar sense that Martha C. Nussbaum condemns), but principally about expanding and extending what is natural and normal for human beings to do. In the pursuit of excellence the person does not transcend what is morally obligatory good for him or her to do. It is about creating possibilities (as one strives to realize one’s potentialities) that transcend what is now given, what is now ordinary (in the multiple terms of morality, technology, politics, economics, arts, and so forth) in a

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direction that is positive to communality, participation, and orientation to the infinite. I have stated that one does not need to be a Christian to embrace the idea of excellence put forth in this book. My theory emphasizes reasons for imitating Christ that are grounded in goods that the person can value for their own sake and independently of his or her relationship with Jesus Christ. Persons are not only motivated, but also energized to imitate Jesus because the value (goods) of imitating him “cohere with, organizes, supports, and is supported by goods that [they] care about for their own sakes.”22 The working out of potentialities is one of (if not the) deepest impulses of humanity rooted in the divine nature that is also their own nature—albeit fragmentarily and derivatively. What does the persistent concern with excellence (moral, technological, or artistic) have to do with human nature? In responding to this question I have tried to adopt a very limited focus as I do not intend to deal with the matter of developing criteria to aid the recognition of certain items, practices, and ideas as excellent and then justify them on the basis of a particular understanding of human nature. Not that developing criteria for measuring objects that we regard as excellent are not important. My concern is rather with the persistent drive to tinker with things, practices, and ideas to express and expand the self both from within and outside, and with what this drive tells us about the nature of the self. The expression and expansion of the self will need a certain kind of inherent space within which it can manifest. Is there a clearing, a space in human existence that allows what many persons have variously described as excellent objects to be manifested or revealed? And how is this unconcealment related to what it means to be human? I interpret excellence as an experience in which an opening in reality grasps and creates a community in which the same opening expresses itself in actions, institutions, processes, and products. To excel is to cross and transcend boundaries by making a break in the walls of abiding and recurring reality and hastening to the space and future beyond them. I think that human beings in general live toward the future. Jürgen Moltmann captures this feeling when he writes that, “people always live in a certain direction—the direction of something lying ahead of them. Consequently they continually cross the borders of their own present, projecting themselves toward the open possibilities of their future, and changing in the course of their historical existence.”23 My interest in discovering this clearing is not about a search for an original state or temporal point that will help us to capture the “true” meaning or concealed essence of excellence. There is no privileged source or some

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fundamental human experience to help us trace back the phenomenon or recollect its lost origins—at least this is not what I am doing. I will try to locate the clearing in multiple places. This is principally to inquire into the “sense” of excellence: (a) the conditions necessary for its possibility, and (b) to ask about the non-originary source of unity that governs the various ways the term is used and can be revealed. Having ruled out any search for an originary source, we hope to locate or find excellence amidst the agonal and contestatory dimension of social space: in the sites of human cooperative activities and the unfolding potentialities of humankind which is rooted in the striving and straining forward into the future. This study is not an attempt to stand apart from some alien work, art, object, or activity and see, admire, and comment on its beauty, but to investigate the human being in his or her self-world correlation. For ego to notice, to judge, and to intend an object or activity as excellent, excellence must first be revealed. An adequate understanding of the predicates or qualities of excellent object or activity is impossible without an insight into being (to-be-ness) of excellence. I believe that we will go astray if we fail to consider the being of excellence in general, or of an object or activity in particular. When a human being looks into the being of excellence she is discovering the depth of the human as a “finite openness” and the gradual opening of each person to his or her own possibilities and the possibilities of others.24 It is also within this understanding of the temporal openness that I will seek to understand economic development as freedom, a significant idea on how to achieve human flourishing in developing economies. Economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum who take development as freedom or capability enhancement have not reckoned with the fact that we can only execute development as the removal of unfreedoms because human existence is tied to the opening of excellence in which economic activities as the pursuit of increasing possibilities for all (especially those at the margin) can take place.25 Once these issues became clear, I asked another question: What do all these have to do with the spiritual quest of human beings? I began to sense that excellence might provide a fruitful avenue to investigating the human spirit as it relates to the divine. Finite excellent objects, practices, arts, and technology may point us to the presence of the infinite within the finite realm of history. Excellence is a spiritual process that is documented in deeds of numerous persons and in the history of all peoples. This spiritual process expresses itself in history as a dynamic realization of four interrelated ideas: the idea of actualization of potentialities, the idea of innovation, the idea of wholeness,

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and the idea of the future. Describing excellence as a spiritual process is not meant to mysticize it, but to draw attention to the dynamic unity of power (vitality, dynamics) and meaning in the creative process of humanity. As we will see, among other things, it names a principle; that is, a source of vital strength, a kind of moving power. It is a dimension of finite life, a power within history that forms social life and drives it toward community and the realization of infinite. It was good old Paul Tillich who conceived the spirit or the spiritual as “the underivable” new amidst situational ingredients. He saw it as something new that breathes form into the dimension of the natural, the human, and the cultural.26 And there is some sense of this in the way this book interprets excellence. Excellence is an excess of meaning that discloses the genuinely new.27 The disclosure of reality that a work is able to do is intrinsically linked to the “apocalyptic” nature of all works of excellence. They pull back the curtain for us to see reality more clearly and deeply. And in calling us to see more clearly and deeply, these works posit a daring critique of what is in existence while, at the same time, offering a glaring hope of alternative possibilities in the future. In this recognition of unconcealment and expansion of the sense of the possible we are challenged and eventually transformed. Occasionally in that moment of unconcealment we sense dynamic divineontological creativity coursing through history. Excellence is also spiritual because it constitutes an essential dimension of the audacity of life. Excellence is an enduring characteristic and confirmation of human life. Whatever is essential endures and it endures not because it is permanent and unchanging but because it has a surplus of possibilities that allow for a never-exhausted need for participation. It was Martin Buber who stated, in his book Good and Evil, that “man as man is an audacity of life, underdetermined and unfixed; he therefore requires confirmation.”28 Then Tillich added that this confirmation is a source of the “courage to be” and humans seek self-affirmation in spite of nonbeing or by participating in some corporate body that may well be a spiritual entity or a nation. Here I am raising the alternative vision of participating in the process of excellence in the face of life’s demands. And also pointing to the risks involved in the process of excellence. In the process of excellence, there is God and antimatter. There are possibilities of distantiation and togetherness. In one feat of excellence, humankind may see itself as needing no transcendental foundation for participation in the cosmic play of life. Yet excellence could be a source of revelation, ecstasy, and communion with God. Anyone who has examined modern life’s pursuit of excellence, the persistent need to ferret out and actualize possibilities in all facets of existential

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life, will also recognize its “religious” quality. This is all the more so, if one juxtaposes the passion for excellence vis-à-vis Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of religion. The word “excellence” can replace the word “religion” in his definition and it could well be an adequate characterization of excellence. Whitehead characterized religion in this way: Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.29

From the sublime let us turn slightly to the managerial. How should our knowledge of excellence and the self affect the way social ethicists conceptualize governance of large-scale societies? How do we relate our notion of excellence to the practical matters of transforming societies, and reducing unfreedoms, and building an embracing community that can actually nurture and sustain excellence? This book proposes a framework for ethics—albeit not a complete ethics—for thinking both about the substantial ethical topics of relating the culturally creative actions of social groups to their religious depth as well as the possible nature of governance in large-scale communities bent toward the kind of excellence this book advocates. Since the notion of excellence developed in this study puts emphasis on openness and alternative possibilities for human flourishing and creative realization of potentialities, the question becomes: How will societal leadership be organized to enable communities to perceive and exploit unexpected opportunities? The answer to this question forms the practical core of this study, which is to translate excellence as a philosophical foundation of social ethics into usable principles for the concrete tasks of leading a society to higher and higher levels of human flourishing. This practical part of the study includes a discussion of economic development. It investigates how the philosophy of excellence will be brought to bear on economic development. Excellence (as in idea, activity, or passion) is the weft and warp in the fabric of economic development. Excellence as the crisscrossing threads of development is not about the progressive history of freedom, the taking down of what Amartya Sen calls “unfreedoms.”30 Rather, it presents the conditions of possibility of experience of development and grounds not only the theory of development, but also the practical, aesthetic, and scientific aspects of development. Excellence is the deep structure of economic development, constitutive of the developmental reality

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that it grounds, as well as an ingredient in the actuality of the economic, social, political, scientific, and aesthetic process that it grounds. Excellence discloses the telos of economic development to be human flourishing, the new breaking in onto lived experience to enact new and better forms of human sociality. Put differently, the pattern of communal solidarity and world-transforming embodiment that result from empowering, liberating, figuring, and driving force of the power of excellence in history and historical passionate pursuit of excellence is human flourishing. The ensuing pattern is the nature of being human, person-in-communion in the realm of freedom and a way of being oriented to the configuring of the future and to the surplus that exceeds the present given. The figurative, transfigurative, transformative power of human flourishing is in the ceaseless praxis of excellence, the shaping power of new and emancipatory synthesis of possibilities that are oriented to the fulfillment of humanity in ways that overreach time and world. Human flourishing is not necessarily the progression of freedoms, but an “open-ended matrix of shapes of freedom.”31 As the font of possibilities in the realm of history, excellence is the unity of the ideal and the real. There can be no excellence apart from the accomplishments of development, attainments in history, and the Amartyian freedoms that so mark and define human flourishing. Excellence is necessarily embodied in development, civilizational accomplishments, yet it is the telos of development insofar as its praxis is the bearer of human flourishing, the creator of the sociality that enhances human life. Nonetheless, unlike Sen I do not think that there is an overarching teleology of freedom in economic development: only an open and uncertain future waiting to be shaped in a life-enhancing way. The march toward economic development is a mysterious process of freedoms and unfreedoms; freedom creating its unexpected unfreedoms and unfreedoms trampled by freedom. Excellence may well be another name for the endless striving in human condition that never arrives at the end (terminus, telos), continually securing freedoms and continually losing freedoms, but on the net gaining freedoms.

Outline of Chapters This book is divided into two parts. Part I (chapters 1–5) develops the philosophical-theological arguments for excellence as a lens to view social ethics and human flourishing. Chapter 1 starts the arduous process of extricating the meaning of excellence from the narrow straits in which it has been put by virtue ethicists for too long. It gradually develops a doctrine of human nature that puts the accent on human striving for the not-yet, the longing to realize

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humanity’s potentialities, as the movement of excellence. Instead of limiting the concept of excellence to maintaining order in a polis and good citizenry as virtue ethicists have done, the chapter presents excellence as a clearing, an opening for the fullness of humanity to manifest. Excellence is the clearing for sheer manifestation of potentialities and the means through which human beings can see what they are doing and where they are headed, and then situate their response to the finitude that chafes against their skin. Chapter 2 asks and answers the question, “What is excellence?” to continue the liberation of the ethical concept of excellence. In this chapter I attempt to render the virtue ethicists’ narrow focus problematic as I interrupt, challenge, and shake up its discursive stability, and thus raise the possibility of an alternative, enlarged understanding. In doing this I not only offer a short genealogy and exegesis of the word, but I also examine excellence in its multitudinous variety in concrete lived experience. Excellence happens in all dimensions of social life and understanding its fecundity of occurrence is crucial for any social-ethical framework that wants to address human flourishing in all of its manifestations. Based on the discursive moves made in chapters 1 and 2, I develop a viable philosophical construct of excellence in chapter 3 that synthesizes the discussions so far to this point and sets the tone and direction for the rest of the study. The result is the knowledge that the word excellence is shot through with the meaning of resistance and forward movement into the not-yet, the development of being qua human being. The moral concept of excellence is not all about maintaining order, but about disrupting and interrogating orders in the name of new and better human development. The construct of excellence in chapter 3 also gestures to the idea that excellence involves an erotic drive to wholeness and thus to overcome estrangement and participate in the divine because of the currents of divine energy that are coursing through human sociality. This is a crucial dimension in the understanding of human development and excellence. Chapter 4 explores the idea of Jesus of Nazareth as a concrete human “construct” of excellence. It interprets his life as an exemplar of human excellence within a Christology of excellence informed by Paul Tillich’s theology of Jesus the Christ as the New Being. Jesus’s achievement of excellence, the actualization of his potentialities, was aided, according to Tillich, by the orientation of his life and work toward the infinite. The study then explores the pursuit of excellence in the form of an imitation of Jesus, not as another little “virtuous” Jesus but as an invitation and challenge to create the politics, eros, and ethos of excellence in a person’s life and communities so that the person can fully actualize his or her potentialities.

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Just as the pursuit of excellence does not necessarily exclude the virtue of piety (acknowledgment of dependence on the divine or wholeness as source of existence and progress through life), it is also not set apart from other virtues such as justice, love, and hope.32 They are particularly good ways of being for excellence. Chapter 5 then explores the virtues of justice, love, and hope as directly linked to the prospects and the vigor of excellence. In it I argue that excellence is united with justice, love, and hope in that all of them are movements toward the attainment of the highest good. They, in their various ways, represent an affirmation of a call that is capable of conquering whatever threatens each being from fulfilling its potentialities. The biggest portion of this chapter is actually about showing how the concept of excellence fits within and extends the philosophy and theology of hope as received from Ernst Bloch and Jürgen Moltmann into new directions. Part II is taken up with the picture of developing a social-ethical framework for large-scale pluralistic modern societies. There are three chapters in this section: chapters 6–8. Chapter 6 offers an ethical framework informed by the philosophy of excellence we have developed in part I. This is done in two areas. The first area, based on Tillich’s theory of ethics, attempts not only to trace and clarify the lure of the mystery at work in the culturally creative functions of persons and social groups, but also shows how the creative functions of human life can express the unconditional eros of divine creativity. The second area explores the ethical implications of the core concepts of excellence in societal management. In exploring the connections between philosophy of excellence and ethics, it imaginatively constructs a “model” of a social world characterized by contingency and possibilities. The model is then used to investigate the interplay between excellence and ethics and to map out some of the possible decision-scenarios leaders and managers of societies (large-scale systems) characterized by contingency and possibilities may face. Engaging the theory of social practice and virtues developed by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and the notion of prophetic spirit by theologian of culture Mark Lewis Taylor, I develop in chapter 7 a fresh understanding of social practice based on the concept of excellence already forged in this study. The concept of excellence turns on possibilities, actualization of possibilities, and the straining toward the future—the actualization of potentialities in the future. It is from this encompassing perspective of possibilities that I reconfigure the received theory of social practice in ethics. Social practices function to limit human actions: a process of directing all discharges of instinctual energies, impulses through socially approved channels; canalizing them from primitive and primal purposes to what is considered or constructed as higher cultural aim. It does this by demarcating possibilities into acceptable and ex-

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cluded. The excluded possibilities are always haunting the included and they are a veritable source of vitalities and impulses for societal transformation. While the MacIntyrean theory of social practice shows how this demarcation can be exploited to derive the notion of virtues or “standards of excellence,” the Taylorian notion of prophetic spirit points the way to how to include the excluded in social practice. I reconceptualize social practice to bring out its implicit directedness and attraction toward the norms of prophetic spirit. In this way, our understanding of social practice is pushed in new directions; and thus capable of being effectively deployed in the service of promoting excellence and human flourishing. Economic development is a manifestation of excellence as clearing and one of the underpinnings of human flourishing. Chapter 8 uses the philosophy of excellence as a lens to explore the theological character of economic development. It goes further to connect Amartya Sen’s notion of freedom to the nature of human beings who have the “future in their being.” Sen has famously described economic development as freedom, the continuous struggle to remove unfreedoms. What is it about human beings that may possibly undergird the ceaseless search for freedom? I argue that what undergirds economic development and its aim of freedom is excellence. Excellence is the matrix from which freedoms come forth. The upshot of our analysis in chapter 8 and the chapters leading up to it is that I put forward a new philosophical perspective on economic development—that of development as human excellence. Economic development is achieved by nations deliberately creating the conditions of possibilities for all citizens to creatively actualize their potentialities. The book comes to a close with an epilogue that summarizes the main arguments and findings of the study and connects the notion of excellence to those of the good, truth, and beauty, and the new creation. By way of reaching conclusion, I need to state that this study will not proceed in the usual academic disquisition style, marching forward in formal linear formation; rather it will proceed to understanding its subject matter and associated themes by encircling it and turning it around to examine it from multiple perspectives. I will try to pick up various threads of the conversation above and follow its leading and, when appropriate, interweave it with new threads to produce a quilt that holds various patterns in a harmonious whole.

Notes 1. See paragraph 1177b 31–34. Martha C. Nussbaum’s translation in The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 375.

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2. Marc Gafni, The Mystery of Love (New York: Atria Books, 2003), 90–91. 3. As I will demonstrate in section 4 of chapter 2, excellence is a dynamic unity of universal (human capacity) and particular (the actuality, the objective existence of this capacity). This unitizing process takes place within a context. This context we have called clearing. In the light of this study’s conceptualization of human capacity and its objective manifestations we argue that such a context is none other than excellence itself. 4. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Life and the Spirit, History, and the Kingdom of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3:30–31. 5. Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analyses and Ethical Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 54; Systematic Theology, 3:30–43. 6. The effort (action, techneµ is shaped by the search for a good human life, openness toward the world, a contextually interactive and generative space, character, and tucheµ. Tucheµ (vulnerability, change) is here, following Martha C. Nussbaum, understood as the absence of human rational control over nature or elements of human existence. Techneµ is practical wisdom, human intelligent (responsible) control over tucheµ. For a brilliant description of techneµ and tucheµ see Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 89–122, 318–27, 324, 340–41, 408–9. 7. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 419. 8. This is an allusion to Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, 206C. 9. I need to make a personal revelation. This author regards Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. 10. See Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997) for discussions of versions of transcending humanity. His book influenced the casting of the ideas in this and the preceding paragraph. 11. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1992). 12. Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 39. 13. Badiou, Number and Numbers, 37–39. 14. Badiou, Number and Numbers, 39. I have crudely used Badiou’s words about the ego, the “I think” for my purpose here. 15. This is what it means to be finite. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2: The Doctrine of Creation (London: T & T Clark International, 1960), 515; Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Reason and Revelation, Being and God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 1:189. 16. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 377. 17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), div. II, chap. 3. 18. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990), 72–73. 19. Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56.

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20. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, for another take on excellence as resemblance to God. 21. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 371. 22. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 274–75. 23. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 265. 24. Michael E. Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), 105–6. 25. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999); Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–54. 26. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3:324. 27. The Kalabari (Niger Delta, Nigeria) word for excellence is ibi-bakam, ibigbana, literally “excess of beauty.” 28. Martin Buber, Good and Evil: Two Interpretations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 136. 29. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 275. 30. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999). 31. Peter C. Hodgson, God in History: Shapes of Freedom (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 74. 32. Here I have relied on Jeffrey Stout’s insightful definition of piety. See his Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 25–37.

Part I

WHAT IS EXCELLENCE?

[T]he line between the appropriate (internal) sort of transcending and the other sort [external, extrahuman] is not and can never be a sharp one. For human striving for excellence involves pushing, in many ways, against the limits that constrain human life. It is perfectly reasonable, within the human point of view, to want oneself and others not to be hungry, not to be ill, not to be without shelter, not to be betrayed or bereaved, not to lose any of one’s faculties—and to strive as hard as one possibly can to bring all that about in life. In fact, one of the merits of focusing on the internal sort of transcendence is that it tells us that such things really matter, that these jobs are there for human beings to do, for politics to do. . . . What is recommended is a delicate and always flexible balancing act between the claims of excellence, which lead us to push outward, and the necessity of the human context, which pushes us back in. It is not easy . . . to say where the line is drawn. —Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 380–81

CHAPTER ONE

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The Making of a New Meaning of Excellence

Section 1: The Making of a Concept What is excellence? The answer depends on whom you ask. The Olympic athlete identifies it with the gold medal. The businessman sees it as whatever wins him more market share and profit. The scientist sees it as the innovation she longs for. For the medieval scholastics it is “a certain perfection of power.” For philosophers like Aristotle it designates the power of anything to fulfill its central function. Where is the center of gravity to be found in the dizzying plethora of claims and features that have forcefully appropriated the hallmark of excellence? What is typical about excellence? What bears the imprint of the ideal, the typos? All these answers are pointing to some goal, that is, some good in itself that stands in relation to all these perspectives and their associated goods as their cause and mark. But what is that good itself? What is this cause and mark? Is the idea, practice, or object we adjudge as excellent different from excellence itself? Our common concern has for long been about how to know excellent objects—an epistemological concern—and not what is excellence itself—an ontological concern. To be an excellent object or practice, piece of art or music, and so on, is to become manifest as “excellent object,” while excellence means to be the unconcealment where this manifestness can show. The excellent object is an “image” of excellence. In any one image the nature of excellence is displayed. Excellence and its image-objects have similar structures. Excellence is a dynamic unity of striving of existence toward the 23

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not-yet and what is already present. In excellence, the past and the future have been thrown together in the present—creating a clearing for the excellent object to shine forth, persist, and eventually move into the darkness and concealment of the past. But excellence keeps returning and the excellent object is the moment of vision when this blending together of temporalities is captured and frozen, and discloses itself as the tradition that stands before us as future possibilities. Excellence is both a standpoint and the going beyond the standpoint. Like light, we never see excellence itself but only through things in and through which it has manifested. Hence all understanding of excellence is indirect, in terms of things that are alongside us. That which is manifest to us came from nothingness, meaning a place of nonexistence, concealment. That piece of art which so demands our attention and captures our awareness, that piece which so beguiles, enthralls, and fascinates us and upon which we pour all praises was at one time in the dark, in the not-yet manifested. Then, yes then, its elements, features have to be gathered and assembled for presencing. Excellence is an interplay between manifestness and concealment. Often the new revelation of excellence comes through an individual, or a team, with resolute will or courage to make way for the new. This letting be, bringing that which is concealed so it can be manifest, is not only about things, it is also about human beings. Human beings are also working out their potentialities through a process of self-affirmation and realization that always requires courage. For a person to be, to grow, she must constantly fight against concealment, staying put to remain unconcealed, or else she will go again into nothingness. She wants to let herself be revealed in a particular way. There is a unity or intrinsic relation between human existence and the event of excellence. Both are events of manifestness-concealment. The two belong together. When the thing that we let be comes to itself we are also offering ourselves to ourselves for apprehension. The event of self-affirmation, the “courage to be” requires the event of excellence. Self-affirmation and realization means to enter (afresh or abide) into unconcealment. Where these happen— especially where they happen to stand in the light of the novum—excellence prevails and happens with them. Excellence, as we have already noted, is the clearing for manifestness of excellent objects. Humans are the openness for that manifestness. Every individual is in principle capable of deciding for excellence—to hold him or herself open for excellent things to come through him or her. He or she is capable of becoming an “excellent self.” But every excellent creation requires a community that can be aware of and preserve what has come forth. Excellence is not just the appearance of things but the reception of the fact of the appearance by a people.

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This human excellence or the excellent self we are talking about truly comes to its ownmost when it is grasped by, appropriated for, or yielded to the manifestation of the excellence of God or is attuned to the cosmic play of life. This appropriating or grasping does not come by heteronomously, but occurs when an individual is released from self-will by his or her own decision to imitate and participate in God. In the search for excellence through releasement of self-will a person opens herself to be part of the cosmic play of life in which she is already a part. In imitation we are deliberately agreeing to be a clearing in which God can display Godself, divine excellence. (In dying to the self—as a grain of wheat perishes to produce more wheat—the person becomes the kind of absence, emptiness needed for the display of excellence. In this releasement the incorporeal energy, dunamis, of the divine is received by the totality of one’s being.) In such a clearing the man or woman is establishing a space where he or she can take up a “dwelling” for excellence to shine forth. In imitation we actualize our particular possibilities to come forth, to be released. And the greatest of these possibilities is being the openness where the play of love, creativity, and freedom happens. Excellence as an opening, a clearing for love, creativity, and freedom, and affirmation is a unity of power and meaning. It is the principle of eros and meaningful significance that drives toward actualization of potentialities and participation. In excellence there is an eros, vitality, power of life in forms of sociality; as possibility that drives humans to create beyond the given, to surpass themselves. This eros cannot be separated from intentionality, meaning. The eros is not chaotic; it is directed toward meaningfulness and cannot be separated from the rational nature of humans or the totality of their being. In excellence, possibility and intentionality are dynamically united. The Greek word arete¯, which is translated as excellence, has this sense of the spiritual—expressing power, vitality, and fulfillment of meaning. The excellent person is a bearer of value and an expression of power in the quest for fulfillment of being and meaning, being all that he or she can be. Behind every assessment of character as virtuous (excellent) there is a judgment about what is moral and what best expresses (authenticates, reveals) the true “essence” (central function) of humanity. Areteµ’s very identity depends on its having an intentional object or objects. For Aristotle the object is the prosperity, the flourishing of the person and his or her polis. Areteµ is not a “non-reasoning movement,” a leap into the dark, but rather it is an evaluative judgment that ascribes to agent’s actions great importance for agent’s own flourishing. For the Greek as well as my own conception of excellence, if you took away the dependence on an intentional object, each concept irrevocably loses its very identity. Second, both concep-

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tions of excellence see it as an integral part of a person’s life, the removal of which renders the person’s life incomplete, damaging the viability of the person’s own cherished relationships and projects of meanings. This is why in Greek ethical thought, areteµ, excellence, is always linked with a conception of eudaimonia or human flourishing. Areteµ is central to and constitutive of the eudaimonistic life. In Greek eudaimonistic ethical theory virtue (areteµ, excellence) is not only constitutive of eudaimonia (flourishing living, living, and doing well), but it also has an intrinsic value. Virtue is an important part of a person’s scheme of ends and goals because a particular virtue has value in itself. Though virtue is not instrumental to eudaimonia, there is still a distinction between them. Excellence as conceived in this essay goes beyond virtue—taking it along to incorporate it in eudaimonia. Excellence is the flourishing life; it is what it means for a person to live well. Yet it is eudaimonia that cuts into eudaimonia to lift it up to a higher plane, just as agape is love cutting into love to lift all forms of love to a higher level, beyond the ambiguities of self-centeredness. According to Paul Tillich, “in the holy community the agape quality of love cuts into libido, eros, and philia qualities of love and elevates them beyond the ambiguities of their self-centeredness.” In another place in the same book he writes, “agape is love cutting into love, just as revelation is reason cutting into reason and the Word of God is the Word cutting into all words.”1 Excellence is eudaimonia beyond eudaimonia. Excellence goes beyond the focus on an agent’s own scheme of goals and projects. Excellence concerns the borders of the social body; it focuses on extending the contours of existence and incorporating new possibilities and participatory connections into the social body. Excellence is an acknowledgment and deployment of hunger and incompleteness that turn on striving to have richer and deeper connections with the world and remaking it. This not only provides what eudaimonia is about, but also transforms and transcends it. Excellence is a process. Excellence is not a product (although we can declare something as a product of excellence); it is not a mean of deficiency and excess as it is not a state. It is, again, a process. It does not exist apart from its product—it is the immanent principle of activity within the straining forward, within all movement beyond obstacles to the not-yet.2 Excellence does not point to a transcendental foundation within humans or their cooperative activities; it is not an immutable Platonic standard, not an infinite object humans are seeking to grasp. It is a directing principle and not a constituting concept. It asks what lies behind the finite form, object, or style we have just achieved and in this way “directs the human mind to experi-

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ence its own unlimited potentialities.”3 It is, simply, the self experiencing its infinite potentialities. From where does the lure come? What is the lure, the motivation to follow through? It is the ideal of what the human can become. “The human being always realizes himself in the light of his direction. He is in that he becomes.”4 This ideal is not a Platonic idea pristinely preserved in a transcendental, above-earth-and-beyond-history realm. But it is born by the self acting in history. In the light of this ideal of what the human can become the self integrates its possibilities of the past, unifies them with the present to create its own single actualization. In this emergent actualization the self is reshaped and it itself shapes the events confronting it. So our focus on excellence in this study is not a search for an immutable and unchanging perfect standard that is afraid of being corrupted in history. It is to gesture to that unfixed standard of indefinite enrichment which both attracts humans to press onward and is itself re-crafted by those moving toward it. In summary, excellence is ontological insofar as it means, as it is used here, the intrinsic self-creativity of human being-in-the-world. This self-creativity turns on the wheel of a lure. Some call this divine urge. This urge is within history in two ways. Humans enjoy freedom in actualizing their potentialities in the creative process itself. This freedom on one hand hinges on divine persuasion acting within history to maximize human potentialities. On the other hand, humans act consciously (in releasement) to open themselves to follow a divine or godly way of acting as they understand such. So the divine persuasion works by maximizing creaturely freedom in a fashion of a “directing principle” and by humans consciously embodying the divine urge by what I will call imitation.

Section 2: Divine Imitation and Excellence The imitation of God I am talking about is not determinism such that what we humans see (perceive) God to be doing we do automatically or mechanically. Insofar as we have a different subjectivity from God, what we see God doing shapes the present actuality of our behavior only as when we see it as appropriate and unified by our present activity and by the power of the present moment. My concept of imitation is like perception: “nothing is perceived unless we actively engage our attention in perceiving, yet what we perceive is dependent upon the content derived from our environment.”5 Imitation does not and cannot mean the “incarnation” of God’s purposes in a human. The creaturely response to what is seen (perceived) always happens within history and is appropriated not in its pure form but as is ad-

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dressed to a concrete human situation. To “see and to do” is to deliberately open oneself as a channel to the intensification of divine aims. Through one’s response to God’s lure, one’s life becomes an embodiment of divine aims. In such creaturely response the person appropriates the divine possibility as his or her own and serves as a concrete point for its actualization on earth. To imitate is at the core what it means to be born again. We are born anew or from above (Greek: anoµthen in John 3:3) as we receive novel aims from God in our actions, as we become profoundly sensitive to the aim of God in the various turns of our lives. This is what Jesus must have meant when he said he did what he saw God saying and doing in John 5. God the Father was not doing complete concrete actions in heaven but was setting novel aims for Jesus that are actualized in the earthly circumstances. In continuous “seeing and doing” we are born anew and from above as God provides novel aims for our lives in our total opening to divine purposing. It is by the Spirit of God that is immanent in the world that we respond consciously to imitate God. In sum, excellence is the creative advance of humans, the gathering together of events, actualities, or influences—of multiplicity—into a New Being, new actuality, as the movement from what is already in existence. The overplus of this movement is either the not-yet or the no-longer relevant in the creative advance of the world under the impact of the spiritual presence. It is my intention to present a Christological interpretation of the persistent quest for actualization. In Jesus Christ we have an example of someone who was able to close the gap between potentialities and actualization. In pursuing this line of interest, I will press into service Tillich’s interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth as the New Being in chapter 4.

Section 3: Excellence and Subject This study is about what is sayable about excellence as excellence insofar as it is excellence, in the absence of qualities attributable to specific objects, ideas, or actions. What is sayable is not accessed in terms of how we should think of excellence in general or in its phenomenal density, but rather how to think about excellence in the light of human flourishing in the immanent plane of human coexistence.6 Within this constraint we have to think about how individuals can become subject of their own flourishing and how they and their current situations are sutured to the non-place of excellence. How are individuals and flourishing related to the void which French philosopher Alain Badiou has relentlessly informed us is part of every situation?7 Excellence, as we have already indicated above and we will show further, is a break, a crack, disruption in situation (configuration, arrangement) which allows that

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which hitherto has no place to be a place insofar as there is an individual (subject) who is faithful to the possibilities of the emerging place. This is how I intend to proceed about saying something about excellence and subject. What summons thought is an idea that sheds light on the frontier between the existence of the old and in-existence of the new and on the finite (part) and infinite (whole) relation. This idea at the minimum involves thinking about how the in-existence of the un-presented (not-yet) new, which nevertheless exists as the void-part of the old, conditions the existence of the old and the emergence of a subject. The thinking that is deployed here to address these issues is informed first by Alain Badiou’s theory of truth and subject, and second by Kalabari (Niger Delta, Nigeria) conception of subject (laabo).8 Enough of clearing the throat, it is time to begin clarifying the thinking. Excellence, in a certain fundamental sense, “is” the infinite longing of humans to actualize their potentialities, to access the fecund void.9 This void is not in a far-off place. It figures from within every sociality purely and simply as margin.10 Excellence indicates the point or the clearing that allows truthful (evental) things to be seen in their unconcealment.11 And in doing so, it redefines the “edge” of the margin or disfigures the limits of possibility that define any reality.12 It is important to mention that even though we know that all forms of human sociality (the bundle of relations, things, practices, and their configuration) dwell at the unmediated boundary of the void, the void itself is hidden from sight, from presentation. It is excellence that reveals it, that illuminates the margin of any sociality, or paradigm. The central idea of excellence in this book is that of the margin (void, not-yet structured) in each form of human sociality, and the ideas, actions, or objects that in each case reveals it. The process of revealing has a subject. The margin is the absent “no-thing” upon which the subject acts (intervenes) to present something. The subject produces a sign (symbol) of the “no-thing” (an excellent object) by encountering the aspect of an extant figuration that has no interest in preserving the status quo as such. The subject, which we can name as the excellent self, is the one that makes “no-thing” to appear in the surface of a sociality, to appear as something, as an invention of something new, as a new criterion for action, and the subject is committed to its founding. Since the something new is not part of the status quo and the principles and operations of the existing situation will not recognize its existence, it takes a reception by other “interventionist” subjects to determine what has emerged as belonging to the situation or not. As Alain Badiou puts it with regard to his conception of event (that has influenced this discourse here):

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“it will remain forever doubtful if there really was an event [novum], except for those who, intervening, decided that it belonged to the situation.”13 The act of intervention, this act to have confidence in the “truth” of the new, as Badiou argues, is always preceded by this kind of decision. There is nothing automatic about receiving something as new. For the novum often starts life as a pure “excrescence”14 and only after it is intervene-ly accepted that a referential space to which it can place its banner is fleshed out in the extant situation or a transformed version of it. The subject not only invents and proclaims the new, but she is also absolutely seized by what is happening and is transfigured by it and committed to build (rebuild) civilization piece by piece from the void. A subject, then, is something quite distinct from an individual in the ordinary sense. In any truly revolutionary process, as Rosa Luxemburg reminds us, its subjects do not direct it from afar, at a safe distance, but constitute themselves as revolutionary subjects through the process itself. A subject is an individual transfigured by the truth she proclaims. The individual, strictly speaking, hardly survives this transfiguration: “It is only by dissipating himself in a project that exceeds him that an individual can hope to direct himself to some subjective real . . . ,” and thereby contribute to the constitution of a true collective subject.15

Though every excellent object (the new) exceeds the situation or status quo and needs the interventionist subject who is faithful to its new founding, there is an aspect of it that is also precisely located in the situation, at the point of the situation that cannot be, in Badiou’s language, counted as part of it and yet it belongs to every situation and every invention. There is an aspect of the new that is potentially located in every individual (albeit, not all individuals will recognize, convert to, and faithfully pursue and investigate the consequences of the new). It is a “foundational” element of all forms or configurations of excellence. This is the generic human longing to transcend any extant, structured set of possibilities. This element is scattered everywhere there are excellent objects, roams through all inventions, and sutures all forms of human sociality to the void. Every transformation, every novelty draws from this element as its site. From a certain perspective, this longing that is inscribed in any event or evental site of every human coexistence and belongs to but is not included by the extant figuration of possibilities or situation is empty, devoid of content. We can only attest to it retroactively by the opening it creates for the new to emerge and in terminating or disrupting a paradigm of possibilities and its functioning and expectations. The something new as such always begins with this longing rather than a structure,

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configuration, form, or status quo. Or at least this is what we must presume if we want to take seriously this aleatory being that is the something new in human socialities. The void, margin not only figures from within human sociality but is also from the human. Indeed, excellence in a certain sense is deep calling unto deep; an irruptive, disruptive “convocation of the void.” Taking it this way means we can develop a principle of excellence without reference to the transcendent and yet absorbing the finite (actual objects, ideas, or actions) within the infinite.16 Besides, the irreducible excess of parts over elements in any set counted as one (“the point at which lies the impasse of being”17) means that the finite can extend itself in potentially infinite ways. By definition this generic human longing as such, which I have stated is part of every novelty, the something new, or situation, we can know nothing of directly. It is about being human—humanity (power of being, vitality, eros) considered without reference to any criterion of difference. This quest for realization is related to humans and their world (self-world correlation). The quest is, first and foremost, a matter of commitment to an encounter of the self with the world. The sequence is not first self and thereafter the making of a world. The self and world, as we shall see in section 6 below, do not preexist the encounter but are rather its results. The encounter is the originary power of self-world correlation, of humanity as we know it, and thus of the quest. The actual nature of this quest we may not know directly. It is impossible, from within the self-world correlation, to think fully and adequately of the self-world-less conditions that gave rise to the striving of the self to transcend its world. The notion of self-world correlation is a concept of radical immanence—it is defined by what belongs to it. We cannot get outside the originary encounter to think the (conditions of) quest as it is “in itself.” Whether we attribute it to divine source or evolution is not, ab initio, very important. What we say of it is always a reconstruction and will always be a reconstruction. The only particularly important question, therefore, to be asked about its existence is this: Is it still there? Its existence as a process points to a margin, a void. When theologians and philosophers use the phrase self-world correlation to name the encounter they are gesturing to a something that is in relation with humans and all-enveloping environment. But this something is made of nothing: the punctual point of the correlation is indeterminable, unanalyzable, and indescribable. Thus, to use Badiou’s language, the longing desire of humans to realize their potentials may testify to “the void of relationship.”18 In addition, the evental site in the self-world correlation at any given time always lies at the edge, the point where the formal resources of existing

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creativeness are exhausted. Each creation is a finite fragment of the selfworld correlation, of an infinite composition of works. The infinity of the creations that is the self-world is not manifest in any one particular work but in the ongoing composition as a result. The shifting of the boundary of the composition, the bothering with the borders of the formless, may start with a subject who decides to violate the extant configuration of works. Excellence is actually a decision in the collective; it universally summons up this infinity for all to be subjects. The very nature of existence, being a participant in the self-world correlation, calls everyone to be a subject and not just an ordinary individual. The task of excellence as in accessing the void is addressed to everyone. Everyone is to discern possibilities inaccessible to the current state of things and work for their realization. Everyone has the ability to become a subject. The specialness of this call is that it does not tell what domain of human activity you should be a subject to excellence, it merely calls you to be an excellent self. Every subject has to assume the responsibility of discerning the crack (the void) in the universal edifice of the self-world correlation: at its most basic level, subjectivation designates fidelity to the discerning of possibilities visible only from within a particular locality. As Badiou relentlessly tells us, a void is always the void for a particular situation. Possibility is always the possibility of its situation. All possibilities are local. It always appears as specific. This is so because, as Badiou has shown in his set-theoretical ontology, it is impossible to have a single set that is the set of all sets. There is always an irredeemable, immensurable excess of parts over the whole. There is always a horizon specific to the situation that defines its limits and what is inaccessible within it. The inaccessible point, the void is the crack that allows for the discerning of possibilities. Because there is no universal set, set of all sets, there are also no global possibilities, but possibilities collected as a subset within the extant situation. The orientation of the excellent self, that is, the subject is to identify and connect such possibilities for faithful intervention within the limits of the situation. It is to allow oneself to be induced by the possibilities for higher levels of human flourishing and follow through with Samuel Beckett’s stubborn persistence: “I can’t go on, I will go on.”19 And in this follow-through the subject is not an agent of change standing apart from the change itself. Both in the doer and the deed, excellence is at work through its unfolding. A question suggests itself as we bring this section to a close. If the quest to realize potentials is a result of the self-world encounter, then why are other creatures, like animals (especially primates), not doing the same? What is it about human nature that may shed light on this question? The quest to real-

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ize potentials is in a fundamental sense a quest for what is lacking, for what is beyond and above, and how to fulfill it, and is a human desire to live on into the future. We will explore all this further in the following two sections.

Section 4: Infinite Longing We can attempt to understand human infinite longing in multiple but related ways (ontological, epistemological, and sociopsychological, among others). According to Paul Tillich, finite human being exists owing to its participation in the depth of being, sharing in the abundance of existence. This depth that grounds all beings infinitely transcends every form of being that participates in it. This infinite depth, abyss of existence not only grounds being, but it also shows the limitation and insecurity of being. The participation in the fullness of being is made possible by virtue of possessing form, by having an individuality that arises out of the abyss but yet stands in the fullness of being and the inexhaustibility of creative possibilities that characterize the abyss. To so arise out of the infinite ground of being by having form is to be limited, finite. It is not to have the whole possibilities available in the abyss and not to have the fullness of being in the assumed specific form. As the Tillichian scholar and African theologian Sylvester Ihuoma puts it: Most significantly, it entails the possibility of losing one’s form of being. Therefore, form is an expression of finitude. On account of the limitation implied by form it must be contended that existence entails an ever-present longing to transcends the limited, finite form. This longing, in other words, must be construed as the will to exhaust the basis of things in an individual being.20

Let us also examine the infinite longing from an epistemological perspective. Mathematician Kurt Godel’s famous Incompleteness Theorem has shown that our knowledge of the world is open-ended, fundamentally incomplete, and subject to perpetual revision.21 If this is how our knowledge is in relation to our world, then there will always be the case that we can imagine alternatives, better ways of doing what we are doing and going where we want to go. The longing is in a sense about acquisition of knowledge and the process of seeking and acquiring it is evolutionary or dialectical. Evolutionary process or dialectical process is infinite in principle because of the excess of parts over the whole, and because of counting a multiplicity as one to use the language of mathematical set theory. The process is also deemed infinite because of the good for which the search is undertaken. In this work we have defined the good to be human flourishing or rather the working out of “the

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endless process of approximations” to what every generation of citizens takes to be its appropriate, real, relevant level of flourishment, or enhancement of life. It appears every generation of human beings is trying to discover the Grandi Series to keep its world going, which “only leads to an endless dithering between 0 and 1.”22 Perhaps, if only time could stop we could get to the limiting point of human flourishment. But time goes on, and after one generation thinks it has reached the pinnacle of eudaimonia, it goes on to perfect, to think about it, and this tinkering and thinking become another limit, another step on the path outward. Whatever level of flourishment a generation attains, it can add one minor improvement to it. “No one has the last word. The Reflection Principle [from mathematics] formalizes this idea.”23 We can also view the infinite longing as the unfinishedness of biohistorical life which contains its own impetus, its own forward movement, as social existence negotiates the margin between the earthy anchor of the old and starry promise of the not-yet. Infinite longing is an act of improvisation, of adding, drawing, pushing, lifting, and cutting the threads of the warp and woof of the fabric of human coexistence with both consistence and innovation. It is the dimension of existence that sees “simultaneously what is and what might be” and leans toward the latter so as to push against the limits that constrain human life.24 It is about using human capabilities to struggle against limits without the aspiration to transcend human life altogether. Generally, the root of this longing is explained by ancient Greek scholars as a wish for restored wholeness or omnipotence. It expresses the pathos of separation or incompleteness. Plato, reflecting on the thought that human beings have the quest to transcend their givens, said that it is a longing based on a feeling of incompleteness. They want to have something they see as valuable and needed. The passion for completeness is what Plato called eros, the offspring of Poverty and Resources. And in Greek mythology its root is traced to a desire for wholeness or completion after humans were cut into two halves. According to the Greek poet Aristophanes, the heavenly bodies, the planets are perfect in their movements because they are spherical and do not express incompleteness or neediness. The sphere in archaic Greek is the perfect shape—a shape that could roll in any direction. Humans were also once whole and perfect. They were spherical (round and symmetrical) and had tremendous strength and great ambitions and challenged the gods for control of the whole universe. In consequence, Zeus made them weaker by cutting them into two and now each person is in movement to transcend his or her limitation after the cutting in order to join with his or her other

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half, to reach the state of primal unity, for the healing of his or her needy, incomplete condition.25 Like the Greeks, modern astrophysicists still believe the sphere is the most efficient shape; it is the most gravitationally stable shape.26 But we do not need to infer the sense of transcendence in humanity from its “failure” to live in spherical shape. We can explain the human desire for the not-yet (not the “other-half”) by forces that pull and push at them in their social existence just as the spherical shapes of the planet are made by forces immanent to them. One is by social forces and the other is by physical forces. Planets are spherical because of the interplay of two forces: gravity and energy (centrifugal forces). Gravity serves to pull everything toward the center of a planet (mass), limiting the possible expansion outwards. Then there are chemical bonds of solid objects (the strength of the materials from which the body, mass, is made) that provide resistance against the force of gravity. We may attribute the human quest for transcendence to two forces of consistency and innovation in the ways life (human coexistence) hangs together.27 The need for consistency pushes errant pull-away back in because of the “necessity of the human context.” The forces or claims of innovation “lead us to push outwards.”28 And the infinite longing is a delicate interaction between these two forces to engender greater possibilities of excellence for better levels of human flourishing within what philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has called “the whole human package.”29 This interplay (a source of variations in human system) as conceived in this chapter is not so much about the emergence of new products or objects as a clearing opening up in the fabric of the relational density of people, object, and knowledge that we know as existence.30 We started our discourse on the infinity (unboundedness) of longing with Paul Tillich’s ontological perspective. I would like to end with another theologian who provides a sociopsychological perspective. Theological-ethicist Max Stackhouse brings a different theological voice to the comprehension and interpretation of the human desire to transcend their humanity, to push past limits and move toward the not-yet, the novum. Stackhouse pays a great deal of attention to what he calls “spiritual and moral energies” behind human flourishing and civilization. He prefers to examine what I have called infinite longing as a set of five powers present in all society. He argues that no civilization exists without their viable integration. Stackhouse states that five forms of spiritual energies invite and even capture people’s loyalties and these not only enable people to move beyond the boundaries and capabilities left to them by their ancestors, but also sometimes, and too often, anchor them to antiquated practices, institutions, and beliefs.31

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He calls these powers or energies eros, mars, the muses, mammon, and dominion (worldview, comprehensive moral vision, religion). “Humans are sexual, political, economic, cultural, and religious creatures. Each one of these dimensions of life involves a certain potentiality and needs an institutional matrix to house, guide and channel its energies.”32 They are organized into spheres of life. Eros relates to the family sphere, muses to the arts and mass media, mars (violence) to the political, mammon to economy, and religion to the whole society. Religion defines what is right, good, and fitting in the other spheres and in human relationship with God. These spiritual energies not only guide current practices, they are implicated in the human drive toward transcendence and the future. In an extensive exchange with this author, Stackhouse provided useful conceptual resources to enable me to trace the contours of possible intersection between his understanding of spiritual energies and my notion of infinite longing. It bears to quote him at length here: The spiritual energies all have an element of ecstasy and transcendence in them. And each has been taken as a means of salvation. The joys of sexual intercourse involves loosing oneself in response to another and the potential production of children in whom one survives beyond one’s life. The creativity of the arts involves a quest for inspiration and a capacity to inspire others as well as leaving a legacy for the ages. The heroism of military valor, and possible sacrificing of oneself for a people or a nation or a political system brings that kind of honor which is remembered in statues, tales, and song. And the production or accumulation of wealth can lead to plenty that can save self, family, or society from want. And religion can be authentic or an illusory ideology accordingly as it seeks to receive and heed revelation or to construct rites and rituals to make the divine do what we want (magic). These powers are necessary for human existence and are all potentially good; but they are all also prone to idolatry—to the preoccupation, worship, or trust in them on their own terms. Thus, these contexts of life need to be channeled and constrained by institutions that reflect what is righteous (which we study in the sub-discipline of deontology). We can see this in each sphere: a rightly ordered eros, in a good family, makes a great contribution to the perpetuation of the species and the formation of persons of character for the future. Just as the arts, rightly disciplined, express the height and depths of human experience and reveal possibilities of what could be that are otherwise not present. And a rightly ordered use of mars and even mammon can approximate a politics and an economics that advances security and plenty. Finally, all these also need to have their potential contributions to the good guided toward the ultimate good, known only through an adequate eschatology, which transforms natural teleology. . . . Theologically, we can ask whether each of these righ-

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teously ordered spheres of life, each driven by a powerful spiritual energy, can contribute to that which coincides with the Kingdom of God which is working within and among us. That is the question of which dominion is good for the whole in a globalizing era.33

As we shall see in chapter 6, the best ethics that is seriously aware of the importance and potential of this longing for human flourishing is one that puts accent on openness to both receiving and giving, and to the unknown. In this ethics it is assumed that the future may create surprises, but it is not dangerous and impossible. The future only requires from us the courage to be excellent. Or put differently, it requires us only to be human.

Section 5: A View of Human Nature In this chapter and the preceding introduction I have related excellence to the notions of New Being and to human nature. All this rides implicitly on the idea of possibility considered to be integral in any conceptualization of the being of humans. It would serve us well to elucidate our theory of human being. What is it that is essential in the existence of men and women that fundamentally informs my thinking in this study of excellence? In the words of Martin Buber, “man [sic] is the sole living creature known to us whom the category of possibility is so to speak embodied and whose reality is incessantly enveloped by possibilities.”34 The human being is a spirit in anticipation. He or she lives toward the future—toward the open scope of possibilities ahead of them. According to German theologian Jürgen Moltmann: This means that their impulses, perceptions, ways of behaving and actions have anticipatory character. . . . When we talk about a person’s spirit, we do not mean his reflective subjectivity, or his fixed, “static” identity. We mean the anticipatory structure of his whole physical, mental and spiritual existence. People always live in a certain direction—the direction of something lying ahead of them. Consequently they continually cross the borders of their own present, projecting themselves toward the open possibilities of their future, and changing in the course of their historical existence.35

Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out that human beings can transcend their creatureliness and the natural order and think beyond finitude because they are endowed with reason, self-consciousness, and spiritual freedom. This endowment (he calls “spirit”) enables humans to transcend their socioenvironmental situation—to transcend it in thought at any rate. Animals do not have reason to the same degree as human beings, so their sense of transcen-

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dence is limited. They are primarily driven by their instincts. Reason enables human beings to give coherence and meaning to their world. Humans do not just adapt, they create a world—something else between them and the environment. This is a world constituted by speech and thoughts. They also have self-consciousness and make themselves into objects of thoughts. They are able to objectify themselves. A person sees herself or himself as a finite object separated from essential reality, but also related to it. Humans are capable of imagining worlds that do not exist. This becomes an area of creativity and religious orientation.36 If we took philosopher Ernst Bloch and theologian Jürgen Moltmann’s point that the Creator is a God “with future in his essential nature,”37 then being created in God’s image implies that we also have the future as our essential being, albeit in a corrupted or lessened form, nonetheless there. What does it mean for humans to have the future in their essential nature? It means, according to Moltmann, “they do not limp after reality and gaze on it with the night eyes of Minerva’s owl, but they illuminate reality by displaying its future. Their knowledge is grounded not in the will to dominate, but in love to the future of things.”38 The command to Adam and Eve to reproduce and multiply and dominate the earth sets in motion the dynamics of hope in the biblical world. The command was a promise to them about their future, their future possibilities. They were directed to what is not yet visible that they can only await in active hope. For the God of the Old Testament, command does not only have the character of illuminating or directing what must be done, but also and principally the character of promise. Commands are often the reverse side of promise. God commands what God’s promises offer.39 It announces the coming of the not-yet; it gestures to the possible and therewith the future of the couple. The command must be understood as a process that does not come to an end with a single transaction. The command in pointing the way Adam and Eve should behave sets before them goals. To keep the command is to keep the promise of the command. “Promise and command,” Moltmann declares, “the pointing of the goal and the pointing of the way, therefore belong immediately together.”40 The command to dominate the earth is about not giving in into the configuration of reality. It is not to reconcile themselves with seemingly eternal recurrence of the wheel of earth (with history, to the “totality of reality” which happens between the command, the promise, and its fulfillment) but to throw themselves upon the wheel so the startling new can occur. Hanging on to the wheels of history to turn it toward the new is their victory and their reign. Thus, the command to them anticipates the future. In the command,

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which is also a promise, “the hidden future already announces itself and exerts its influence in the present through the hope it awakens.”41 Even our ordinary use of the word excellence (ex-cellere) anticipates the future, exerting a hope of further fulfillment. When we say a particular performance, work, speech excels, it means not only that it meets our expectation (whatever may be the prevailing standard), but it also exceeds it. Excellence then is used to describe not only the fulfillment of a promise (expectation) but also the surpassing of fulfillment. This overspill of fulfillment points to the “not-yet” of whatever is already in existence. In this striking out toward the unseen horizon, the word “excellence” inevitably connotes the expansion of the promise of the activity or work in focus and the orientation toward the future. Every human existence has a future character. There is always an envisioned ideal in front of the present toward which we strain and strive with purposeful action. The movement from the present vision of what we can be individually and collectively (by selecting, interpreting, appropriating, and reworking our past) to the not-yet state is a strikingly persistent process. As we engage in this process we are transformed into a different sort of human that carries marks of persistence and change. It is this process that I have named excellence. Since excellence is both the process that points us to what we may be and at the same time the “vehicle” that takes us to that future state we cannot adequately understand human nature apart from it. Indeed, to understand excellence is to understand human nature—the “ideal and futural character” of human existence. “Since the future is something not yet accomplished, human nature is also something not yet accomplished; it is underway.”42

Section 6: Self-World Correlation and Excellence We have just analyzed an essential aspect of human existence—the orientation to the future. Any serious analysis of human existence must not only attempt to understand the self, but must also and can only understand the self in its own milieu, that is, its world or the self-world correlation. The actual beginning point for the analysis of the self in existence is the self-world correlation. The self is best understood in terms of its evaluative engagements with its world. The world in which it is thrown into at least constitutes it in part, and it (the self) in turn creates the world. The self has a world it relates to and to which it belongs. The self-world, according to Tillich, is the basic subject-object structure of being. Being thrown into this world comes with consciousness. This consciousness in

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which humans have the world placed before them triggers questions about being, ultimate reality, and meaning. In this world that man or woman finds him- or herself encompasses everything that he or she does. The person may choose to focus on an object, event, or action, but an object, event, or action is always located in the world. None of these is only by itself alone—the object (event or action) is concretely located in some definite world that provides the context for the person and his or her object (event or action). Yet as a person, the self stands in relation to this world, this universe of interactive and interrelated fields, as subject-object. This world is not the physical world: we only encounter and understand the physical world or nature within this world. This relationship of human-world is not just about knowledge, interpretation, or meaning, but rather a mode of being, the basic ontological structure of being. Thus, Tillich argues: Being a self means being separated in some ways from everything else, having everything else opposite one’s self, being able to look at it and to act upon it. At the same time, however, this self is aware that it belongs to that which it looks. The self is “in” it. . . . Man has a world. Like environment [those things with which a person has an active interrelation], world is a correlative concept. Man has a world, though he is in it at the same time. “World” is not the sum total of all beings— an inconceivable concept. . . . [W]orld is a structure or unity of manifoldness. If we say man has a world at which he looks, from which he is separated and to which he belongs, we think of a structured whole. . . .43

In this embracing conception of world, whatever is not part of this world does not exist. To be is much more than being around. Every object (with us as part of the world) is not just thrown alongside another object but also serves as an ontological mediation between humans and this world. Given this understanding of the self-world correlation, the straining forward toward the future, to reach the novum is a deep process of remaking the world. Every creation of humankind (“technical excellence”44 for that matter) reflects their world as revealing an aspect of their world. It is both a mirror and a window of their world (the world becoming transparent).45 But then every new creation shows the possibility of how humans can be-in-the-world differently. In this process of reflection and transparency, humans reach a new level of interaction and relationship with the world; they gain a new understanding of their world. And in this process the world is reinterpreted and questioned, seduced and coaxed to further unconceal itself and thus “the world of the future makes its appearance.”46 This revelation is always not a once-and-for-all affair. Self and world is dynamically, dialectically continuous—constantly on the move.

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The boundaries of this world that the self finds itself in is continually redrawn—pushing the boundaries outward or pulling them inward for the sake of the person’s own flourishing. Excellence is basically a process of pushing the boundaries of the self further outward that remakes one’s world for the sake of human flourishing. A new self is bursting forth from the old and in the breaking-forth it does not break forth into the world of the old self, but actually simultaneously steps into a new world dragged out of an old world. To use the metaphorical language of philosopher Nelson Goodman, excellence is an affair between a self with a past and a world that yields while protesting. In the conceptualization of excellence as an affair, there are two elements: resistance and attraction. The world will resist attempts at remaking it, but there is an eros in the self-world correlation for insightful reorganization in the fields of the self-world correlation. This insight can be illustrated with the dynamics of appearance of a new metaphor in any language. Goodman argues that any time a metaphor is introduced it rearranges the referential realm it enters and affects several labels (“predicates,” “possession of a feature”) in the schema (a label does not work alone but rather as a member of a family) at the same time. Let us say someone looks at a piece of cloth and calls it sad. Calling a cloth sad is a metaphorical application of a word normally reserved for bearers of emotions. The introduction of this word into the realm of labels typically applied to humans will cause a rearrangement of the field of reference to the object, cloth. We have here a symbol (“sad”) that is made to refer to cloth not belonging to the class of things to which the symbols in the schema normally refer. In this deliberate reassignment of a label there is a resistance to perceived literal falseness and an attraction toward the possible shaking up of the referential realm. It is this insight that led Goodman to write: Every application of a predicate to a new event or new-found object is new; but such routine projection does not constitute metaphor. . . . Metaphor, it seems, is a matter of teaching an old word new tricks—of applying an old label in a new way. But what is the difference between merely applying a familiar label to new things and applying it in a novel way? Briefly, a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.47

In this application of the new label there is both an attraction and resistance to the metaphor, but more of an attraction that overcomes the resistance. The resistance arises because of the literal falseness of the new label, but the attraction comes from “the insightful reorganization of a schema of labels vis-à-vis a referential realm, which the metaphor brings about.”48

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The insight we want to take from this Goodmanian analysis of metaphor for our study of excellence in terms of self-world correlation is this: when a self reassigns new level of development or affirmation there is a rearrangement of its field of reference, its world. Anytime the old self with a past attempts to redefine itself there is a resistance from the existing world because of the incongruence of the expected new and the old world-schema; but there is also an attraction deriving from the possible reorganization of the world vis-à-vis the new self. In the next chapter, I raise the question, “What is excellence?” again in order to weave into our conversation another thread of analysis. Not only will the chapter further work to dislodge the concept from the perch on which it has been located by virtue ethicists, it will even correct the popular idea that excellence is about extraordinary performance. In chapter 2, excellence is viewed both as the primary end and as the principal means of beingin-resistance, that is, overcoming obstacles to the unfolding of being. To be an existent is to be engaged in struggle against the threat of nonbeing, and overcoming problems that hinder the further-to-be, the not-yet-become. In the forthcoming chapter I maintain that excellence involves the removal of various types of resistance (obstacles, difficulties) that block the unfolding of being.49 Excellence, it is argued, is constitutive of being. If this proposition is accepted, the reach of the theological and ethical analysis in chapter 2 lies in establishing a coherent and adequate perspective of excellence as a means of understanding the development of being, qua human being.

Notes 1. Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 33, 116. 2. Excellence is the incarnation of the eternal restlessness of becoming. In actualizing their potentialities, humans express and make concrete, render finite, the Infinite in ways that destabilize the old to make room for the new in the endless restlessness of life. In other words, it is the immanentization of that which infinitely transcends them. Excellence is both a product and a process, so it is simultaneously embodied in particular products and it is the process in and through which particular products are created and destroyed. It is both the way station and the states of life in fluid dynamical motion. Here I have adapted theologian Mark C. Taylor’s description of life for my purposes. See his After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 343. I came across Taylor’s book when I had finished researching and writing the manuscript for this book. Given the similarities in our thinking in many areas, this work would have profited more from his compelling insights into some of the issues I treated if I had read it earlier. 3. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:190.

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4. Moltmann, God in Creation, 267. 5. Lewis S. Ford, The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 35–36. 6. In trying to think about excellence in a way other than in the form of object, I am not claiming a direct access to excellence as such of all excellent objects or fixedcut-outs of excellence itself. We are only attempting a presentation (as count-as-a-one of unifying multiple elements within a process of change, variation, and diversity) of excellence, an unfolding of excellence as a consequence of human infinite longing. 7. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005). 8. The subject in Kalabari language is laabo. It is the idea of an individual who rises to an occasion, to an event. It is event that makes or turns an ordinary tombo (person, individual) into laabo. For instance, when a man is able to rise up to an occasion, an event, and is faithful to the demands of the event (this may involve not calculating interest and benefits) he is even said to have become a man, a real man, in that moment. There is a moment in which a person decides his or her identity. Kalabari will say ori oyibo late, meaning he has become a man. Not that the man was not a male before, but the event to which he faithfully responded has made him a male. He has become a male-man. Similarly when a woman rises to an occasion she has reached womanhood. Not that Kalabari do not recognize age and biological progress that turn children into adult males or females, they insist that is the run of ordinary development. It is in the crucible of the extraordinary that true maleness or femaleness emerges. It is only then the person can be said to have taken his or her personhood seriously, which is bukebusin. In fact, true personhood also emerges from an individual who is subject to the event. When a person is called to rise up to an event, to be faithful to its expected and unexpected demands, the Kalabari will say tombo tombo so’, let a person become a person. This practical notion of subjectivation carries the idea that a person becomes what actually he or she is essentially and therefore potentially in the contingency of the moment. Becoming a true person is thus a moral imperative. It is deemed immoral not to do and actualize what one is essentially and potentially capable of doing. Ethics is in a sense internal to the subjectivation process. 9. See section 4 below for details. 10. This for Badiou is the “immanent excess of parts over elements”; for Bergson it is vitalism. 11. “Truth” and “evental” are used in ways akin to French philosopher Badiou’s usage. 12. See Alberto Toscano, “From the State to the World? Badiou and Anticapitalism,” Communication and Cognition 37, no. 3 and 4 (2004): 199–224. See also Lorenzo Chiesa, “Count-As-One, Forming-Into-One, Uniary Trait, S1,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 2, nos. 1–2 (2006): 68–93. 13. Badiou, Being and Event, 207. Here I have quoted Peter Hallward’s English translation of the text in page 229 of the original French edition. See Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 128.

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14. Badiou, Being and Event, 97–101. 15. Hallward, Badiou, 122–3. Italics in the original. 16. Or is it a linking of two infinites? There is a movement of any particular form of human sociality, objects, to overcome what limits it. It is a movement from finite to infinite. This movement of objects must be connected to movement of subjects. That is, it must be linked to the constant yearning of humans to realize their potentials so that they can express the infinity that is in their being, become what they fundamentally are. These two processes must be linked by an assumed priority of creative energy that connects them. This immanent creative, erotic energy is primarily human. Let us take another perspective, that of the “trajectory of a finite.” That is to show how a finite artifact passes into infinite. Through the finite investigations by humans that are sustained by their persistent fidelity to actualization of potentials, the finite passes from finitude into infinity in an infinitely accumulating set of accomplishments. So what we have called margin, void in human sociality must be understood in terms of and correlated with the human longing to actualize potentials. 17. Badiou, Being and Event, 83. 18. Hallward, Badiou, 186–88. 19. See Hallward, Badiou, 265. 20. Sylvester I. Ihuoma, Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture in Dialogue with African Theology: A Contextual Analysis (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004), 106. 21. See Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 154–57, 164. 22. Rucker, Infinity and the Mind, 118, 204. 23. Rucker, Infinity and the Mind, 205. Italics added. In the last three sentences I have adapted the rhetorical flourish of mathematician Rucker for my limited purposes here. 24. Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2004), 76. 25. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 483–85. 26. Neil deGrasse Tyson, “On Being Round,” Natural History Magazine (March 1997): 68–69. 27. Innovation is about the recombination, reorganization, re-threading of existing elements or threads of a whole in order to extend it by incorporating new elements or threads. 28. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 381. 29. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 366. 30. For a thorough discussion of variation, expanding and contracting variations, as the setting for excellence see Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996). Gould’s conception of excellence is explored in the next chapter. 31. Max L. Stackhouse, introduction in God and Globalization, vol. 1, Religion and the Powers of the Common Life, ed. Max L. Stackhouse with Peter J. Paris (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2000), 35.

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32. Max L. Stackhouse, introduction in God and Globalization, vol. 2, The Spirit and the Modern Authorities, ed. Max L. Stackhouse with Don S. Browning (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2001), 5. In another place, he wrote: “[P]eople carve out spheres of social activity, clusters of institutions that house, guide, and constrain, and in certain ways, permit, even encourage, these powers to operate. Each sphere is regulated by customary or legislated rules, and each is defined by its own specification of ends and means, as these accord with the nature of the activity and its place in the whole society or culture. Each sphere develops methods of fulfilling its own standards, ways to mark accomplished goals, definitions of excellence, and standards of success” (See Stackhouse, God and Globalization, 1:39). 33. Stackhouse’s e-mail to this author on September 20, 2008. 34. Buber, Good and Evil, 136. 35. Moltmann, God in Creation, 265. 36. Reinhold H. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 1, Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964). 37. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vols. 1–3, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995) and Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 38. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 36. Needless to add that to shine the light on reality is to cut reality into two: one must be left behind and must be surpassed, and the other “must be expected and sought.” It is this thrust to cut into reality, to stand in contradiction to reality of now and heretofore and to strain toward the novum that characterize excellence. 39. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 121–22, 124. 40. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 120. 41. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 18. 42. Samuel M. Powell, Participating in God: Creation and Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 70. 43. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:170. 44. This is explained in chapter 2. 45. Francis X. D’Sa, “Tradition of Texts and Texts of Tradition,” in Christian Contribution to Indian Philosophy, ed. Anand Amaladass (Madras: The C. L. S. Press, 1995), 101–2. 46. D’Sa, “Tradition of Texts and Texts of Tradition,” 102. 47. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 69. 48. Goodman, Languages of Art, 69–70; see also Alessandro Gioannnelli, “Goodman’s Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Summer 2005 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/enteries/goodman-aesthestics/. 49. Though in chapter 2 I will focus on obstacles to the unfolding of being, I want to register a point here about how both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas have given a place to the notion of overcoming obstacles or difficulties in their understanding of excellence. Aristotle suggested in his discussion of virtues that what is more difficult to achieve is more excellent. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terrence Irwin

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(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), 1105a9. This is a suggestion Aquinas adequately exploited to erect the foundations of this theory of Christian courage. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Allen, Tex: Christian Classics, 1948) II.II.123.6.

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I will call ethics therefore this movement (parcours) of actualization, this odyssey of freedom across the world of works, this proof-testing of the being-able-to-do-something (pouvoir fair) in effective actions which bear witness to it. Ethics is this movement between naked and blind belief in a primordial “I can,” and the real history where I attest to this “I can.” —Paul Ricoeur1

In this chapter I want to examine excellence in its multitudinous variety in concrete lived experience.2 Virtue ethicists have generally restricted its meaning to the moral sphere of life. Excellence happens in all dimensions of social life and understanding its fecundity of occurrence is crucial for any socialethical framework that wants to address human flourishing in all of its manifestations. In this chapter I will endeavor to render the virtue ethicists’ narrow focus problematic as I interrupt, challenge, and shake up its discursive stability, and thus raise the possibility of an alternative, enlarged understanding. Virtue ethicists’ conception of excellence is principally drawn from moral phronesis (understanding “moral good” and the “means for moral applications”) to the neglect of poiesis.3 I will attempt to develop a concept of excellence as an ethical principle for the whole of human self or practices—or as some might say, restore the understanding of virtue that encompasses all human actions. That is, transversally incorporate phronesis and poiesis (forming something new) into the conception of excellence. My poetic-phronetic matrix of understanding gestures toward the dynamic and transformative process of realization 47

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of human nature (potentials: moral and technical: form and vitality) and moves away from static ordering of virtues. Thus, I will approach4 excellence as the active, dynamic integration and exercise of all human powers (potentials: reason, practical wisdom, will, drive, emotions, passions, intelligence, sensitivity, technical and nontechnical skills, and so on) involving making and doing5 that is directed toward deep connectedness with being or toward a good. At the heart of this approach is the concern with internally transcendent6 actualization of human potentials and human flourishing and vision of social existence characterized in part by pure transformative possibility. All this aims to prepare the ground for a fresh, expanded conceptualization of excellence as a category in social philosophy and as a veritable tool to aid the construction of a social-ethical framework for the twenty-first century. This will be a framework that takes excellence as the principle of ethics. Excellence will serve as the basis of morality of which governors and institutions of society are to act in such a way as to promote the goal of full realization of humanity—a goal that will always recede. Let us now begin our formal discourse by asking the vexing question again: What is excellence? Indeed, what constitutes excellence is a matter of great controversy. We can all point to many objects, arts, ideas, or practices and declare all or some of them as excellent. In any lifetime any one of us would have received several answers: from the deplorable mish-mash of hastily assembled practical observations, semi-intelligent principles for attaining unsurpassable heights, to the practices of a good society. But what is the abiding structure, the one common idea beneath the confusing array of features at the surface, if any? Excellence, as I will argue in this chapter, is not ultimately about what is, or even about what exceeds the normal and what is prevalent at the technological cutting edge of a society, practice, or profession. It is simply the pursuit of the dynamic typos into (toward) infinity. It is about the dynamic selfworld correlation. The movements and expressions of human capabilities, in the context of the dynamic self-world correlation, are like a force (actually a propensity7) that inclines humans to seek their own flourishing. And this force is one that does not cease to be operative and developmentally salient when a particular goal, practice, or moral achievement is reached. This brings us to another insight about excellence. Excellence once manifested is a lie. This, I should note, is not equivalent to saying that there is nothing real about an excellent object, practice, or idea, or simply excellence is flawed. It is rather that every manifestation of excellence issues forth into a self-world correlation where it is certain to be surpassed, contradicted, tinkered with, or trivialized as inadequate or primitive. All this does not mean that hu-

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mans should stop striving for excellence, only that we have to be aware that by manifesting this concealed idea and not that in the infinite abundance of possibilities we have stopped excelling and started concealing. It ever takes excellence to unconceal, over and over again. Thus, there is no end to excellence. The “ex” in excellence points to something by way of ideal—something absent now, yet to be actualized. By pointing to the unavailable, the not-yet, it manifests both the limitations of all attainments or actualizations and their utopological dynamics. For every superior achievement is sooner or later revealed to be a mere achievement. It is an instantiation of excellence, but it is not excellence itself. At any particular moment the reigning, proudest achievement substitutes for excellence itself and in so doing, in presenting its presence as an absence, it loudly proclaims its inability and symbolizes excellence that is not completely with us. The word “excellence” too often connotes an accomplishment that stands apart from other achievements, absolved from or independent from everything mediocre, improper, distasteful. This conventional notion is the passive, intransitive idea of excellence, but there is also an active transitive meaning of the word. It is a process that releases a human activity from certain constraints, opens up a configuration to new transfiguration and new possibilities. In this sense, excellence is not attached to a finite and determinate object (tangible or intangible, labor, work, or action), but it is the transformative power8 of human sociality and ingenuity that is utterly free to enter into any productive, poetic patterning, figuring activities and nudging them to strain onward to or step into the novum. Excellence is not so much the consequence of a skilled, cutting-edge action, style, product, or craft as the precondition for it. Excellence as dynamic fluid power that courses through, in, and with human sociality “incarnates” in shapes (gestalten) as “products” of human actions or persons, as creative syntheses that draw or lure ideas, rational-ethical values, or as praxis to the future. Excellence “incarnates” in the gestalten that form both in and around persons or products. This is to say excellence appears in the technical, ethical, communal shapes of certain products, persons, movements, or styles.9 My attempt here to consider the meaning of excellence as rooted in communal sociality has a long history in ethics. Let us now turn to that history.

Section 1: The Grammar of Excellence The Homer’s Greek word areteµ, which is translated as “excellence,” had much broader meaning in the past than now. I want to retrieve some of that

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meaning. In doing so my aim “is not to return to some original content that has been lost or distorted, but an appropriation of a historical source that is a potentiality, a revisitable launch of possibilities rather than a ‘ground.’”10 Areteµ was used for all kinds of excellence and was not restricted to some labels on a narrow list of virtues. A fast runner was praised for the areteµ of his feet; a soldier for the areteµ of his courage; the attractions of a woman or the prosperity of a citizen were regarded as instances of areteµ. The basic understanding was that areteµ was whatever enabled a person to discharge his duty in a heroic society.11 Plato linked excellence to order, a self-manifesting reality. The whole cosmos exhibits an order as everything in it is ordered according to the Idea of the Good. In this order there is a hierarchy that defines different ranks for all beings, and the paradigmatic purpose for any being is set by its rank in the order. Each kind of being in this order has its own unique Idea that exhibits its good as the whole (in which it belongs) has its Idea that also exhibits its own kind of goodness. When a being plays its part well in the whole, that is when it conforms to its Idea, is then said to exhibit excellence. For Aristotle areteµ (virtue) meant the qualities the possession of which enable a person to live a flourishing life. The virtues, the excellences are not just means to the goal of eudaimonia, but are a central and necessary part of what it means to live well. The excellent act is not merely an act done very well, but one done with the appropriate motives and the appropriate knowledge. Aristotle’s notion goes beyond just doing the right thing without considerations of motives and training; the agent needs to be a certain sort of a person in a certain sort of community. The good of a person and his community cannot be evaluated without reference to the virtues. The good of the person Aristotle is interested for which he investigates areteµ is not the good for a particular time, but the good of human qua human. Aristotle has moved the conception of virtue away from the roles persons occupy to human qua human. Yet there is some similarity between Homer’s and Aristotle’s view of virtues. Each has a paradigm of human excellence. For Homer it was warriorking; for Aristotle, the Athenian gentleman. For Aristotle also it was the telos (the blessed life) of humans (the gentleman as a human) that enables the determination of which qualities of a person-in-society are virtues. In investigating the Aristotelian understanding of excellence we cannot limit ourselves to areteµ. The attainment of areteµ is part of the movement of human beings as they go from potency to act according to their mode of being and operation. In Aristotle’s work, in addition to the focus on excellence as areteµ, there is the notion of excellence as actualization of potentials.12 The connection between excellence and actualization in this Greek philosopher’s

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work comes in various garbs. At least one can immediately identify three forms of the connection. First, in his Metaphysics, he argued that a being that is working out its potentialities (that is becoming) is not excellent. A being is excellent when it has completely worked out its potentialities. God is the only perfect being who is truly excellent, as God has no potentialities to be worked out. The perfect being is unchanging.13 God is Pure Act without any iota of potency. Human beings are imperfect; hence they are actualizing their potentials in their acts. Second, virtue is not only about what allows for the realization of potentialities or the mean of extremes, it is also a balancing act between full realization of potentialities and non-realization (concealment) of the human essence (central human function).14 The virtues allow the person to live to the fullest the human central function—approaching (but not reaching) full actuality over time. A life of vices (without the necessary phronetic balance between extremes) conceals and blocks the realization of the central human function. So in a sense the virtues as a unified whole expresses a mean state between complete actuality (God) and full potentiality.15 Third, there is the idea that excellence involves working out of potentialities as a being moves toward or approximates the good.16 The degree of excellence depends on how well a person has actualized the potency of his or her human nature (especially moral excellence).17 Take for instance, happiness (living well, doing well, welfare, flourishing, eudaimonia) as the good of a human being. The good of a human being as such is not related only to happiness, but also to the degree of actualization of potentials. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle reasons that happiness is not only about the performance of the central function of human beings, but also about actualizing form. What is happiness except the highest actualization of human’s highest faculty? When Aristotle states that happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with reason, he is not only distinguishing happiness as an activity from happiness as a state (which he rejects), but he is also referring to a person whose potentials are being realized. Thus, pursuing the good is a matter of tracing one’s pathway in life to the asymptotively perfect combination of matter and form. (Form here is not merely a shape, but the dense actuality of being, a mode of being, the coming into presence of an entity. This coming into availability, this movement into concentrated actuality, does not happen in some transcendental realm beyond the human world, but in the realm of intelligibility, in the phenomenal, embodied human world. Nonetheless, it may be directed toward an eternal being who is fully actualized in a beyond-human realm.)18 The longing of human beings for actualization is a function of their lack of simplicity, being composed of matter and form, and an end that is not yet pres-

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ent. The longing, the activity, is about how they transcend their limitations, move toward the contemplative life, and also interact with one another. Thomas Aquinas held similar ideas wherein full human actuality is attained by resting in God, the Final End of all human striving. Human transcendence is toward the eternal being, and not toward the world. Actualization of potentials is for the sake of that good which perfects and completes them—God, the uncreated goodness.19 Let us turn to another scholar influenced by Aristotle to further plumb the depths of the great philosopher’s understanding of excellence. The scholar of interest here is the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom the French philosopher Alain Badiou, arguably, called “the last universally recognizable philosopher.”20 We have already seen the connection between excellence and actualization of potentials. Aristotle also linked the actualization of potentials to activity, the tendency, the drive of an organism (being) to move forward to maturity, realizing its potentials. Now we are going to examine the connection between actualization of potentials and what Heidegger called the human Dasein. According to Heidegger, Dasein is a temporal-historical unfolding animated by possibilities. It is a movement of actualizing of potentials. This is a movement that never comes to an end; there is always something to be disclosed, and there is no transcendental being (divine actuality) in whom it can come to a rest or who can compensate it for sacrifices endured. In this light, Heidegger maintains that possibilities exceed and are higher than actuality.21 Dasein is always a potentiality and is prior to actuality—unlike Aristotle who argues that actuality is prior to potentiality. Aristotle maintained that there is a divine reference point (the perfect being, the constant and complete presence) who serves as the basis and compensation for all the striving and movement in the natural world.22 According to Aristotle, the desire or longing that animates the movement or striving principally arises out of an experience of a lack, “an absence with respect to a desired condition.”23 Similarly, for Heidegger, Dasein’s motivation for ethical existence is an affective futural impetus, futural openness, “a toward-which moved by perceived absence.”24 The major difference is that this movedness of life, the self-transcendent movement of life, does not ever stop for Heidegger. On the whole, excellence as actualization of potentialities cannot be for Heidegger actualization of definable forms (completed states); it cannot be limited to an ethical summit of lived life, or be restricted to eudaimonia as the complete realization of potencies. Heidegger’s ontology radicalizes Aristotle’s ethics and gives potentiality no ultimate security, resting place, or constant

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presence in a transcendental realm.25 The result of this move—Heidegger both affirming and unsettling Aristotle’s thought—according to philosopher Lawrence J. Hatab is that the German philosopher is: able to accommodate Nietzsche’s insight that creative individuals experience and instigate a conflict with normal organizations of life; they cannot be described as seeking “happiness” in the sense of contentment or a balanced harmony of all human capacities. Nietzsche alerts us to the ambivalent coexistence of culture and creativity—in that culture is furthered by innovations that must exceed and disrupt existing cultural forms. Aristotle’s world seems too conservative and lacking this creative energy. . . . [H]uman flourishing and living well can include certain excesses and tensions that are no less appropriate to human nature than are the more normal patterns of the social world.26

This unsettling of Aristotle was done, among other reasons, to accommodate Heidegger’s notion of authenticity. A person choosing to be “authentic” to the call of Dasein, the human as possibility, and thus assuming his or her ownmost self can become the agent of creativity that moves his or her community to a higher level of flourishing. According to Heidegger, the authentic being is faithful to the nature of Dasein as sheer possibility, attempting to resolutely shape existence to discover ways of deepening and widening being that are more appropriate to the particularity of human flourishing in a given community. He or she is ever looking for possibilities amidst actuality and fixed tendencies and elucidating pathways for cultural transcendence.27 We jumped ahead from Aristotle to Heidegger because the latter’s thought is most helpful in exegeting excellence when in entering it we have as our point of departure its general indebtedness to Aristotelian thought on human living as self-transcendent movement. We will do well now to return to a familiar pattern of presentation of the intellectual biography of excellence by focusing on Stoicism, the major philosophical paradigm in the Greco-Roman phase of Western thought. The Stoics abandoned the notion of telos in their conception of virtues. A virtuous person does what is right for its own sake without regard for any purpose.28 The Stoics believed excellence (there is only one virtue) is about acting in conformity with nature—the laws of the cosmic order. The ability to act in consonance with the cosmic order comes from a rightly formed will. When the will is trained, the Stoic both in his internal disposition and external act will serve the cosmic order. Contrarily, for medieval Christian scholars who held sway after the Stoics and were heavily influenced by Aristotle the exercise of the virtue is necessary to a life with God—the supreme human telos.

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Robert Merrihew Adams’s view of excellence in Finite and Infinite Goods is not very far from this although he works from a Platonic tradition.29 Excellence is goodness itself and the well-being of a person consists in the enjoyment of that which is excellent—enjoyment of finite goods. This enjoyment gives the person “glimpses of something transcendently wonderful.” These glimpses point the person to the intrinsic and primary goodness that exists which is independent of the person’s experience of finite good things. A thing is good by virtue of its resemblance to the perfect Good, which he identifies as God who is intrinsically excellent. The finite excellence is objectively of value in its resemblance to divine excellence. By identifying the good with God, Adams hopes to provide an objectivist ground and debunk the idea that what is good is reducible to any human perspective on what the good is. The concept of excellence has traditionally been employed in the evaluation of persons, traits, and so on. It refers to what people love or admire or the goodness of something people love, admire, or honor. Excellence is thus dependent on human valuing and there is no substantial something in which it consists. This is where Adams comes in with his attempt to provide the discourse of excellence with objectivity so that excellence does not collapse into human response to things they treasure. He argues that God is the transcendent Good and as such the exemplary model of excellence. Excellence of any finite good consists in its resemblance to the paradigm of excellence that is God. The value of persons is in imaging God. Hence he argued that contemporary ethicists’ focus on well-being of (what is good for) the person is misplaced. The primary focus of ethics should be on excellence—goodness in itself—rather than on well-being. Philosopher Mike W. Martin, who is noted for his works on applied philosophy and professional ethics, limits his theory of excellence to the plane of immanence. His conception of excellence (more precisely creativity) rejects making excellence an object of analogical predication. Martin in his book, Creativity: Ethics and Excellence in Science, argues that there are two types of excellence: achievement and virtue; creativity and moral character.30 Creativity is an achievement and the virtues are the agents’ traits that make the creativity possible. According to him, creativity is the purposeful invention of new and valuable products (including artifacts, ideas, techniques, and organizations).31 The two kinds of excellence philosopher Martin has identified can be put under the rubric of form; that is, the form excellence takes. What Martin has ignored in his analysis and in the distinctions he made are the human powers to achieve excellence in achievements (products) and moral character. Whatever is behind the enterprise of seeking creative

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expressions in the new and valuable products needs to be incorporated into the philosophic analysis of excellence. Such powers are defined by desire and capability fulfillments at the very ontological core of human being: the desire for a flourishing life and the unfolding of capacities. In Martin’s analysis, products are crystallizations of creativity; creativity made manifest. But we also need to add that creativity is the form in which human potentials (powers) are manifested in material (in all of its physical and spiritual dimensions) life. The actualization is not ephemeral, accidental, or additional to being human, it is ontological to what it means to be human. Not to put a fine point on it, but if creativity is human, then self-actualization (the dynamism of the powers) is homohomo, that is, doubly human, humanity squared.32 Martin’s understanding of excellence is inadequate in another sense. His concept limits creativity to technical achievements and separates ethics from poetics. But creativity applies both to moral excellence and techneµ (what he calls achievement), to phronesis and poiesis. John Wall argues that phronesis can be productive-poetic of finite moral worlds (bringing something new, a new form of social arrangement). Moral practices are inherently creative and good actions can be poetically produced. Poiesis is useful for moral life and the arts and sciences are also meaning-making activities.33 In this light, excellence in Martin’s schema should have been presented as poetic-phronetic. Let us turn to a life-science understanding of excellence. According to Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, excellence is not a being, is not an essence, is not a mean, and is not progress; it is not an entity or a thing, but it is variation as the expression of reality. It is a “bushy” trend of events.34 In his 1996 book, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, he argues that excellence is not necessarily about improvement, complexity, or progressive movement in a definite direction; it is about variation and its changing pattern over time. For Gould, variation is where excellence is. Variation, as he described it, is not the spread of accidents around an essence from which we can calculate an average, or decipher a mean. Expanding or contracting variation within an entire system is itself the excellence of the system. For instance, a complex system will “improve” its performance—that is, move toward excellence in the entire system—when variation between the performers playing by consistent rules decreases. The disappearance of 0.400 hitters for the entire system in baseball since 1941 when Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox hit 0.406 is not due to a decline in the performance of batters, rather “increasing excellence in play.” If standard deviation in the players’ batting averages is decreasing, meaning players’ batting averages are coming together rather than dispersing, then to

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hit 0.400 in a season will require more standard deviations from the mean performance of all players in the season. For Gould, excellence is not the freak of nature or performance but the kind of improvements in a system that decreases variations among its players. As players competed over an extended period of time under the same rule, “variation decreased around a constant mean batting average.”35 For baseball, excellence came by contraction of variation: more and more players moving toward the upper limit of biomechanical possibility, the limit of maximal achievement set by human bone and muscle.36 For other systems it may be due to expansion of variations. Rule changes that alter a system’s equilibrium could lead to increase in performance spread among the players. This is how changes in local environments cause variations that trigger novelty, speciation, and complex series of branching in evolution. Excellence, for Gould, is not about searching for a Platonic essence about a thing or a social system; it is not discerning the mean of performance or behavior, but about variation in the social system and why it is expanding or contracting.37 He cautions that we cannot interpret improvements in systems (especially biological or evolutionary developments) as “a thing moving somewhere.” He also stated that, “variation can expand markedly in one direction and little or not at all in the other.”38 This happens when there are “walls” or “limits to the spread of variation,” causing a skewing of the distribution of variation in one direction. As Gould puts it: As a major reason for skew, variation is often limited in the extent of potential spread in one direction. . . . The reasons for such limits may be trivial or logical. . . . The reason may also be subtle and more interesting—as in the example of batting averages. . . .39

The idea of variation and the “wall” that make variation to spread freely only in one direction can enable us to see human excellence (which is not defined by biomechanical possibility) as right-skewed toward the not-yet. We can then think of excellence as either realized or not-yet realized. Since the human race as a whole cannot totally forget all its (Lamarckian) cultural inheritance from the past, all of its realized excellence—that is, return to zero or less-than-zero heritage—the distribution of variation in a human system (knowledge base, for instance) will be right-skewed, much freer to expand in the direction of not-yet realized excellence. There is a “left wall” without a “right wall.” There is an unlimited potential spread in the right direction toward the not-yet. But this tendency toward the right tail is not an inevitable ladder-climbing exercise (not a linearity), but multiple branching events out of which some persons may interpret a particular pathway as an epitome of current human glory.

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We cannot fully grasp the dynamics of variation in human systems without acknowledging the vital role of infinite longing.40 Gould calls it the “drive to betterment” or “never-ending search for transcendence” so as to touch “the divine realm of the right wall of human limits.”41 In chapter 1, I have presented it as an interplay between consistency (the tendency toward center, the norm of performance) and innovation (deviation from the norm, the push for the possibility of transcending the norm). The “drive for betterment” is also not subject to “increasing precision and standardization” that over time creates a right wall for its expansion. Given that this is its character, one can say infinite longing is in the position to be a veritable source of variation in entire human systems. It would continue to produce the kind of disturbances that will both reduce or expand variations in human performance. These disturbances in cultural evolution as against natural evolution can accumulate toward predictable progress or greater complexity.42 Finally, Gould ends his book by drawing the reader’s attention to the social-ethical implication of his thesis. He argues that societal institutions should be “shaped and be troubled” by right walls. This is about how our awareness of the presence and shifting of right walls in human performance and our sensitivity to the human “drive for betterment” should inform the unrelenting modern ethic of innovation.43 For economists, excellence (or what in very technical terms is called optimality) is at the margin. “Operate at the margin” is their mantra for excellence. In order to maximize profit a firm is to operate at the level of production where marginal cost equals the marginal revenue. This in simple terms means the cost of producing one item, the marginal item, should balance the revenue from selling it. The return from the employment of labor is maximized when marginal productivity of labor (the additional output as a result of adding one more worker) equals the marginal wage for the incremental worker. Deciding the excellent way to allocate a society’s capital, for instance, depends on figuring out the next best alternative use to which the capital currently employed in one area should be redeployed. This is to say, value to society of any particular asset is assessed by whether or not it is earning the marginal rate of return currently obtainable. The resources of an economy are excellently allocated when it operates on its production possibility frontier, the line of marginality between what is attainable and what is not yet attainable. This is how an economist explained it for noneconomists: This line [with a bowed-out curvature] is called the Production Possibility Frontier, or PPF, because it divides the area of the graph into two parts: The com-

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bination of output that are possible to produce given [an economy’s] limited supply of labor are under the line, and those that are not possible to produce are above it. The bowed-out curvature of the PPF graph illustrates the effects of diminishing returns. . . . The PPF is also very handy because any points that lie on the PPF itself (on the frontier) clearly show the output combinations [an economy] gets when [it is] productively efficient, or wasting none of [its] resources. . . . All points below the line are productively inefficient.44

Beyond the frontier (PPF) is a void. It is not a space; is not conducive for “economic habitation” (for production and exchange). It is a non-place, a nonexistent economic space. But as an economy expands, its constraints loosened, it creates its own space. A cutting-edge economy creates the space into which it expands. With what “forces” does an expanding galaxy of economic activities unfurl the subsequent space it will inhabit? Technological breakthroughs and human capital improvements are some of the factors that usually shift the line (curve) outward. Improvements in society’s welfare are also subjected to marginalist thinking. The ranking of alternative arrangements to improve society’s welfare is analyzed with the aid of the notion of Pareto Optimality. This is economists’ way of stating how an economy can achieve an excellent distribution of resource. When a nation starts reallocation of resources it may have what is called Pareto Improvement: one person is made better off without making anybody worse off. This appears good, but to economists it is not good enough, not excellent. It means the overall allocation of resources is not yet efficient. In order to reach the point of efficiency, to reach the magical margin called Pareto Efficiency, the society has to be at the point where the improvement of one’s person welfare can only come if some other person’s welfare is reduced. All this way of thinking by the margin (the role of substitution at the margin, equi-marginal allocation of cost and revenue, and many more concepts) came into economics in the 1870s in what has been termed the Marginalist Revolution that eventually overthrew classical economics. The revolution is about conceptualizing constraints to economic activities as margin, frontier, or border. The predominant concern is: What is the border use of a particular resource or endowment? In this revolutionary way of thinking pioneered by William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras, the value of any product or factor of production depends on its marginal value—that is the value it can command given a particular configuration of constraints in the economy. Marginal changes happen when the configuration is altered, meaning constraints relax or tighten incrementally. Marginal changes are very small steps in a series that approaches some limit of a sequence.

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Neoclassical economics that dominates technocratic economic management in the major capitalist countries are indebted to this thinking. By and large, it is the only acceptable way of analyzing economic problems in their universities’ economic departments. After four years of training in these departments, any undergraduate will have marginalism pouring profusely from every pore of his or her body. On a lighter note, let me end this discourse about economic concept of excellence with two short stories. An economist once told me, a theologian, that Ezekiel’s God is a marginalist, a deity concerned with the next small thing. He said that Ezekiel’s God (33:12–20) stated that a person is punished and condemned for his or her marginal (incremental) act of sin even if he or she has always lived without disobedience. Similarly, a sinner is saved by his next act of obedience. God declared this approach to deciding who to reward with life and who to make suffer death, which is all based on repentance or act of sin at the margin, as just and fair. So my economist-interlocutor concluded that Ezekiel’s excellent God is concerned with acts done at the margin. Another male economist gave me a marginalist exegesis of Jesus’s healing of the woman with “a flow of blood for twelve years” as recorded in Luke’s gospel (8:43–48; see also Mark 5:25–34). He stated that Jesus displayed the excellence of his character, justice, and power when he sensed the “small touch” by the sick, poor woman. It takes a superior endowment of supernatural power for a person to note a particular light touch in the midst of a thronging and jostling crowd. In his economistic thinking, excellence is paying attention to the smallest details, to the next small thing, operating at the margin, the border. The woman in her prolonged sickness was marginal between health and death, and was also situated at the margin because of her poverty (Luke 8:43), the “pollution” relating to unending menstruation (Lev 15:25–27), and her gender in the midst of Jesus and his male disciples in the patriarchal first-century Palestine. As if to accent the marginality of encounter between the woman and Jesus, Luke even told us that she touched the hem (border) of Jesus’s garment, the margin of his garb. She also “came from behind” to initiate the encounter, not daring for the privilege of a face-toface encounter, mindful about the embarrassing condition and, perhaps, her femaleness. This is, indeed, a story about operating at the margin. She moved into the margin (rather into the void) and Jesus followed her—both of them crossing borders—and she got her healing. In that double movement the community’s participative possibility frontier between maleness and femaleness, between social classes, and of relationality was expanded. In the less philosophical and theological circles of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century United States, excellence is either about performing above a

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given set of standards or simply the qualities that enable a person to achieve natural or supernormal success. It is also conceived as pushing the limits that constrain human life further afield. As John W. Gardner perceived it in his 1960s book, Excellence, it is about the striving for the highest reaches of performance, the full realization of each individual’s promise in life. It is about releasing potentialities. The purpose of education, he argued, is to stretch the individual to the utmost of his potentialities.45 For Gardner the striving for excellence is integral to the American spirit and the American way of life: In our society one does not need to search far for an idea of great vitality and power which can and should serve the cause of excellence. It is our wellestablished ideal of individual fulfillment. This ideal is implicit in our convictions concerning the worth of the individual. It undergirds our belief in the equality of opportunity. It is expressed in our conviction that every individual should be enabled to achieve the best that is in him.46

Forty years after Gardner stated his thesis for America’s educational system, Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon added that excellence must meet with ethics in order to produce good work. Excellence in one’s work is not just about expression of what is best in the person, but also about experiencing a psychological state called “flow” (that is, enjoyment of the performance of work which comes because the skills of the worker and the challenges of the task mesh in an absorbing way), and contributing to the well-being of the community. When these conditions are fulfilled the worker is not just expressing his or her unique potentialities, he or she is doing a good work. “Expressed more generically, good work is whatever advances development by supporting the fulfillment of individual potentialities while simultaneously contributing to the harmonious growth of other individuals and groups.”47 There is a bit of this understanding of excellence (good work) as the route to self-expansion and meaningful community relations among contemporary U.S. upper class. These are those David Brooks has called “Bobos.” They have synthesized old-fashioned bourgeois and bohemian lifestyles in a peculiar effort for personal development, self-expression, self-actualization, or self-expansion. As Brooks explains: Workers in the spiritualized world of Bobo capitalism are not the heroes of toil. They are creators. . . . They seek to explore and then surpass the full limits of their capacities. . . . Self-cultivation is the imperative. . . . So this isn’t a crass and vulgar selfishness, about narrow self-interest or mindless accumulation. This is higher selfishness. It is about making sure you get the most out of your-

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self, which means putting yourself in a job which is spiritually fulfilling, socially constructive, experientially diverse, emotionally enriching, self-esteem boosting, perpetually challenging, and eternally edifying. It is about learning.48

Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman in their best-selling 1980s business book, In Search of Excellence, argue that excellence in the corporate world is innovation, precisely, continuous innovation. The practice of innovation is marked by developing new products and services and by dynamic adaptation to a changing environment.49 They recognize that behind innovation are people and the task of management is to motivate their workers to excel, to create the new, to strain toward the future of both products and environment. One of the things excellent companies do (what Peters and Waterman called “saving remnants” in the heyday of foreign competition plummeting American businesses) is to tap into the paradox or ambiguity of human beings: self-determination (to “stick out” and individuation) and also wanting to be part of something (participation).50 This is how they summed up the ambiguous attitude of workers: “We desperately need meaning in our lives and will sacrifice a great deal to institutions that will provide meaning for us. We simultaneously need independence, to feel as though we are in charge of our destinies, and to have the ability to stick out.”51 While for Peters and Waterman excellence is all about technical, cultural, craftsmanship nature of business leadership of the “saving remnants” poised to deliver the United States from Japanese competition and domination in the 1980s, for Albert Borgmann, a philosopher and ethicist, there is more to it than technological breakthrough, product innovation, and managerial leadership. Following William Frankena he began his inquiry of excellence by making a distinction between moral excellence and nonmoral (natural or cultural) excellence. He tried to identify the common root or common fruit of both. They both need to be nurtured and developed and that they are for the common good of community. He added that the development of skills and talents into excellence “requires the moral excellence of hard work and self-discipline.”52 These definitions or conceptualizations of virtue or excellence appear varied and polysemous in character. But there is a certain kind of harmony or common core in all of them. They are aimed at “the good of a certain kind of life”:53 whether it is the political life of the Athenian citizen, the monastic life of a medieval clergy, or the life of a jazz musician. Excellence then is the set of capacities the possession and exercise of which enables a person to “participate in the attempts to sustain progress and to respond creatively to problems” in a community that takes the good of a certain kind of life seriously.54

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In the above definition—which by the way is very tentative—we can notice that excellence is about the good life (the flourishing human life), progress, and overcoming of obstacles to progress, and participation. We can throw more light on these four key words by “phenomenologically” analyzing the word “excellence” as it is even used in common parlance. The word “excellence” has as its verb form “excel,” suggesting that it has to be understood historically as MacIntyre rightly pointed out.55 It is, however, not enough to understand it historically; one has to also comprehend it both currently (in the present) and futuristically. A work that excels does so within a particular tradition and thus a work that excels not only preserves, mediates, remembers, and surpasses the past and makes present the past and the tradition that both sustains the past and the current work, but it also points us or opens us to the future. “The matter of the past is of interest to the human only in as much as it matters for the future. . . . The ‘present’ [work] is forward-movement of the past. There is no simple pure present.”56 And it is by this ability to dwell within the spaces of three time segments at the same time that it makes possible the continuance of progress, tradition, civilization, and indeed the human race. In connecting the past to the future and thus expanding our horizon, the act (exercise, pursuit) of excellence alters the self-world correlation of the community. To “excel,” therefore, is to participate in this ceaseless moving forward into the future and striving against obstacles to the good life. Excellence is indeed an attempt to being-in-the-world differently. Ultimately it is about existence, a mode of being-in-the-world. While the brief discussions above have placed excellence within the context of the good life in a community, our next discussion will place it within the context of life as a whole. We will place the ceaseless moving forward into the future and the persistent striving against obstacles that we have just talked about in a much wider context so as to properly ground them. Life, limited by death, is excellence. Or rather the audacity of life is the grammar of excellence. The anticipation of a definite end, of annihilating nothingness in the midst of life’s fundamental creative drive toward new forms, gives excellence its existential character. Humans have to look beyond their finitude, their limitations, to experience their finitude. But the standpoint of this looking beyond is potential infinity imagined as an abstract possibility. Excellence directs the mind to ask what lies beyond the given, the current and living form, and absolute and dead forms. Excellence not only directs, it initiates the process by and through which the potential, the one beyond the finite, becomes actual and finite. This basic understanding of what life is and why life transgresses the limit of death is excellence. Excellence is the

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demand on life (being, object) to transgress death (nonbeing). Excellence itself is not an object or a being but the call, the demand on any life, being (object) to transcend every time and every space, every finite reality in direction of the infinite. As Paul Tillich puts it: The power of infinite self-transcendence is an expression of man’s belonging to that which is beyond nonbeing, namely, to being-itself. The potential presence of the infinite (as unlimited self-transcendence) is the negation of the negative element in finitude. It is the negation of nonbeing. The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself.57

According to the thinking presented here, excellence is related to the infinite or more correctly to a ligament of the finite and the infinite. As its etymology indicates it is defined by the self (the finite) going out (ex-) toward, surpassing the highest (cellere, the hill). It is the self transcending itself deep in the fabric of its existence to reach the not-yet of existence, of history. This drive toward new forms, the not-yet becomes embodied in cultural creations, institutions, technologies, knowledges, styles, and so on. Excellence is the self-awareness of the finite self as potentially infinite. Excellence does not and will not lead to an infinite being and is not about divinizing humans. The infinity I have in mind here is “a directing concept, not a constituting concept. It directs the mind to experience it own unlimited potentialities.”58 It is the power of the becoming circle of life in the penetrating forward movement of existence. What I have metaphorically described as the circle of excellence has two key features.59 First, it is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Every human being is potentially and actually a center of excellence. In him or her there is a dimension of plus, an urge to go beyond the current circumstances of existence to the not-yet.60 The circumference is nowhere because it is ever expanding. Second, it is a circle that is both visible and invisible, so to speak. It is made visible by its circumference as the circumference that can only make the circle visible is filled with achievements. Our accomplishments, practices, and objects that bear the marks of originality and creative advance are what define the circumference of this great circle in all forms of our sociality. But the circle is invisible because its center is everywhere and expanding as it moves ahead. The center (that is, the dynamism built into the core of every human) is the seed that is pushing the “achieved circumference” to the not-yet, to the “unachieved in-finite circumference.”

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How can we understand this core dynamism that so entangles human life within the dynamism and vibrancy of matter and spirit, of all of nature? To understand this “seed” is to grasp the nature of excellence and express it adequately. This study is an attempt to answer the most general questions about the nature of excellence and human existence. How can we go beyond the nature of excellence in a specific sphere of human endeavor to the nature of excellence that is effective in all spheres? What is the basic universal category, the basic way in which excellence is experienced in the structure of being? Given these pressing questions that need response, excellence must be sought not just in fine products, processes, inventions, or laws, but more fundamentally or primordially at the level of what it means to be human. Our question is not what particular social practice may be deemed excellent, but what it means for our existence and moral life to involve an excellent dimension. On what do our willing and acting that produce excellence in our practices ultimately rest upon? Practice of excellence first springs from neither our accumulation of know-how or from some objective laws or values of a mode of production or social formation, but from the dynamic desire and courage to actively participate in our world and shape it. There is a certain intentionality or capability in humans to dynamically and innovatively recreate our received world and this intentionality is never completed. This study’s focus on excellence helps to make the case that: societies are more profoundly constituted at their very core by an a priori human capability for creativity in common. . . . The notion of a radically creative capability helps us to see that communities are . . . ongoing historical forms that we are called to create and re-create ever anew, and that this process should be guided at least in part by the ultimate poetic aim of a creatively reconciled humanity.61

One of the goals of this book is to show how human beings who are at the core imbued with creative capability can in the pursuit of excellence create a more flourishing, inclusive, and creatively reconciled society. Before we tackle this aspect of the study in the subsequent chapters, let us look at two types of excellence (technical and ontological) as part of our task of deepening our knowledge about excellence, human existence, and meaningfulness. There is no such thing as excellence without meaning; such an excellence would be un-human. A vision, a hope is always in place to provide a direction and the direction itself is informed by excellence. They draw from each other. How is this so? Work (in that full sense that includes techneµ and poiesis) undertaken by humans not only shapes and defines them fundamentally, but is also set off

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in the first place by their purposes. There is no deed standing apart from doer, and no doer apart from deed. The perpetual unfolding of technical and poetic activities is the unfolding of humans. It is humanity manifesting its potentialities and the courage to be. Thus what is called technical excellence always finds its home in ontological excellence.

Section 2: Excellence: Technical and Ontological Technical excellence is used in the sense of technical achievement: perfecting of the application of some techniques, methods, or procedures.62 It is understood in terms of result—results that match or exceed a preconceived standard of expectation. The focus of emphasis is on means: the pursuit of excellence is a tool for mastering and controlling reality. Through this kind of excellence human beings have been able to move technical civilization forward all through the ages. Excellence as an ontological excellence is the source of meaning. It is identical with the actualization of potentialities of humanity. It is the search for fulfillment; it represents an inescapable moral call on humanity to deepen and widen being by turning to the infinite. Excellence is the structure of being and world that makes participation in the infinite and in community possible and meaningful. It is a centered act of the whole person by which he or she participates in the dynamics of life. The person is driven to the infinite by human potentialities that seek actualization. Ontological excellence is the precondition for technical excellence. Ontological excellence is the process in which technical excellence reaches beyond itself and its world. Humans in their pursuit of technical excellence are aware of their potential infinity, the infinite depth of human potentialities. If technical excellence is grasped by the will-to-the-infinite humans not only shape their world, but also transform and re-create it. Technical excellence is then driven into the presence of the holy and thus strains to go beyond the limits of its finitude. Ontological excellence is the movement of technical excellence toward ultimate meaning and significance. Technical excellence is the presupposition of ontological excellence, and ontological excellence is the fulfillment of technical excellence. The two concepts of excellence are in means-end relationship. Technical excellence deals with the discovery of the means of actualization of human potentials. Ontological excellence is the longing for the source of all meaning, the driving force toward the good-itself. Ontological excellence nourishes technical excellence, and the dehumanization of humanity itself arises if the two are separated. When they are separated men

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and women are made to function as mere instruments in the sustenance of civilization and their striving for self-affirmation (which is the power of being to actualize itself, the process of life) that is constitutive of their humanity is severely threatened or becomes destructive. Not moving forward also dehumanizes human beings because the thrust to move forward is ontological to their being and hence ontological excellence is not an imposition or a strange demand on human beings. It is rather an affirmation of what essentially they are and what they ought to be. Philosopher Francis X. D’Sa puts it well when he writes: The orientation toward the future is a dynamism which the Human cannot escape because his very being is future-oriented. The Human ek-sists means Dasein is future oriented. . . . The basic thrust of any being is toward the future. A thing exists in as much as it is endowed with this thrust. Without the future nothing can exist. That is to say, the future is . . . constitutive of a being.63

Ontological excellence stands in judgment over-against technical excellence. This is not a “heteronomous” oversight, but a “theonomous” one. Ontological excellence does not reject any breakthrough, achievement, or actualization of human potentialities that may appear under technical excellence, but it does not take any actualization as the ultimate except that one that is yet to be reached. Technical excellence cannot become ontological excellence, cannot fulfill itself as ontological excellence, and cannot stand as an adequate symbol of ontological excellence except it continuously sacrifices itself as technical excellence to itself as ontological excellence. Any acceptance of any level of technical and social organization of civilization as the ultimate which is not the acceptance of its form of sociality as standing under the judgment of further drastic improvement is a form of idolatry. Ontological excellence is the affirmation of the principle and concern that no existing form of human sociality has the right to consider itself as the ultimate. This propensity to reject closure, the urge to say “on, one more step!” is what I will call the will-tothe-infinite. A necessary part of any theology of excellence is the examination of how the will-to-the-infinite can grasp a group of people and create a community in which this will “expresses itself in symbols of action, imagination, and thought” that sustain and carry forward human flourishing.64

Section 3: Excellence as Will-to-the-Infinite Victor Zuckerkandl once described music as a two-faced or two-minded force tending toward both the finite and infinite.65 Excellence can also be described as a two-faced force. It is intent on self-affirmation of the individual,

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the fulfillment of his or her promise, potentialities. It tries to reach a goal, to bring a resolution, a closure to what is and what is yet to be. It wills the finite. But each fulfillment only gives an occasion for further fulfillment, straining forward to what is to come. Every fulfillment is partial and provisional and is an acknowledgment of incompleteness intrinsic to human being. Every fulfillment, every height attained is perpetually intent on reaching what is beyond and only renews the desire to go forward into the future. “[W]ith its renewed ever more insistent ‘On!, Once again! which hammers out after it is a striving without end that accepts no limit, a willing of the infinite.”66 Excellence is a willing of the infinite like music. The two forces or tensions intrinsic to excellence are not dialectic or opposites, a two-step process, or successive phases in a process. The will-to-thefinite is generated and is dependent on the will-to-the-infinite. To repeatedly engage in the will-to-the-finite is to be opened to the future, to anticipate the future and to be drawn into a hope of better fulfillment. And to will the infinite is to have the finite and its past bearing upon or be incorporated into the forward momentum. The “being” of excellence stores itself and anticipates itself. There is no mutual extrinsicality of infinite and finite. The willto-the-finite is also codependent on the will-to-the-infinite. The finite has its dynamic life in and through the infinite. In the finite the infinite is also in a sense contained. Because of the hierarchical nature of excellence and its inherent incompleteness (like metrical waves67) the infinite incompletely completes the finite. The infinite satisfies the demand for completion in the finite and in doing this carries the finite (now charged with its future) from its spatial-temporal location and reaches beyond, to the novum. The will-to-the-infinite is not the will to be a super-mench, to strive to do the greatest thing possible, to overcome the most daunting obstacle, but to do the next small thing. Mother Teresa once said: “To God there is nothing small. The moment we give it to God, it becomes infinite.”68

Section 4: Excellence as Community of Abstract-Concrete and More There are fundamentally two sides to excellence. The items, tangible or intangible, that are recognized as excellent are the phenomenal forms excellence takes but are not excellence itself. Excellence itself is a play of dual properties. There has to be excellence before its phenomenal medium; first there has to be excellence which has to be embodied in a particular form. Excellence lies behind the form and it is carried by the form. That which lies behind the item (form) we can call description or title. A thing, item,

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idea, virtue, or behavior answers to the description as its medium or mode.69 These, title and answer, are respectively the abstract and concrete units of excellence. The abstract unit could be expressed in a plurality of modes. The concrete unit or medium not only signifies and points beyond itself to the abstract, but also participates in it—just like symbols.70 The abstract unit is what we have called self-actualization and the leaning onward to the future. The abstract aspect gives the item (adjudged excellent) its character of having the future in its being. The abstract unit is an immanent, rhizomatic, decentralized biosocial dynamic. It is a surplus (and always so) of uncoded longing, flows of energy. The concrete aspect is the form of the description as we can perceive or sense, giving the abstract form its embodiment, particularity, code. Self-actualization cannot become manifest or phenomenological as excellence without some objects, media, behaviors, or forms. To become excellence, self-actualization would have to be attached and “objectified” in something, in a form. A series of self-actualization or self-affirmation that bears no relation to form, to something, neither exists as excellence nor is it constitutive of an excellent item.71 Paradoxically, the abstract appears at both ends of the concrete: it is both the final product and the preliminary condition of all excellent items (forms). There is no concrete form that is not initiated by the infinite longing, self-actualization. There is no final product (coding of actualization) that does not bear and cannot serve as a basis for further actualization. The abstract is within the concrete and against the concrete. All things (forms) adjudged excellent must share the dual properties of description and answer. These two properties or qualities are deeply embedded in social relationships. There is no private excellence. As a locus and means of shared participation in being, excellence has its place only in a community. The concrete form can only function, answer as, and receive acceptance as the presentation of excellence by the action of a community, and it is by such a collective acceptance that an item comes into this function. An excellent item does not exist in a vacuum, but is always embedded in social relations and “created” out of social relations. A medium of excellence exists in relation to a sociality that confers excellence on it. The abstract unit is also a social phenomenon; a multiagent set of distributed capacities and dynamics. First, humans are always persons-in-communion. Second, self-actualization unfolds itself in an encounter of beings to beings, in the claims of one being upon another and the whole of the community, in persons’ participation in connections larger than the self, and in relations of a communicative praxis. It cannot be said to be flowing from a central source or even from a collections of centers, but rather as distributed in a network. It is capillary in its operation. Without denying

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what a single individual can do to actualize his or her own potentials, it would be wrong to assume that human self-actualization is based on individual effort, mind, or creativeness. Self-actualization is fundamentally social. Human selfactualization is deeply connected to the communication and cooperation of a multitude of creative agents. All this is not really to divide excellence into two parts: concrete and abstract. The metaphor of swarm-intelligence model gestures to what I am trying to name here. To recap, all excellent items simultaneously have both qualities: abstractness and concreteness. And these qualities are not only socially contingent, but also social relation is constitutive of them. The simultaneous presence of the two qualities represents what I will call the dimension of materiality of excellence.72 In addition to this dimension of excellence there are two others: tradition and transcendence. An item deemed excellent is always located in and a part of a tradition (a sociality, a narrative framework). There is also the transcendence (ekstatic) dimension: the item (in its combined abstractness and concreteness) points beyond itself to what is beyond, the not-yet, the oncoming future in history. The analytical separation we have just made is for heuristic purposes only. The properties are members of one another and hence are inseparable in any item of excellence. There is no priority of dimensions, only the unity of excellence. It is in this unity (wholeness) that inheres its (potential) transfigurative power to address socialities at points of disfiguration and restore such to wholeness. The occurrence of excellence involves the transformation of material conditions, confronting reality and going beyond it, struggling within and constructing against given tradition, questioning the not-yet, and straining on, through and beyond the given conditions as transcendence so as to reach a new phase of wholeness (holiness: halig). These threesome features of materiality, tradition, and transcendence suggest that the study of excellence as an ethical principle could offer a comprehensive framework to engaging with, modeling, and pursuing human well-being (wholeness, flourishing).73 Such a framework, as per Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, would lead us not toward “the naked life of homo tatum but toward homohomo, humanity squared, enriched by the collective intelligence and the love of community.”74

Section 5: Problematic “Standards of Excellence” The discourse of abstract and concrete provides another docking point to engage with virtue ethics and popular thinking on excellence that rely on standards. Virtue ethicists define internal goods by standards of excellence.75 Joe

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the Plumber or Jane the Pundit defines excellence as a set of standards that are appropriate to a domain of human activity. Not that this evaluative approach to excellence is false and useless, it is simply inadequate. This is so because it ignores excellence as a matter of ontology whose continuous unfolding creates a new social being and because it attempts to measure the immeasurable. Standards are measures of excellence: markers of its presence or not in a domain of cooperative human activity. Such markers or measures are dealing with the dialectic of presence-absence. We have already noted that excellence has no center and is distributed as a network; and since it is a dynamic flow in the interstices of sociality there are not stable boundaries between inside and outside. All this is not to say that excellence cannot be measured at all or be discerned as time passes; “it means rather that its presence and absence tend to be indeterminate.”76 By the way, what exactly is being measured, the abstract or concrete aspect? Another problem with the evaluative approach to excellence is that it reduces excellence to a unitary conception. Excellence is a multiplicity that permeates human sociality and social being, and in order to measure it in a domain it has to be reduced to a unity or a single identity. All differences in the way it could be manifested in singularities of individuals have to be sliced, diced, and counted as one in order to judge it. All differences are submerged and the concept is used as an exclusive one. Every fixed measure of value tends to jar on the mobility, fluidity, and globality of the abstract unit of excellence as metal on concrete. The challenge of philosophizing about excellence is not to start from the reduced and hegemonic basis or from a domain-specific perspective. As we have repeatedly stated, the real task is to conceptualize excellence as the universal, inclusive, open clearing that allows humans to act together, human creativity to manifest, and persons to creatively resist obstacles to human flourishing in all forms of sociality. The evaluative approach is attempting to measure something that is immeasurable. Excellence as we have already noted is a surplus. There is always an excess. In chapter 1, using Badiou’s ontological mathematics, we stated that owing to the irreducible excess of parts over elements in any set counted as one the finite, immanent human excellence can extend itself in potentially infinite ways. Every excellent product embeds both living and dead matter: vitality and form; abstract and concrete aspects of actualization of potentials. Living excellence (humanity’s own innovative and creative capacities) always exceeds the concretized excellence. Living excellence cannot be quantified (parceled) as plaudits or epaulettes. There is still one more point to add here on the issue of immeasurability of excellence. The clearing is outside measure and beyond measure. The clearing

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is the site within which cooperative human activities take place and there is no transcendent notion of measurement that establishes its legitimacy or constitutes it. It is constitutive of what it means to be human and is constituted by humans. Those who insist on “standards” may be acting out from what Hardt and Negri call, “the ideological necessity to give a transcendent ontological foundation to order.”77 The great Western metaphysical tradition has always abhorred the immeasurable. From Aristotle’s theory of virtue as measure to Hegel’s theory of measure as the key to the passage from existence to essence, the question of measure has been strictly linked to that of transcendent order. Even Marx’s theory of value pays its dues to this metaphysical tradition: his theory value is really a theory of the measure of value. . . . Throughout modernity, the immeasurable was the object of an absolute ban, an epistemological prohibition.78

Does this assertion of the immeasurability of excellence mean that the social-ethical framework I am attempting to develop in this book negates justice, equality, or virtue, all of which involve some notion of measure? As we shall see in chapters 5 and 6, “in contrast to those who have long claimed that value can be affirmed only in the figure of measure and order, [I] argue that value and justice can live in and be nourished by an immeasurable world.”79

Section 6: Excellence and Creativity There is a lot of similarity in the way I have described “excellence” and what is commonly understood as “creativity” and so there is a need to explain that I have not just substituted one familiar word with another. Excellence encompasses creativity. On the basis of the understanding of excellence developed so far in this study it is obvious that excellence is the principle of creativity (from Latin creare, which means to “bring forth,” to “come into existence”). If excellence is essentially the drive toward actualization of potentialities for all human beings, it follows that creativity of human beings is the form that is adequate for this movement. Creativity is the creator surpassing him- or herself by making whole or weaving a whole out of the fragments of life and existing-nothing. I use the compound word existing-nothing to differentiate my idea of nonexistence from nonbeing or nothingness. The existing-nothing belongs to existence as such. Existing-nothing is the contents of cultural life that demands existence of that which does not exist but should exist. The history of humanity shows us again and again “nothing” breaking into existence through ongoing selfaffirmation—with flashes of light that illuminate levels of reality that are

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normally hidden—and becoming something. This nothing that is mixed with existence and is urging to become something is not external to humans, but is in them extensively and intensively. Existing-nothing is existential; it is implied in the existence of human qua human. Nothing or nothingness presupposes existence, being. Being possesses the eros of fulfilling itself, to work out its potentials. The urge of existing-nothing that is taken into existence provides a power, a will to move forward in spite of inhibitions and render as no-thing obstacles to human destiny, which is the actualization of what humans potentially are. In every act of creativity, humans contribute to excellence through the actualizing of their potentials, participating in something transcendental, and closing the separation between the given and the novum.

Concluding Remarks Excellence is popularly understood simply as an extraordinary performance (output, results, ideas by an individual or a group). Every word of this present study contradicts this distortion of excellence. Excellence is viewed, in this study, both as the primary end and as the principal means of being-inresistance. To be an existent is to be engaged in struggle against the threat of nonbeing and overcoming problems that hinder the further-to-be, the notyet-become. Excellence involves the removal of various types of resistance that block the unfolding of being. Excellence, as it is argued here, is constitutive of being. If this proposition is accepted, the reach of the theological and ethical analysis in this book lies in establishing a coherent and adequate perspective of excellence as a means of understanding the development of being, qua human being, human flourishing, and the relevant social-ethical framework for it. The word excellence is radiant with ontological meanings. Excellence is not a state of affairs; rather it is both the process and consequence of life activity governed by the passion of resistance that is gesturing toward deep connectedness with being. The life of activity is a movement—grasped by the eros for participating in the unfolding of being—that has as its highest object union with God as with that “object” in which human questing finds rest and “perfection.” Excellence is the overcoming of obstacles—both external and internal—to this ontological passion. Excellence is a demand for something new to exist in order to bring humanity to fulfillment.80 This demand for something new is not just to produce something better for the moment, for the time, for the place. It arises from the possibilities created by the interplay of phronesis and poiesis in endlessly transforming history anew within history.81

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Excellence is not a theory of permanence of human progress or of some activities of a super-mench; it is rather a symbol of an ethical reality rooted in divine-human action and in being. It is the character of resistance, the selfaffirmation of the unfolding, deepening, and widening being in more than the sovereignty of obstacles. It is ethos and eros of human flourishing, the urge to participate in something that transcends today in spite of circumstances that undermine creativity. Excellence is the movement to realize that which does not exist and which existence not only would increase connectedness, extend human possibilities, but will also reflect divine-ontological creativity.82 The notion of excellence being developed in this book is similar and also different from the humanist conception of human progress.83 It is similar in the sense that in the two the ideal of both human sociality and personality is the actualization of the potentials and possibilities of the human. It is different in two aspects. First, my concept has the notion of participation in some common spiritual reality that transcends the individual and his or her forms of sociality, giving him or her a spiritual center and imbuing his or her purposes with ultimate meaning. The unfolding of being goes beyond the unconcealment of potentials to the deepening and widening of human sociality as a way of connecting with ultimate reality. Excellence, unlike the humanist idea of human progress, is participation in the unfolding of being by a finite being who is turned to the infinite. There is an objective end (telos) to which excellence is directed and it is human flourishing which is ultimately participation in the life of God, the source of being and source of all good. Second, it involves the idea of a movement, a kind of dynamism that undergirds all human actions. Excellence is characterized as a movement because of the recognition of the salience of transition to a greater flourishing. The naming of excellence as a movement gestures to the importance of the straining forward to the good and fine thing outside ourselves and our environment that are essential for our well-being. This movement has two dimensions: spatial and temporal. It moves forward to the new, to a place of attainment, to “a new earth and new heaven,” “land of milk and honey.” The new in this spatial sense of excellence is “ontological,” tied to the origin; both the old and new are derived from and tied to the same original state. The “new” earth and heaven is only a going beyond of the old into a kind of a new phase in history. In the temporal sense, excellence is a movement toward something that does not exist, attains it, and moves on again toward another that should exist. The new here sheds its original state; the new reshapes the character of the old in a fashion of top-down causation. The new state becomes a new beginning.84

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I have also named excellence as a movement to suggest that there is something about it that is not merely about human activities surpassing a particular configuration of obstacles and standards in the present. Rather these activities tap into hidden recesses and energies of human experiences and the hanging-together of life, into the dimensions where persons and groups wrestle with the ontological questions of being and responses to the ultimate reality that sustains and encompasses being. Excellence is a current and a way of being, pursuing and maintaining meaningful existence. Before bringing this chapter to its end, I would like to address an important question one of the readers of an early version of this chapter put to me. I was asked to show how my notion of excellence differs from its traditional and common usage in ethics. The predominant traditional understanding of excellence primarily turns on three concepts: disposition, exercise, and common telos (the good). Excellence is thus a disposition the exercise of which moves the agent toward the good or its realization. In this chapter, the interpretation of excellence has also turned on three concepts: capability, actualization, and the good (interconnectedness of being, human flourishing, or the actualization process itself). Now someone may raise the objection that there are here three conceptions of the good which may or may not be equivalent. All through this work I have used these three notions of the good interchangeably for very good reason. The interconnectedness of being, the widening and deepening of being, is taken for the purposes of this study to be human flourishing. Interconnectedness of being and human flourishing are both rooted in the actualization process itself. The good is created by the process by which it is attained. The telos that a community strives to attain is largely produced by the process of actualization of capacities of the community itself. The realization of human potentials to their fullest as a vision of the good is appropriated by actualization of the potentials themselves. Excellence is both a means and an end—technical and ontological as explained above. In addition, because this human capability is “always on the way toward becoming,” its good, perfection, inner aim, or telos “lies by its very nature beyond” and within.85 By and through this capability human beings creatively transform the boundaries of and the relationship between their finitude and freedom.86 This humanity’s capability to mediate its historicity and hope, sameness and disruption, is not only considered to be at the very ontological core of what it means to be human, but is also presupposed in every moral and technical notions of creativity.87 This capability is not just a fact about human beings, a tool for expression of potentialities, or forming of new possibilities in its interplay with historical situation. More profoundly, it is a medium within

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which the self uncovers its ownmost concealed transcendent possibilities and transforms its vision for and meaning of any given historical situation. The next chapter aims to describe this way of being in the twenty-first century. In chapter 3, I interpret and reinterpret excellence as that eros (the manifold creative energies at work in human sociality) that can serve as a centering, animating, and driving arrowhead of all forms of human cooperation. It is the current at work that enables political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic dynamism to drink deeply of the human throwness into unfolding being. Excellence is a way of being and living in unfolding being. Subsequent chapters will attempt to show us how to cultivate senses of excellence; how social groups can drink deeply from the stream of being in order to enhance human flourishing.

Notes 1. Paul Ricoeur, “The Problem of the Foundation of Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 22, no. 3–4 (1978): 175–92, 177. 2. This chapter was presented in Ethics Colloquium (faculty-doctoral students) seminar of the Boston College School of Theology on October 31, 2008. I received very useful comments from the participants. I especially want to thank Professor Lisa Cahill, the official respondent, for her insightful comments and advice during the presentation and in a discussion immediately thereafter. 3. John Wall, “Phronesis as Poetic: Moral Creativity in Contemporary Aristotelianism,” The Review of Metaphysics 59 (December 2005): 319, 321. 4. By this approach, I will argue with and against Aristotle or the virtue ethicists. The understanding of excellence is being enlarged from its moral-sphere limits undergirded by the central human function to its robust moral and technical richness that is undergirded by the actualization of human potentials. There is a good reason for focusing on actualization of potentials or social self-realization instead of central human function or reason. As I will show below, Aristotle had the actualization of potentials in his conception of excellence. As he reasoned, the pursuit of the central human function is the best way of actualizing human potentials. Immanuel Kant also had similar thought: he linked the doctrine of categorical imperative to social self-realization. At the heart of Kant’s ethical view is the concern with human flourishing which involves the fullest realization of personal capacities and happiness of others. Humans realize their true humanity if they act out of respect for the law of their own essential being. The capacities destined to be best developed in humans are the ones that serve the use of reason. According to him, human potentials unfold through time as they are drawn by a final end and they will with time culminate in an age of happiness. So in a sense Kant’s monumental efforts in his critical philosophy are ultimately concerned with the process of actualization of potentials that leads to human excellence in the form of freedom, creation of conditions most conducive for the exercise of individual freedom. See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Keith Ward, Religion and Human Fulfillment (London: SCM Press, 2008), 3; Ward, The Development of Kant’s View of Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 54, 85–98, 111–12, 125–27; Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 220–23; J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1920), 243–56. 5. Making and doing are used in the Thomistic sense of actions producing something outside the agent (“external good”) and actions abiding in the agent, respectively. 6. I am using the phrase in that specific Martha C. Nussbaum sense as explained in chapter 1. 7. For an explanation of propensity in the Karl Popperian sense see Robert E. Ulanowicz, Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 36–41. 8. This is in the sense of power as both the “intelligible force of praxis” and the “practical intention of theory.” See Hodgson, God in History, 190. 9. Hodgson, God in History, 207–9. 10. I found philosopher Lawrence J. Hatab’s words in a very different context as most appropriate to express my intention for undertaking a genealogical account of excellence here. See Lawrence J. Hatab, Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 88. Italics in the original. 11. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 127. 12. I am grateful to social ethicist Professor Peter Paris under whom I studied the ethics and politics of Aristotle at Princeton Theological Seminary for reminding me of this point during a conversation over lunch at Harvard University on September 19, 2008. 13. Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII.9.1074b26. 14. I owe this interpretation to the stimulation of thought I got from Professor Paris and Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 118–21. 15. It is important to make some clarifying comments here. Yes, it is true that Aristotle says the fullest realization of human potentials takes place in the contemplative life. It is truer to say it is a life that transcends normal human morality and finitude (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. X.7.1177a12–b1; 1177b26–34). In another place, Metaphysics, bk. XII.9.1074b15–35, and XII.9.1072b23–30, Aristotle presents this divine way of being, this ideal of human life, as impossible to permanently attain; we can only asymptotively approach it at best. (See also Jussi Backman, “Divine and Mortal Motivation: On the Movement of Life in Aristotle and Heidegger,” Continental Philosophy Review, 2006, 245–46.) So in ordinary, immanent, life the virtues enable us to dwell in the dynamic space between open potentiality and the closure of actuality. 16. Aristotle’s explanation of this process includes a principle he called entelechy, an internal principle of growth and perfection guiding the organism to actualize its

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potencies. He believes that the complete form of the matter is present in the matter from the beginning and matter merely actualizes its inherent qualities, working through formal causes, and it is pulled to perfection or final telos by its final causes. The form of the full grown oak is present in the acorn. The theme of actualization of potentials (as part of the history of debate of change versus permanence) is woven through much of Western thought. See Anand C. Paranjpe, Self and Identity in Modern Psychology and Indian Thought (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 182; Backman, “Divine and Mortal Motivation,” 241–43. 17. See Aristotle, On the Soul II.5.417a21–b2; On the Generation of Animals II.1.735a9–11, and Nicomachean Ethics II.1.1103a26–1103b7. 18. If you think some portion of this parenthetical comment alludes to Martin Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s philosophy see below my discussion of Aristotelian and Heideggerian thoughts as they relate to actualization of potencies. 19. Albino Barrera, God and the Evil of Scarcity: Moral Foundations of Economic Agency (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 19–23, 31–33, 216–21. 20. Badiou, Being and Event, 1. 21. Heidegger, Being and Time; and Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 14, 22, 28–29, 86. 22. Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII.6.1072a9, 1072a19ff. 23. See Aristotle, On the Soul III.10.433a23-b10; see also Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 104. 24. Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 85–86. For more discussion on the connection between virtue and desire in the works of Aristotle and Heidegger, see Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 124–28. 25. Rejecting or redefining Aristotle’s notion of full actuality and life’s essence as having no outward movement, Heidegger writes: “The purest manifestation of the essence of movedness is to be found where rest does not mean the breaking off and cessation of movement, but rather where movedness is gathered up into standing still, and where this ingathering, far from excluding movedness, includes and for the first time discloses it” (Heidegger in “What Is Metaphysics,” quoted in Backman, “Divine and Mortal Motivation,” 253). 26. Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 110. Italics added. 27. For a good discussion of Heidegger notion of “authenticity” see Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 25–27. My presentation of authenticity is deeply indebted to Hatab’s elucidation of Heidegger’s thought. 28. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 150–82, 184. 29. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods. 30. Mike W. Martin, Creativity: Ethics and Excellence in Science (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 32–33. 31. Martin, Creativity, 9–15. 32. Here I am working with insights I received from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 71–72, 81, 204, 216. 33. See John Wall, “Imitatio Creatoris: The Hermeneutical Primordiality of Creativity in Moral Life,” The Journal of Religion 87, no. 1 (January 2007): 21–42; Wall,

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Moral Creativity: Paul Ricouer and the Poetics of Possibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 34. “A trend is not a march along a path, but a complex series of transfers or side steps, from one event . . . to another” (Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin [New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996], 63). 35. Gould, Full House, 157. 36. Gould wrote in page 79 of Full House that: “I devote this chapter to the paradoxical claim that extinction of 0.400 hitting really measures the general improvement of play in professional baseball. Such a claim cannot even be conceived while we remain stuck in our usual Platonic mode of viewing 0.400 hitting as a ‘thing’ or ‘entity’ in itself—for the extinction of good items must mean that something has turned sour. I must therefore convince you that this basic conceptualization is erroneous, and that you should not view 0.400 hitting as a thing at all, but rather as the right tail in a full house of variation.” 37. Gould, Full House, 146–48. 38. Gould, Full House, 37, 145–46. 39. Gould, Full House, 54. 40. Gould treats this, albeit unsatisfactorily, in Full House, 130, 217–30. 41. Gould, Full House, 226. 42. “Natural evolution includes no principle of predictable progress or movement to greater complexity. But cultural change is potentially progressive or self-complexifying because Lamarckian inheritance accumulates favorable innovations by direct transmission, and amalgamation of traditions allows any culture to choose and join the most useful inventions of several separate societies” (Gould, Full House, 222). 43. Gould, Full House, 226–29. 44. Sean Masaki Flynn, Economics for Dummies (Hoboken N. J.: Wiley Publishing, Inc, 2005), 41–42. Italics in the original. 45. John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1961), xiii, 3, 60, 86, 135, 150. 46. J. Gardner, Excellence, 135. 47. Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 244. 48. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 134. 49. Thomas Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Warner Books, 1982), 12–13, 19. 50. Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence, xx–xxi, 80–81. 51. Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence, 56. 52. Albert Borgmann, Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 97. 53. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 190. 54. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 189–90. Italics added. 55. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 189. 56. D’Sa, “Tradition of Texts and Texts of Tradition,” 94–95. 57. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:191.

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58. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:190. 59. This metaphor of excellence was stimulated by Raimundo Panikkar, “Colligite Fragmenta: For an Integration of Reality,” in From Alienation to At-One-Ness, ed. Francis A. Eigo and Silvio E. Fittipaldi (Villanova, Pa.: Villanova University Press, 1997), 87–90. 60. According to Raimundo Panikkar, “It is enough to say that Man [sic] experiences the depth of his own being, the inexhaustible possibilities of and for relationship, his non-finite (i.e., infinite) character—for he is not a closed being and cannot put limits on his own growth and evolution. Man discovers and senses an inbuilt more in his own being which at once transcends his own private being. He discovers another dimension which he cannot manipulate. There is always more than meets the eye, finds the mind or touches the heart. This ever more—even more than perceiving, understanding and feeling—stands for the divine dimension.” Italics in the original. See his “Colligite Fragmenta,” 88. 61. John Wall, “The Creative Imperative: Religious Ethics and the Formation of Life in Common,” Journal of Religious Ethics 33, no. 1 (2005): 61. 62. Here I have plowed Tillich’s thoughts into the very fabric of my argument. See his thoughts on ontological and technical reason in his Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 72–77. 63. D’Sa, “Tradition of Texts and Texts of Tradition,” 94–95. 64. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), 90. 65. Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 176. 66. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 176. Italics added. 67. Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music, and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 60–68. 68. Ann and Jeanette Petrie, producers, Mother Teresa (Burlingame, Calif.: Petrie Productions, 1986) quoted in Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 200. 69. Description and answer alludes to John Maynard Keynes’s description of money in his, A Treatise on Money (London: Macmillan, 1930), 4. As stated by Keynes, “if the same thing always answer to the same description, the distinction would have no practical interest. But if the thing can change, whilst the description remains the same, then the distinction can be highly significant” (A Treatise of Money, 3). 70. For a general understanding of the meaning of symbols as used here, see Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 47–62. 71. This something could be materialized or dematerialized medium—it really does not matter. 72. Materiality here does not mean only hard objects, products, or artifacts. Even magnetic traces, organizations, techniques, behaviors, or ideas are parts of the material dimension of life. 73. The discussions about materiality, tradition, and transcendence in this paragraph and the one before it are deeply indebted to the insight garnered from John Atherton, Transfiguring Capitalism: An Enquiry into Religion and Global Change (London: SCM Press, 2008), 199–200, 283–89.

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74. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 204. 75. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 187. 76. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 55. I have used Hardt and Negri characterization of network to make my point here. 77. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 355. 78. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 355. 79. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 356. 80. What is demanded is human action. What is demanded depends on human action for its concrete realization. The demand is one sense an experience of the tension of the encounter between the given and the promise (expectation), the present and the future that can only be released (carried to fulfillment) through human action. The concrete realization of the new from the tension as a creative synthesis of form and “abstract unit” (capability) is termed excellence. 81. The recognition of this interplay should not lead anyone to forget that the movement of actualization is simultaneously the ground of flourishing human life and its negation. Actualization can and often does turn against its created possibilities. It can be radical in that Kantian use of the term. 82. For a discussion about how human creativity can reflect divine-ontological creativity, See Nimi Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2008), chapters 2 and 7. See also chapter 6 of this book. 83. For a discussion of the idea of progress in Western thought see Nisbet, History of Progress, and Bury, The Idea of Progress. 84. Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper & Row, [1933] 1977), 20. 85. Wall, Moral Creativity, 29, 10. 86. Some readers may think that excellence as capability (rather than disposition) is virtù in that well-known sense of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. The sense I am using capability goes beyond Machiavelli’s and Nietzsche’s conception. My conception of capability simultaneously includes the moral and nonmoral senses. Second, my conception of capability is not about the singular strength of a powerful, dominant person (the “single one,” Ubermench, super-leader, a Cesare Borgia) forcing his or her will over the rest of society and dispensing with “virtue” as measure of his or her strength. In this book capability is communal and erotic: individual self-realization takes place within a community. 87. Wall, Moral Creativity, 25–26, 179–80.

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The Core Features of Excellence

Excellence is the core principle of eros and ethics. Eros is the creative power (divine-human) in the universe that is behind all cultural creativity, realization of ideals, and exerting and urging toward bonding of groups, interconnectivity of being, and embracing wholeness. Ethics is the pathway, the line that gets humans into this circle of shifting, forward-leaning transformative connective embrace that the metaphor of eros represents. This book as a whole is about excellence—it is about showing how the line and circle that bear the human self in existence are accessible through excellence. This chapter investigates the question of how the pursuit of excellence deepens the understanding of the self and how the human self is re-created, deepened, and widened any time that we encounter the audacity of excellence. It explores the question of what we learn about the self by learning our possibilities. Any object we consider as excellent both depicts and expresses something. Through its representation it expresses a meaning, an import, and implies a mode of self-world relationship. In this chapter I want to investigate how the “world” is opened up to the self, and how the hints and prints of the divine and time can be sensed when the concern over excellence (meaning excellent objects, ideas, thoughts, accomplishments, and so on1) moves from their representative power to their expressive power. The excellent thing does not result from our hearing, seeing, apprehension, or encounter but from the vision it provokes through them. In such item we see something characteristic of ourselves: in the visible, the audible, the tangible we the see the invisible. 81

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The excellent object is the icon of the invisible humanity. We see the self that we ought to be, what is possible for the human. The expressive power of the excellent object, the vision and its history of relentless expansion, is the self awakened to hope, to its erotic connection to being. This self I will name as the excellent self. All pursuits of excellence, all excellent objects presuppose the presence of this self. The manifestation of this self in historical existence and in each person is the decisive criterion for all forms of excellence or form-giving activities. As I will demonstrate, excellence is about expanding boundaries, shifting the boundaries of consciousness, reality, and being. To be grasped by the excellent object is to come to the realization that ultimately there are no boundaries but only radical interconnectivity of all being. “And yet the road to the circle in which everything is on the inside is through the line,” so advises Marc Gafni.2 By line, Gafni means ethics that allows us to break out of the tyranny of a preexisting circle and journey into a new one; it means prophetic resistance to what is given and the discipline of commitment to embracing the other and consciously attending to his or her need; of finding new connections. The path to eros, to radical inclusiveness and responsiveness, is ethics. Excellence is the core principle of eros and ethics. The excellent self is the person who is transparently open to excellence, flowing in the aroused water of eros. Such a self is a bearer of hope for the new, for a great new possibility. The study of excellence, the excellent self, as we have already indicated, will require of us to explore ideas about eros, possibilities, hope, and being. Though I am approaching this study from a Christian theological perspective, I will begin my investigation of the excellent self from an African traditional religion’s understanding of the excellent self (bunimibo, bukebusinbo). The Kalabari people of the Niger Delta region in Nigeria have a view of excellence that gave me some insights on how to craft a Christian theology of excellence that is not about humans glowing in their overman achievements but about gesturing toward ontological and existential “essence” of excellence.

Section 1: An African Conception of Excellence The entry point into Kalabari-Ijo understanding of the excellent self is in their particular conception of God. In the traditional conception, God has two dimensions, parts, or selves: Teme-órú and So. Teme-órú is regarded as the female creative modality. So is the dynamic directing agency, the aspect of divinity that orders the created outcome, the neuter or male counterpart. The

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Teme-órú part is concerned with creation, existence, destruction (wrath). So is concerned with destiny and behavior of people, groups, animals, and institutions. The shaping of destiny is done by or rather understood via the possibilities that So makes available to each person, group, or institution. So when applied to individuals is called so, to households is wariteme-so, and to communities is amateme-so. We will soon learn how an individual comes to have his or her own so. Let us call So as applied to individuals, households, and communities as lowercase so and to the deity as uppercase So. So is the universe of possibilities from which some are defined as available to persons and institutions and others remain either unfulfilled or simply the set of possibilities excluded to them at any given time. So is the ultimate source of possibilities, and the principle of limitation or selection.3 Lowercase so is the ideal the individual receives from God and the person works it out within history, that is, achieves its actualization, by the way he or she unifies its efficient causes. The person transforms the pure possibilities given to him or her into realizable possibilities under the conditions of the world. The idea of God’s directing activity being present in each person or collection of persons—as indicated by the attachment of lowercase so to person or groups—suggests that every person or group incarnates some degree of God’s purpose in the world. The excellent self is the one who has fully realized his or her particular divine aim with little or no distortion, or is in search of the maximum potential in his or her historical circumstances. The particular divine aims have been decisively realized in the lives of few individuals in history and they became gods or community heroes (amaoru). The heroes, human-gods, became the embodiments of divine creative purposes, the specific divine addresses (speeches, bibi) to the community at a specific time, and a sort of transparent medium through which the people could read (comprehend and prehend) So’s aim for the community. The men and women who had so realized themselves became effective concrete lures for both individual and collective actions. They served also for personal and corporate self-understanding at a given historical juncture and what stood beyond them. Such men and women in actualizing So’s particular ideals for themselves expressed So’s general aim for their entire community and it was received by all members of the community. The interpretation of work of community heroes and their reception is not timeless. When the historical situations that brought their works into collective consciousness and sustained them changed, their valuation also altered. So with the coming of Christianity and the expansion of the communicative reaches of the community, new excellent selves embedded in religiously rel-

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evant historical situations were sought. English anthropologist Robin Horton argues that as Kalabari horizon expanded owing to increasing spheres of commerce, transportation and communication networks, and long-distance trade the heroes they kept also changed or tended to change.4 In the cosmological adjustment that ensued many of the symbols and understandings of old worldview were carried over. When one looked at the conception of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ and as the second person of the Trinity, one discerned some resemblance with the Kalabari conception of So and community heroes. Now I am not saying the Kalabari community in the nineteenth century, when they began to convert to Christianity in good numbers, consciously worked out the similarities between their conception of So and the Christian conception of Jesus as the logos. But for our limited purpose in this study they are worth noting for the purpose of enriching the Christian theology of excellence being developed in this work. According to Christian theologian Lewis S. Ford, the logos is the totality of possibilities God envisages for the world or the totality of creative possibilities inherent in the nature of God. Jesus Christ is seen as an incarnation of the logos, the creative Word addressed to humankind.5 In Paul Tillich’s thought, the Christ-event is taken to be the emergence of a new humanity, a New Being who represents the closing of the chasm between potentialities and actualization. In the man Jesus of Nazareth, the “excellent self ” has been realized and thus there are radically new and creative possibilities for transformation of humankind and history. Such “unique” actualization of potentialities is of universal significance and must lead to creative transformation of historical existence, according to Tillich.6 The indigenous Kalabari understanding of So and excellent self is remarkably anticipatory of these received Christian theologians’ conceptions of logos and New Being. We will engage fully with the Christian ideas of Jesus as logos and community hero in a short while. For now, let us continue our discussion of lowercase so. How is so generated for each person in Kalabari? The individual is believed to have a two-part personality. The component parts of this personality act as separate “persons.” One is conscious, the other unconscious. The unconscious part (the soul) before the birth of the person decides the destiny (so or fiyeteboye), the life-course of the whole person on earth. When a soul (spirit) is about to come on earth the would-be soul of the person goes before Teme-órú and decides on a set of possibilities for the life of the individual it is going to inhabit. The other part (the conscious), the physical embodiment of the soul, works to actualize these chosen set of possibilities in history. If a person does not like the course of his or her life on earth she goes to a di-

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viner to change her so or fiyeteboye. The process of changing destiny is called bibibari (altering or nullifying the spoken word, recanting). The person visits a diviner to let Teme-órú know that the person would like to change how he or she wants to live his or her life-course on earth. Once the change of destiny is effected the new so determines the whole course of the person for the remainder of his or life on earth. Horton writes that in existence, that is, in history, the incarnating soul lives a split life. People are split from their real or deepest selves. The essential self (the set of pledged possibilities) is separated from the historical (earthly) self. Often they may even be in contention, going in opposite directions. When the chasm (alienation) between them becomes unbearable a person undertakes bibibari (the recanting of speech) to recalibrate the balance between them, to close the gap. The uppercase So offers a new chance to each person’s becoming if the earlier set of possibility is not suitable for what the person wants to be. The importance of securing bibibari in the Kalabari conception of the excellent self cannot be overstated. It addresses the chasm between potentialities and actualization. Let us not forget the Kalabari conception of excellent life. It is a life where a person works out his or her potentialities, the given divine gifts. Thus, in a sense, life is a movement from separation into union. This yearning force of being is the driving force behind the unfolding dynamics of potentialities. Let us take a closer look at fiyeteboye, the remote antecedent of bibibari. Every person, the pre-born in some realm of essences or pure possibilities, some “heavenly realm” (so-bio) is obligated to see itself, to see what it might become on earth before it makes the nine-month journey into history. The spirit before the birth of the person on earth is to imagine itself in history. It says before God, “I imagine myself in this way. . . .” The pre-born before the dawn of its existence is standing before God—before adorning its earthly garb—and with permission says, “I will be what I will be.” The spirit takes on a flesh only after this obligatory imagination. So with boldness we can say the earthly body of the spirit is imagination. The spirit emerges from “heaven” to live a life of imagination. So in Kalabari imagination is at the core, the essence of who humans beings are. Imagination is ontological. Long before the person can alter Mbiti’s “I am because we are,” the person has altered “I imagine therefore I am.” The spirit that said, “I will be what I will be,” cannot be everything. The moment a decision is made, a cut is made into pure, infinite possibility. And “what I will be” is immediately a “fall,” departure, or slice from the infinite possibility. Historical existence, as we have already noted, involves self-affirmation of these potentialities, the courage or eros to work them out

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under various existential constraints, and to participate in this primordial imagination. So when people imagine their situation, when they see beyond what is given, when they see an alternative, they are expressing existentially their ontological humanization. The fiyeteboye, this speech (“fari”) before God is creative;7 the moment of its utterance is a moment for structuring the range of possibilities within which one’s life will rhythmically move. This initial aim that the person sets for him- or herself becomes an enlivening lure though the person is largely unconscious of it during life on earth. Fiyeteboye is singular, never used as plural. Yet the possibility (the divine gift of the possible) is not just one, “not a simple but rather a multiple one.”8 The multiplicities of possibilities are folded together—the complexity that is both all too human and all too representative of life—and about to unfurl. With fiyeteboye the person emerges on earth with a space of becoming and is enabled to be. The person is “let be.” This letting be is a call to actualize the possibilities for the lineage and the community. It is to embody in his or her flesh, to incarnate, to make a carnal reality a set of possibility in the midst of others. For every child born into the community there is celebration for a new possibility of shared flourishing. The anticipation of coflourishing is also borne—at least in part—on another dimension of So, the collective set of possibility. Every individual comes into the community with the call to actualize his or her possibilities but the pieces of each of their limited efforts are gathered, extended, and shared in the community by the amateme-so. The coexistence, relationality of these two distinguishable but inseparable dimensions of So are the attraction and reception, intensity and width, disparity and beauty of the divine transformative power within the process of interaction. Excellence is an erotic expression of the person’s deep essential nature, the set of possibilities and potentialities that define the person’s unique name (ere) on earth.9 In this sense, excellence is ethics—the expression of a person’s or community’s deep self, a person’s so or the community’s so (amateme-so). In Kalabari, the crucial focus of ethics is on enabling a person to be all that he or she can be; that is to support a person’s ability to live out his or her verbal script, to respond to the call of the voice, the speech, the imagination that preceded his or her journey to earth.10 The community is a symphony of the voices. Each unique sound is contributing to the creativity of the ensemble to produce a melodious communal life. In this symphony each note is allowed to sound, but not at the expense of other notes. Ethics is thus about supporting a person’s essential being and organizing the pursuit of each person’s possibilities in such a way that will avoid violations of others’ possibilities. The word ethics that comes from ethos in even its original

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Greek meaning carries the connotation of a stable that guards members of a society and also of the special nature of the persons within it or the whole community.11 In his book, The Depth and Destiny of Work, theological-ethicist Wariboko has highlighted certain aspects of Kalabari social ethics. He draws attention to the accent put on the preservation of communal well-being, personhood (as person-in-communion), and communion with gods. All these and many more are ways the Kalabari community uses to bring persons and community (the bonded collection of persons) to express the potentialities in their So. There is no necessary conflict between individual self-fulfillment and community well-being—they are aspects of the same fundamental process. They are different sides of naming the same state of being, that of realization of divine gifts (so and amateme-so) in the community and mature relatedness. Community norms, laws, and injunctions are not considered heteronomous or contradictory to the nature of human beings. The community’s laws are to show each person his or her essential nature, his or her true relationship with the gods, ancestors, other members, and his- or herself. The laws are to help each person’s and each community’s true nature to manifest, for the divine gifts (so or amateme-so) to show forth. Though a community member can alter his or her so, it stands (before it is altered) against his or her existence, supposedly commanding and judging it to bring about an undistorted manifestation of his or her potentials under the conditions of existence. The divine gift that captures the person’s essential being—lowercase so—is also an expression of the divine in the midst of history insofar as each set of possibility is a subset of the inexhaustible vessel of possibilities, uppercase So. Each person is a bearer of divinity. To the extent that each person carries a piece of the same thing (So) it should provoke an eros to communal belonging and fellowship. This eros in Kalabari is called gboloma. Excellence and, for that matter, ethics, that is not rooted in gboloma will ultimately fail. Excellence that is not guided by the lowercase so is not deep and gboloma (eros) will not enter into the inwardness of the person’s spirit (teme) to move the person to fulfill his or her potentials. This why I stated above that excellence in Kalabari is an erotic expression of a person’s essential nature, the set of possibilities given to him or her before physical existence. Let us examine the concept of gboloma, the Kalabari notion of eros.12 The word gboloma points to different dimensions of human relationality. In one sense, it points to something being inside another thing, getting involved, experientially being engaged in an activity, or participation. Secondly, it means interconnectivity of all being, inclusiveness, social solidarity, fellowship, communion, merging, or interpenetration. It also means being fully engaged,

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present in an activity or a person’s life. So when someone shows unconcern or an “I-don’t-care attitude” to an activity or goings-on a Kalabari person will say, ani o gboloma-a.13 Fourth, the word is also used for intense desire, yearning, the ecstatic movement toward the other, longing that can culminate in or be modeled by sex. Finally, it is also used for a union or unity that is the community.14 Thus, gboloma, eros, not only captures the urge/energy to realize one’s potentials but also the connection-making power within life. It is what animates and shapes community’s life. Without this creative energy for communal belonging the necessary relations crucial for the community to support the self-fulfillment of the individual, for the individual to become what he or she is potentially, cannot be sustained. Essentially, gboloma is what draws people to go beyond themselves into communion and participation for the creative unfolding of possibilities. It is the inner dynamics of both individual and communal life. We have examined linkages between four Kalabari concepts—So, fiyeteboye, bibibari, and gboloma—to demonstrate the existential margin that the human being has to conquer to achieve excellence. The purpose is to understand what it is the Kalabari people understand by excellence in existential living and later to investigate how this foundational sense is linked to virtues and flourishing life. The four Kalabari concepts hide as much as they reveal. They reveal the divine gift of possibility to each person, but they hide the fact that often persons do not fully realize their gifts. The gift is often an ideal that resists any sense of final realization. Bibibari, precisely, alludes to this. It points to lived experience that no one has ever so realized his or her gift so as to become one with it. This is not only a Kalabari problem. In many other cultures and religions there is a disremption between potentialities and actualities. The pursuit of excellence holds out the possibility of permanently closing the gap, a search whose goal is elusive and yet as in Kalabari and Christian communities there are figures who have been identified to have closed the gap between essence and existence and hence stand as models and lures for others’ becoming. In Kalabari we have the community heroes and in Christianity we have Jesus Christ. Since we are attempting to develop a Christian theology of excellence, let us examine how Christian theologians perceive Jesus of Nazareth to have possessed this elusive final good and thus serve as lure for the realization of divine aim for humankind as a whole. In Jesus as the Christ, the second and last Adam, the express icon of the invisible God, we have a portrait of someone who was at one with all of his possibilities. By that unique achievement he made it possible for us, all of humankind, to also become sons and daughters of God in the event of becoming and actualizing our possibilities.15 According to Catherine Keller,

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When we say that Jesus is the Christ, we mean that from our point of view the Jewish expectation of a Messiah was in a certain sense realized. If it was fulfilled in the person of Jesus—it is because he resolutely realized the possibilities tendered him by what he called abba. We might say that the initial aim for him moment to moment was to realize the messianic age, or the basileia, in the midst of his own limited circumstances.16

In this light, Tillich calls Jesus of Nazareth the New Being and that participation in the life of a group that is based on the New Being as it has appeared in Jesus as the Christ will help men and women to paradoxically heal the split between essence and existence, to fragmentarily conquer the estrangement. Tillich’s notion of New Being is essential for our understanding of excellence and thus it deserves to be investigated at some length.

Section 2: New Being: The Construction of the Excellent Self The New Being is the appearance of essential humanity in history. It is the new creature that is connected with its ground of being and meaning, without separation and disruption, under the presence of the Spirit. The radically new, the structure of authentic humanity has appeared in history. According to Tillich, Jesus is the New Being: for in him appeared what humans ought to be. He showed that our essential humanity is no longer unreachable—this is humanity in intrinsic relation to God. “The paradox of the Christian message is that in one personal life essential manhood has appeared under the conditions of existence without being conquered by them.”17 This unprecedented unity with God ushers in a new age of healing, wholeness, and salvation. Jesus reached this level of unity with God, in Tillich’s understanding, because he was completely transparent to the Father until his death—in utterances, deeds, and possession. He had nothing of himself but received everything from the Father. Second, he sacrificed everything he could have gained for himself from the unprecedented unity with the Father. In Jesus as a person in history we saw two outstanding characteristics that made him the New Being: “uninterrupted unity with the ground of being and the continuous sacrifice of himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ.”18 The appearance of this New Being, this new reality in history is for Tillich the criterion or norm for Christian self-understanding, for all religions, and for conquering estrangement in all human existence at all places and in all times. Thus for all facets of existence the experience of unbroken relation with God has become actual (albeit fragmentary) possibility. In this sense even our cultural forms can become avenues for the actuality of our essential humanity—the fulfillment and not transcendence of the human. In the

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pursuit of excellence or in the creation of excellent form-giving activity, we may be transcending the given, but it is all about the fragmentary fulfillment of our essential humanity, the leaning forward to an intrinsic relation with the divine. This fragmentary self is the excellent self—actually the questing of the self as a historical embodiment of the New Being. For Tillich the New Being is not just about individual salvation, but also about communal healing and about the church. The church can become community of the New Being if it adopts a self-sacrificing character and orients itself to the prophetic “Protestant principle.” In becoming the community of the New Being it becomes “the place where the new theonomy is actual [and] from there it pours into the whole of man’s [sic] cultural life. . . .”19 The New Being is absolutely of decisive importance for comprehending what human life should be and for healing and presence of the commonwealth (kingdom) of God in society. New Being is a term that both captures the coming into being of, and points toward, a new order of relationships in history. It is the image of the trajectory of the human and human history toward fulfillment that has become visible to the human eyes. Thus if one chooses one can deliberately and self-consciously order one’s life, activities, and creativity in accord with the basic, restorative principle of the New Being, essential humanity manifesting in history. At the heart of Tillich’s conception of the New Being is the idea that Jesus’s death and resurrection represent “the transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible.” New Being is a nomenclature for what happened and will continue to happen to humans universally. By accepting this idea subjectively (what he calls reception) one can link the Christ-event to one’s life. In contrast to other understandings of the accomplishment of Jesus of Nazareth, the impact of the appearance of the New Being, to borrow Alain Badiou’s words, “is measurable only in accordance with the universal multiplicity whose possibility it prescribes. . . . [Tillich’s] discourse is one of pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event.”20 What founds this event and makes it of universal significance is not the singularity of Jesus as a subject, but rather what his accomplishment says about the possibility of a new humanity that founds the singularity of Jesus as the subject, Jesus the Christ. This understanding of our humanity provides a decisive perspective for the construction of the excellent self. If one takes seriously, as this author does, the paradigmatic significance of the appearance of the New Being in history, our interpretations of excellence, the excellent self, and how people should live together in society change. Under the illumination of the New Being we gain a vision of human existence that is oriented to excellence:

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processes of humanization, authentic human fulfillment, a mode of being. This orientation to life aims to draw us and move us toward fullness of being while simultaneously resisting the absolutization of any order and encouraging the relativization of the best of current accomplishments. Excellence in a certain sense is a commitment to being and resistance. Jesus as the New Being captures the basic idea that one gives up who one is today for what one may become tomorrow. In Tillich’s language, Jesus sacrificed Jesus to be the Christ. He gave up the possibility of being a king or whatever his disciples and followers wanted to pin on him to become the possibility of possibility for all humanity. If he had remained as Jesus only, he would have been frozen into an image of just being another human being and thus be unable to conquer existential estrangement and leaving a gap between potentialities and actualization. In becoming the New Being, he resisted the old being and in doing this showed us how to open ourselves to deepened relationships with God, others, the world, and to ourselves. The pursuit of this new and richer way of being is what excellence is about and it presupposes a person or group of persons erotically participating in the universal unfolding of creative processes. This person is not just pursuing technical mastery of things, but is transparent to the divine depth of things and the ground of being. He or she sees things in ways that unite the knower and the known, which results in radical transformation of both. Deeply buried even in the process of excellence are the ideas of divine depth and communion. We often say bright, original ideas or insights come by intuition, seeing things differently so as to create the new. What is intuition? According to Tillich: This means seeing into. It is an intimate seeing, a grasping and being grasped. It is a seeing shaped by love. Plato, the teacher of the centuries, whose words and visions have deeply influenced the Fourth Gospel and the Church, knew about the seeing which unites. He called the love that drives us to a genuine intuition the “child of poverty and abundance.” It is love which fills our want with the abundance of our world. But it fills us in such a way that the disrupted multitude is not the last we see—a view which disrupts ourselves. The last we see lies in that which unites, which is eternal in and above the transitory things. Into this view Plato wanted to initiate his followers.21

My extension of the basic idea of New Being to excellence: creativity, fresh discoveries and insights, wisdom, knowledge (gnosis) is a move Tillich will easily embrace. In the search for knowledge, estrangement can be conquered—knowing is a form and symbol of union—and a deep erotic fulfillment can be experienced. Tillich writes, “according to Plato, the cognitive

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eros is born out of poverty and abundance. It delivers us toward reunion with that to which we belong and which belongs to us. In every act of knowledge want and estrangement are conquered.”22 Genuine cognitive union, as in true insight (gnosis), does result in “a radical transformation” of persons and groups,23 and we can not adequately understand them if we do not have insights into their lives. He states that: Insight into the principles on which the life of a group is based, and acceptance of them, is considered an absolute precondition for the life of the group. There is no difference in this respect between religious or secular, democratic or totalitarian, groups. It is impossible to understand the emphasis in all social groups on the knowledge of the dominating principle, if the uniting character of knowledge is not recognized.24

The pursuit of technical mastery is for many people in this age of “technical reason” what excellence is all about. But we have just argued that it is much more than that. Ensconced in the pursuit of “perfection,” creativity, or craftsmanship is a “vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized, . . . something which is the ultimate ideal.”25 In addition to the technical mastery and vision there is also communality. In the archaic understanding of making or crafting, there was a unity of skill and community. Homer, in a hymn to Hephaestus, celebrated the craftsman as someone whose skills and tools promote the common good. In the ancient Greek understanding craftsmanship (“the desire to do a job well”) and community were inseparable and the aim for qualitydriven work was areteµ, the standard of excellence. The community set the standards.26 According to sociologist Richard Sennett, “the word the hymn used for craftsman is demioergos. This is a compound made between public (demios) and productive (ergon).”27 Now let me try to state the fundamental or organizing idea of excellence earned from my coupling of the Kalabari idea of excellence to the Christian notion of New Being. The excellent self defines what a man or woman can be; what is possible. What is possible involved the weaving together of selffulfillment, communality, and the quest for God. In Jesus we have a model of this achievement and craftsman-carpenter. He saw things in ways that united and made him transparent to God. In chapter 4 we will investigate how the pursuit of the excellent self or excellence will involve imitating him. In the meantime, by way of reaching a conclusion let us sum the basic features of excellence that are scattered in our discussions into one central place. They are what ties the meaning of excellence and excellent self together.

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Conclusion: The Features of Excellence At the heart of what we understand as excellence in various manifestations is a same quality. Excellence is not only a product of imagination, but is also a process of and invitation to imagination. When we say an object is excellent we are giving up what a thing (idea, product, a world) is for what it might become. By transcending or transforming the given, that which is excellent has nudged us to release that which was and that which is and grasp that which is to come. To grasp that which is beyond us is an act of imagination. So the first feature of excellence is the open invitation to imagine that rearrangements, alternatives are possible. It is to think not in terms of limitations but “possibility of possibility.” There is only possibility. Second, there is no idolatry. No achievement, performance can be frozen and put in a glass box to be watched by the pious. All current images of excellence are made to be destroyed, that is, to be surpassed. No one image should be allowed to block all other possibilities. The third feature of excellence is imitation. The man or woman who is standing at the edge of the given (the already accomplished)—which is the same thing as standing at the edge of the void, the luminous darkness, the not-yet—must “do” what he or she is “seeing.” The excellent self is aroused by the deep desire (natural and sacred vitality) to go across the chasm (the between) that separates the familiar and the novum and produce a new portrait for humanity. The excellence-aroused life lives between fullness and emptiness. On one hand, there is a fullness of achievement (accomplishment, tradition, and order) that resists any risk of leaping into the abyss. On the other, the emptiness of the abyss is the inexhaustible depth of the novum, new opportunities, the never-before-noticed, new possibilities. Every fullness is always beckoned by this emptiness to experience the eros of new connections and enjoy the yearning of being to go beyond itself. If the invitation is accepted, the person (the inventor, the artist) experiences the between as not emptiness, but fullness. At the margin there is fullness of ideas and presences to be born if only we can imitate what we perceive. The fourth feature of excellence is expansiveness. Excellence is in a certain sense a weaving and reweaving of the fabric of being that creates a new thread waiting to be taken up. In moving beyond the past and stepping into the future while simultaneously pointing us to the future-future, the weaver picks up three threads (past, present, and future) which are rearranged in the fabric of being to create a new, not-yet visible thread that awaits unfurnished eyes. Thus excellence is an act of interiority (penetrating into the old to come out into the new, penetrating into the void to come out in plenora)

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and pulsating desire to interconnect a fresh being and to imitate. To imitate in this case is not just to copycat, but to transverse one’s separateness, one’s isolation, and to edge closer to the divine being in whom we move, live, and have our being. At the core of excellence, at the center of the desire to exceed the present, to make connections is self-transcendence. It is the self going beyond itself to participate ever more fully in its world. Excellence always involves a mixing: the segments of time mixing; the self mixing with others, elements mixing together; ideas and material elements mixing up together, and hopes and recalcitrant reality mixing up together. Excellence is also celebratory—its appearance calls a community together in its appropriation. Excellence is not just appearance of the new, but is also the reception of new by the community. Sometimes, such reception is accompanied with some kind of religious awe, wonder, and fear, especially when that which is received is deemed original: “Originality” traces it origins back [to] one Greek word, poesis, which Plato and others used to mean “something where before there was nothing.” Originality is a marker of time; it denotes the sudden appearance of something where before there was nothing, and because something suddenly comes into existence, it arouses in us emotions of wonder and awe.28

Fifth, excellence with its prefix (ex-) is signifying that what is outside is not to be set in opposition to what is within, what is at hand. What is already is always related in a certain sense to what is not-yet. The ex- is the essential ingredient of the meaning of the already, of the margin that is at the center of all that there is and the margin that is the emptiness that allows things to come forth. In a different language, excellence is like the spaces between words in a sentence. The space, the silence between the words is what enables us to understand the meaning of a sentence. This is silence that inhabits all that has been spoken or written, and every new word or sentence speaks from the silence that follows the full stop (period). Every product of excellence wells up from the silence of the last achievement and the ones before it and allows (craves) for emptiness. The void, the no-thing-ness, the silence, the margin is the source of the something, the excellence. It is the place where the artist, the painter, the scholar, the dancer, the musician, the priest, the scientist can touch the prima materia of eros of creativity. The word for primal energy, spirit, and creativity in Kalabari is teme. Creativity depends on primal drives and energy, the place beyond mere knowing, the place of ontological knowing, the divine spot where the person gets out of the self, the “I,” momentarily to get into the spirit that grounds existence and lets

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the pulsating flow of primal energy in him or her crackle the silence. This fundamental notion of erotically following an innovative idea in ways that transcend the self is captured or hinted by a Kalabari myth of cultural innovators receiving their ideas from the spirit realm or first seeing the would-be item, play, dance displayed by the water-spirits (owuamapu) whose world is marginal to that of humans. Excellence is thus marginal. It is marginal in a multivalent sense. It is marginal because it is a product of liminal space. It is marginal because it is the next small thing arising from the spaces between previous achievements and the next small step into the void. Finally, it is marginal because it is not absolute: it is both related to all that which comes before and after it, and it is not absolved of commitments to them. Simply, it is finite and cannot be raised to the infinite.29 It participates in the infinite and might even be a mark of the infinite in history, but it is never the infinite that cannot be questioned or set aside in the flow of time. The marginality of excellence should not be understood only in terms of spatial metaphors. Every excellent bringing-forth is beyond time. It stands in a line (stream) coming from the past and crossing the “circle of eternity” by the sheer force of its presentness. In the wide expanse of its presence it somewhat ejects us out of the narrow straits of the passage of the past (the so-called line of tradition) into the wider, deep place of the eternity that dwells in the now. The now is the moment (according to Carl Jung, it is experienced “as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state”30) in which the cosmic line and circle of time are united, wedded by the erotic principle of yearning for the new, pregnant virgin existence.

Notes 1. I will refer generally to forms of excellence (whether in arts, music, ideas, practice, and so on) as excellent object. 2. Marc Gafni, The Mystery of Love (New York: Atria Books, 2003), 319. 3. See Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work, 39–49. 4. Robin Horton, “A Hundred Years of Change in Kalabari Religion,” in Black Africa: Its People and Their Cultures Today, ed. John Middleton (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971), 192–211. 5. Ford, The Lure of God, 63–66, 71–79, 100–101. 6. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Existence and the Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 2:80, 119, 133–37, 150–53. 7. Fiyeteboye can be translated as fate. The word fate derives from fari (Latin), meaning to speak. See Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 1984), 95.

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8. Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 64. 9. In Kalabari, parents, grandparents, or elders give names to their children to capture their “essences” or the imagined potentialities that need to be actualized. Names are meant to be a well-thought-out title of the life-script of the person. 10. This is the set of possibilities agreed with God before birth. 11. Paul L. Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, [1963] 1998), 23–25. 12. For brilliant analyses of eros as used in the West see Gafni, The Mystery of Love, and Alexander C. Irwin, Eros toward the World: Paul Tillich and the Theology of the Erotic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1991). 13. Gboloma-a is the negative form of gboloma. 14. See Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work, chaps. 2, 4; see also Gafni, The Mystery of Love, xi–xv, 3–77. 15. Keller, On the Mystery, 151–52. 16. Keller, On the Mystery, 152–53. 17. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2:94. 18. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2:133–37, 150–53. 19. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:148. 20. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 45. 21. Paul Tillich, The New Being (New York: Charles Scribiner’s Sons, 1995), 129. 22. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:95. 23. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:96. 24. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:96. 25. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 275. 26. See Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 24, 25. 27. Sennett, The Craftsman, 22. 28. Sennett, The Craftsman, 70. 29. This point ties in with the point we made above that excellence and idolatry do not go together. 30. Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, rec. and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 295–6.

CHAPTER FOUR

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New Being: Participation and Imitation

Jesus gave them this answer: “I tell you this truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. . . .” —John 5:19–20

I am interested in Jesus as the New Being, as the person who actualized all his potentialities and was totally directed to the infinite. Actualization of potentialities and the will-to-the-infinite are crucial dimensions of the portrait of excellence we have painted so far in this study. The purpose of this chapter is to show how we can learn to actualize our potentialities and turn to the infinite. I am going to develop my argument by “exegeting” the above passage from John’s gospel. My thesis is that Jesus of Nazareth was able to actualize his potentialities and his life was turned to the infinite because he consciously sought to participate in God by imitating God’s actions. Of course, I am not saying imitating God’s actions is the only viable way to participate in the divine. I have resorted to it because it is a powerful and splendid lens with which to further examine the unfolding of life in history that we have come to call excellence. Imitation and participation as laid out here gesture to a particular understanding of human anthropology. The questions: Who or what is human? Who am I? are answered in context of the call and mission of God and from the future to which the divine charge and appointment lead him or her.1 97

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Moltmann puts it well when he writes that the mission and the call of a person “reveal and open up to him [sic] new possibilities, with the result that he can become what he is not yet and never yet was. . . . What man is in body and soul, in partnership and society, in the domination of nature, is disclosed in its reality only from the direction of the life he lives. . . . Man has no subsistence in himself, but is always on the way toward something and realizes himself in the light of some expected future whole.”2 This call and mission is tied up with the ethical challenge before every human: Be a New Being!

Section 1: Christology of Excellence Excellence concerns the totality of the being of humans. It points to humans’ essential being standing against what they are now and what they can be within and under the conditions of existence. It points to the new humanity they are yet to attain: it points to the potential character of their essential being and a testament of a new victory over the limiting character of their existential being. To envision, to imagine, to look at the expressive “thereness” of a new idea, object, activity, painting, piece of music, sonata, et cetera, is to both encounter alienation and confirmation. In it we see ourselves—it confirms something about us. In gazing at it, I see the other (the creator, that is, the human-maker) and in seeing him or her I see myself. In seeing myself I have become an other and the work is then humanity’s. The fact of creativity is now married to reception. The work also points to an alien infinity—the potentialities of humans that are always inexhaustible, and this poses an ethical challenge. Be a New Being! As Tillich puts it, the New Being happens when humans are able to work out their essential nature under the conditions of existence. The life of Jesus is excellent because he became the New Being. Even though living under the conditions of historical existence, Jesus showed, according to Tillich, what humans are essentially and therefore might be under the conditions of existence.3 At one point when Jesus was asked if he was the messiah, the “New Being,” he pointed his questioners to his works of transforming human’s historical existence. “[The] being of the Christ is his work and that his work is his being, namely the New Being which is his being.”4 If Tillich is correct, there is a sense in which our works, our excellent achievements express and even point beyond our current historical being, to our potential New Being as an historical reality. George Steiner also noted the spiritual nature of human creativity, but approaches it from a different angle. For him, the creativity, the excellence of

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human poiesis is not about their new being (not just about the transformation of humanity), it is about something bigger. The so far inexhaustible deployment of forms by humans is in sheer competition with the “other Craftsman,” the “other Shaper.” He posits the hypothesis of alternative divinity as the motive behind the drive to excellence. Humans are not imitating God in excellence. Excellence or creativity “is radically agonistic. In all substantive art-acts there beats an angry gaiety. The source is that of loving rage. The human maker rages at his coming after, at being, forever, second to the original and originating mystery of the forming of form.”5 Indeed, one does not need to be Matisse who told Sister Jacques-Marie after his painting at the Chapel of Rosary at Venice that “Yes, but I am God.” After he had finished the painting, he declared: “I did it for myself.” It was then the Sister objected, “But you told me you were doing it for God.” Then he uttered the famous reply.6 In a substantive work the human “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,” intoned James Joyce,7 and when we encounter it we meet its creator or at least the image of the creator. My interest in investigating how the New Being can manifest in our historical existence has a very limited goal. I am not looking forward to how humans will become God or become overmen, but to the working out their potentialities. That is why my interest in this chapter is focused on the humanity of Jesus—as the second Adam. How was he able to achieve his potentialities in historical existence? One area of Jesus’s life that, I believe, holds the key to his overcoming the chasm between possibilities and potentialities is his idea that he did what he saw and heard the Father do (John 5:19–20). Below, I will discuss this area fully. His “seeing and doing” has a provocative and revelatory capacity, initiating certain insights about the path to the New Being. Blessed life follows from seeing things as God sees them and self-binding to what one sees. Authentic freedom lies in choosing to be aligned with God. Being fully human involves this sense of letting one’s destiny unfold in a manner which best accords with being open to the future in the light of the possibilities one “sees and hears” of God. The ethics of excellence is the ethic of resolute commitment that allows the integration of the self and the breaking-in of the infinite into the finite existence of the self. Jesus, in seeing and doing what God showed him, was only deepening his commitment to the eternal God. He integrated himself here on earth to the eternal God by the resolute repetition of his chosen possibility. And in this crucial decision taken time and again he experienced himself as always becoming who he already was.8 In resolving to imitate the Christ, we are also coming to our ownmost possibilities—the fulfillment of what we are already and what we will be.

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Exegeting Jesus’s Statement In Jesus’s statement about following God’s action there are three main elements on how to approach God. First, there are constraints or rules according to which we can act toward God. We do whatever we see God doing. It is not a one-time affair. The “seeing and doing” is how one continuously actualizes his or her ultimate concern in all spheres of ordinary life. Second, God’s actions stand as a judgment over human actions. God’s actions represent what essentially our activities should be and therefore ought to be. Our actions appear inadequate if they are determined by something less than God’s. Therefore, we must try to go beyond our limitations and reach beyond ourselves. If all this sounds like this author is suggesting that people reach what can never be reached, we need to remind ourselves that the showing of God’s actions (what Jesus is said to have seen) by God points to God breaking into human reality and driving the one seeing them beyond his- or herself. Using Paul Tillich’s insightful phrasing in another context, I would say the act of imitation “is an act of a finite being who is grasped by and turned to the infinite.”9 Finally, once we accept that God’s actions are the criteria for human acting, the “ought to be” of human existence, then our personal and social actions are judged in the name of the giver of the law of righteousness and justice. In terms of the prophetic tradition of the Israelite prophets of the Bible the “ought to be” is a demand for justice in the name of Yahweh, in the name of the principle that implies ultimacy and universality. The god in whose name the “ought to be” is given and sustained is the “the God of justice, who because he represents justice for everybody and every nation, is called the universal God, the God of the universe.”10 The “ought to be” stands as a critique of the present situation and driving it beyond to a utopological-progressive state of communion between God and humans and between humans and humans. So the idea of “seeing and doing” what God shows and does is not only about relating to divine actions, which have been seen in the past and are now followed in the present, but it is also proleptic of future, eschatological relations. Such a “seeing and doing” has a provocative and revelatory capacity, the ability to initiate “certain insights, and unveils a fullness of meanings that go beyond what is seen as” mere do-as-God-does.11 This kind of imitation of divine actions in history is transformative, empowering, and participatory. There is another dimension of analysis that can enrich our understanding of imitation of and participation in divine action. What Jesus is saying in John 5 is that God’s actions is one way God chose to grant a self-disclosure in history and that we know God by God’s participation in history. Since Jesus by his actions reveals God, the divine will, and purpose, anyone who

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honors him honors God (John 5:23). In the Christian religion we know God by what God does in history, for the deeds done for God’s people. But this is only one side of the equation: God’s participation in history is only a precursor and an invitation for human participation in God’s life and being in the whole world. God’s revelation in terms of what God does and shows is appropriated by the historical Jesus in his seeing and doing. There is an invitation and a response to God’s act. It is, however, not any response, but a response of imitation. This is a response that presupposes recognition of God’s actions in history, interpretation of what it means, and being grasped by it so as to participate in them. Outside the realm of the Johannine Jesus the notions of imitation and participation carry serious risk of confusing the divine and the human. There is no guaranteed way of discerning the dimension of divine activity in any historical juncture and thus it involves taking risk, risk of faith. Such a danger is no reason for not seeking to deepen and widen being by participating in God’s way of acting in one’s community. Besides, a nuanced understanding of participation and imitation will help to clarify areas of any possible confusion. For instance, will a self lose its independent selfhood if he or she chooses to imitate another person? There are three important claims I want to make regarding the self engaged in divine imitation and participation. The claims are important to bring up because the passage we are analyzing has been used in the past by theologians to deny Jesus’s selfhood. For instance, Joseph Ratzinger, commenting on the statement (in John 5:19, 30) that the “Son can do nothing of his own,” wrote that, “the Son as Son, and in so far as he is Son, does not proceed in any way from himself and so is completely one with the Father.”12 He proceeded to add: When it thus becomes clear that the being of Jesus as Christ is a completely open being, a being “from” and “toward,” that nowhere clings to itself and nowhere stands on its own, then it is also clear at the same time that this being is pure relation (not substantiality) and, as pure relation, pure unity.13

The idea of imitation and participation being put forth here does not reduce the “I” of the Son to the Father; the distinct identity of the one imitating the other is guarded.14 The Johannine Jesus is dependent on the Father for his actions. It is a dependency born out of imitation, not the dissolution of the Son into the Father. He can do nothing not because there is nothing of him to be seen, but because he chose to open and completely give himself to the Father. There is a self that “sees and does” what the Father “does and shows” because that self

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which is not dissolved in the Father and coalesced into an undifferentiated unity chose to coincide with the Father by imitating the Father’s actions.15 When I read Jesus saying that he does what he “sees” and “hears” from the Father (John 5:19, 30) I do not get the impression that his identity is lost in the Father. The verbs, “to see” and “to hear,” suggest to me that of a person having a separate identity, but participating in another person. The “seeing and hearing” as the precursor to doing disclose both disjunction and smooth participation or imitation of God. To see is to see an object in a space that excludes you—it is without you, it is away from the eyes. But space sensed by the ears does not exclude the person but appears to come to the person from all sides. The person is the center toward which sound flows from all sides. As Victor Zuckerkandl puts in it: The eye discloses space to me in that it excludes me from it. The ear, on the other hand, discloses space to me in that it lets me participate in it. The depth that I hear is not a being-at-a-distance; it is a coming-from-a-distance. . . . Where the eye draws the strict boundary line that divides without from within, world from self, the ears creates a bridge. . . . The space experience of the eye is a disjunctive experience; the space experience of the ear is a participative experience.16

Second, Jesus’s being participates in the Father by being completely opened to the Father and opened to humanity as he mediated humanity’s relation with the Father. This kind of participation involves deep telic centering, his “spirit and matter” innately ordained toward the divine; and are characterized by deep ontological purposefulness directing his actions to align with God. Being stands in relations that shape its identity. In participation, as the statement of Jesus points out, there is a giving of being to the Father from whom it is received and a giving of self to humanity. Finally, there is self who though stands in and is defined by relations is not dissolved into other or others with whom it has the relationships. There is the presence of the others in the person to whom he or she ought to give him- or herself and in doing this he or she is not dissolved into relations. There is an “I” that can stand on its own after it has given the self and received the other. Can this complex idea of relationship of self with God that rests on the twin notions of “imitation” and “participation” be brought down from the level of Johannine Jesus to twenty-first-century human sociality? What will it mean concretely for the theology of excellence we are exploring in this study? I want to explore this issue by asking what an understanding of imitation and participation mean for examining the unfolding of being in the sense of human flourishing.

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Participation The “seeing and doing” as I have already argued is a form of participation in the divine. Participation in this sense means human activities, creative functions are made to correspond with the dynamic ontological creativity of God. “Corresponds” here does not mean equality of divine creativity with humans; rather it means to unfold, actualize latent human potentials together with our current understanding of the process and unfolding of God’s being with the world. “Correspond” is a verb so there is never a complete alignment. The word does not signify a state, but gestures to a state of unfolding, questing, and approximating. It names our commitment to realize the promise in our being. “To understand this dynamic connection, it is helpful to think of the word correspond, derived from the Latin con-, meaning together, and respondere, meaning to answer, which in turn is from spondere, meaning to promise.”17 Correspondence is rooted in a promise, that is, the commitment, of the imitator to unfold his or her potentialities together with God’s way of being in the world in order to realize the promise in his or her being. “This promise is answered/ echoed in the promise of others,”18 Jesus, and Godself. Thus true participation is a social movement, a constantly unfolding process; a radical ontological process of realizing potentialities. This is not a movement toward perfection. The model of Jesus’s response to God suggests a tight fit between his actions and that of the Father. He said he could do nothing without the Father. Does this mean participation in God’s life and God’s being with the world is a matter of perfect alignment? No, it is not a call for rejection and shaming because of imperfection. Participation as a concept of human relationship with God does not mean a zealous critical surveillance over all of one’s actions to bring all differences between human and divine actions to nothing. There is always capacity and space for mercy and forgiveness in relating to God. Jesus’s imitative style of participation opens up spaces for human possibilities. His pattern is not to show an idiosyncratic way of participating in being. To understand his pattern—to stand under it and grasp its importance and value—is to grasp our own life’s possibilities. The possibilities are to be pursued or are often pursued at several levels of specificity and generality, with striving that extends the self outward, opening persons to attachment to being and world outside themselves. The reader of John 5:19–20 is invited to occupy a certain point of view, to experience the sense of life that animates Jesus’s ministry taken as a whole. Imitation Now that we have cleared the air about the self being dissolved into “nothing” in a person’s participation in God, let us now see if imitation “fatally”

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threatens the individuation of the self. It is germane to immediately mention that my intention in this chapter is only to raise imitation as a possibility for an ethical ideal; that is, to show a way humankind can participate in the triune God’s life and activity as disclosed in Jesus Christ. There is no necessity in created being imitating God or responding to the dynamics of God’s activities in the world. My concept of imitation is not a take on vestigial Dei. Imitation is not necessarily about a power acting on us, pulling and drawing us to follow a pattern of actions not already present in us. Every imitation is a synthesis. The object of our imitation, moving according to its own logic, engages us to work alongside it. This engagement is so much a reflection of the action of the object we are trying to follow as much as it is a reflection of our ontological disposition. To imitate is to educate (originally the word means leading out from something19), enrich, deepen, and even reshape, rehearse a tendency (self-affirmation) we already have. To imitate in a sense is to draw out and lead into actualization of potentialities. The agent trying to imitate the other is attempting to set up or even has set up a form of relatedness between it and the other entity. The agent is in a sense the signifier and the other entity the signified. An amalgam of actions, recognized as socially and culturally embedded structure of faith and agential actions, is arbitrarily and habitually associated with a mental construct of the set of appropriate actions—doings and sayings. Unlike language where meaning is generated through a relation of difference, in religious imitation meaning is generated primarily in a relation of likeness and attraction. Imitation or imitatio connotes a replication, a reaction or response to what is already “there.” It is always a second act—always coming after a first. The first, the initiator of the first act has self-expressed him- or herself and received self-knowledge in the process of going and coming back to the self. The initiator of the first act finds him- or herself in this process of going beyond the self and returning to the self. The initiator of the second act in his or her doing is not only replicating or merely going beyond a “thereness,” but expresses the self and gains knowledge of the self. Thus an act of imitation of God’s actions is not a mere project of replication of God’s earlier action. It borders on an imaginative engagement with God’s triune image and God’s patterning of relatedness and creative energy. In the imitating act we are trying to reflect a “thereness,” a present, a given.20 But the reflection that we attempt to bring forth takes place in an interplay of contingency and constraint. What is there is either a process of the results of the interplay or a process depending upon one’s hermeneutical approach. The agent in interpreting and responding to the “thereness” of the first act stands in a particular thereness. Therefore every imitation is a

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particularization (that involves “mirroring” and “rethinking”) of the first act (material) for a specific context and as such does not exhaust the possibilities of the material. The sheer existence of the surplus possibilities may in turn point the responder to unconsidered possibilities in his or her own context. Every moment or act of imitation, indeed, carries potentials for novelty. And every moment of divine imitation carries the potentials not only for novelty and creativity, but also to make us more human. Imitating God as Jesus did may give the impression that one needs supergrace or that one is even attempting to be “divine.” But this is a bad impression; imitating God only makes us more human. As John Wall puts it: “moral life involves a capability for the imitatio creatoris, that is, humanity’s deeper self-humanization by imitating the divine act of creation in the ongoing creation of our finite moral worlds.”21 Wall gives an interesting interpretation of Genesis 1:26 and 28, especially as they relate to humans being created in the image of God and God’s very biblical command to humanity to be fruitful and multiply. To be created in the image of God (bearers of Imago Dei) means God has affirmed the goodness of human capability to create, in imitation to God, for themselves. Humanity has been affirmed to create their own societies and relations, to share in the fruitful creation of their relational, social, historical, and moral worlds. As God has made God’s self fruitful and multiplicative in the plurality and diversity of creation and in the replication of God’s image in humankind, humans are to analogously create their own image for themselves. But to imitate themselves is to imitate what is deepest within themselves, the image of God. In the words of Martin Buber, to imitate what is deepest within us or to imitate God “is what becoming a blessing for the other peoples means: setting a living example of a true people, a community.”22 For the twelfthcentury theologian Moses Maimonides, the imitation of God is [T]he perfection, in which man can truly glory, is attained by him when he has acquired—as far as this is possible for man—the knowledge of God, the knowledge of His Providence, and of the manner in which it influences His creatures in their production and continued existence. Having acquired this knowledge he will then be determined always to seek loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, and thus to imitate the ways of God.23

To come back to John Wall, imitating God or rather the activity of creation itself involves understanding the salient moral lessons of the story of Genesis 1. The Genesis creation narrative is about bringing forth, the poetics of the new. Thus bearing the image of God, for Wall, means humanity has a fundamental and original capability to “create social relations that are

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new and hitherto unimagined.”24 The command to humankind to multiply goes beyond biological procreation and points to broader social generative creativity. As Wall puts it: [The] command to imitate God’s fruitfulness and multiplication is at least in part a command for humankind in turn to create and renew given society. Male and female are symbols of the primordial moral ability for the kind of (re) productive tension or stretching that may engender new forms of community on the basis of difference.25

Given the diversity of God’s creation, imitating the Creator calls human beings to create a historical moral world that is radically inclusive.26 Immediately God created God’s image, it is named as multiple or plural: male and female. Whatever kind of fruitfulness and multiplication may be commanded, it is to take place within human relations’ difference and otherness. The cosmological creation of humankind is also ethical in the sense that it mythologizes ultimate possibilities for otherwise broken or alienated human relations.27

From this interpretation of the Genesis story we see that excellence, that radically new possibility for creative solutions for social relations, for human flourishing is at the core of what it means to imitate God. Excellence is humanity’s response to the call of creative imperative deep within it. Excellence symbolizes humanity in “imitation of the Creator.”

Section 2: Imitation in Christian Theology The notion of imitation developed in this chapter plays with seven ideas in Christian theology. First, it is a call to purify one’s will and the actions it engenders: sins, partiality, and narcissism. To imitate the universal God of justice is to subject one’s action to the demand of justice, righteousness, and personal and social holiness. Second, it is recognition of deep inadequacy and incompleteness—the dependence of believers in sources of good outside the self. Third, there is a longing for fulfillment. This longing is a response to an external call; it is summoned up in us by what is showed to us. What is showed to us is the image of a better world in history. Fourth, it means human beings are capable of being good, capable of doing good. Thus the notion of imitation used in this study allows humans room for the dignity of moral agency. The self that is seeing and doing, as in John 5:19, is a self which can see and do and not self which is dissolved into one’s God. Fifth, imitation

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involves an element of imagination which serves as a vehicle through which we can transport ourselves across the gulf that separates humans from God; that is, developing our imaginative ethical stances in ways that are highly pertinent to seeing them as fully embedded in a form of eternity and relationships of intimacy. Sixth, imitation is an epistemological exercise as it is an ethical one. Understanding God’s “doing and showing” is akin to interpreting artworks. “Artworks require interpretation and interpreting them amounts to understanding what they refer to, in which way, and within which system of rules.”28 This involves recognizing similarity and identifying exemplars. Whether one’s “seeing and doing” is in correspondence with what God does and shows is an argument of similarity. As Nelson Goodman argues, any two things can have properties in common.29 The properties we take as significant depend on everyday practical organization, habits, assumptions, and prejudices. Identity or sameness is not intrinsic in any object, but is conferred and entrenched by their coherence with other ideas and theories in society. Rightness of categories depends on harmony between elements in the mode of thought; it depends on fitting within an authoritative world vision. A particular act, behavior, or theme is right not because it is similar to some past event but because it fits well with relevant rules and claims. So an act of a human being labeled or denoted godly says only that it possesses a certain feature or property which validity depends on, a particular cultural fit or symbolic system. But it is much more that this. In addition to possessing that feature, the idea of exemplification requires that the human act refer back to God. An exemplar, according to Goodman, not only possesses a preferred feature it refers to the label or predicate that denotes it.30 Exemplification is possession plus reference. The swatch of cloth displayed in a tailor’s shop exemplifies certain features of the whole cloth but it does not show all the features the whole cloth possesses. The features that are exhibited, typified, and shown forth (such as geometric pattern, texture, and color) are only those for which it is a symbol. The swatch denotes only texture and color because they are what are relevant in the symbolic world of tailoring. So when the swatch refers to the whole cloth, it refers not to all properties of the cloth, but to certain relevant properties possessed in a given context. The swatch exemplifies whole cloth if it possesses certain properties of the cloth and allows us to pick out certain relevant properties in a given context. The swatch at the shop window is not an image of the whole bundle of fabric; it is only an example, a display, an exemplar. The customer or tailor’s ability to recognize the swatch as only a sample and not referring to all the properties of the whole material depends on collectively learned habit. What properties

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the swatch refers to out of limitless number of qualities have to be learned, socially selected, and agreed upon. The bottom line is that when we imitate God we are only exemplifying God’s actions.31 Finally, there is also the tension of particular versus the universal. The actions of Jesus of Nazareth who is concrete and particular are set against God who is abstract and universal. If Jesus is seeing and doing what God does and shows him, then it implies that the more we understand the particular deeds, and indeed Jesus, the more we understand God. To apprehend the particular in this way as under the form of eternity is to grasp the whole—the union of the particular and universal which is both abstract and concrete. How can something be concrete and abstract, particular and universal? It seems paradoxical if one says that only that which is absolutely concrete can also be absolutely universal and vice versa, but it describes the situation adequately. Something that is merely abstract has a limited universality because it is restricted to the realities from which it is abstracted. Something that is merely particular has a limited concreteness because it must exclude other particular realities in order to maintain itself as concrete. Only that which has the power of representing everything particular is absolutely concrete. And only that which has the power of representing everything abstract is absolutely universal. This leads to a point where absolutely concrete and absolutely universal are identical.32

In the light of all of the above what does it mean to imitate Jesus? It is to demand for the whole. Every particular action, decision, or striving can be seen as a fragmentary reflection of the whole, steps leading to the whole. Indeed, the whole art of Christian living is to make use of the particulars as a series of steps enabling us to imitate Jesus and draw nearer to God. Through sin we were estranged from God, from the whole to which we belong and the desired imitation is recognition of the series of transitions in being to restore wholeness. Wholeness as a symbol for God is not a static concept, a totally determined thing, fixed and unchanging. We can only approach it asymptotically with the awareness of an ever-present gap. Thus we are destined to pursue wholeness forever and in so doing continually transform our world. Imitation is linked to excellence. Excellence is a series of small steps humanity takes in the direction of what it does not wholly possess. We have covered a lot of ground in our theological, ethical, and philosophical investigations of Jesus’s sayings in John 5:19–20. The image of Jesus we got from John’s gospel is that of a person who is completely in tune with the Father; that of a person fully participating in God. In this passage Jesus did not particularly tell us what he was doing after seeing God’s actions.

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We know, however, from the whole of his biography that he was working to make society more humane—increasing inclusiveness, love, justice, and human flourishing. From Wall’s interpretation of Genesis 1:26 and 28 we learned that imitation and participation imply that radically new possibility for creative solutions for social relations and human flourishing is at the center of what it means to imitate God. Imitation is a response to the call of the creative imperative deep within every man and woman. To participate in divine creativity is to attune oneself to the rhythms of dynamic ontological creativity. This is only another way of saying the same thing: to adjust the pitch as well as the rhythms of one’s own creativity to the word, logos, the rational structure of the universe. It is sound calling unto sound. Humans sound out (to measure the depth of) their connectedness to the creative sound, the Word. As we learned from our study of the fiyeteboye (speech, fari in Latin) and So (logos), to be fully human is to act out the deepening of being. In sum, the overall ethical principle we can discern from this study of Johannine Jesus from our perspective of excellence is that participating in the divine is about imitating the divine. The notions of imitation and participation came out as the ethical norms to guide human actions. Imitation and participation are not really two standards for guiding human relations with God. Imitation is a kind of participation in the unfolding of being by a finite being who is turned to the infinite. In the light of the notion of the New Being, it means that the more human institutions are attuned to the divine, that is, the perceived qualities of the divine, and give them incarnation, the more we can unlock human potentialities, creative energy, and remove obstacles to a flourishing life.

Concluding Remarks When I say that a person needs to imitate Jesus it does not mean I am valuing the excellence of a person by his or her resemblance to Jesus. When I say a person is leading an excellent life I am only applying the norms of excellence as I have already indicated to that person. The norms take the form of New Being as an exemplar with which we can compare the performance of the person. This is where Jesus as the New Being serves as an exemplar, someone worthy of imitation (but not only as this). Imitation has historically served as a model of teaching excellence or virtue, going back to Aristotle. The wouldbe virtuous person in imitating a man or woman of virtue will come to share a property with the virtuous person—the virtue of good citizenship. Thus, it is true that in a person’s life having the property of excellence will come to have a relation of resemblance with Jesus of Nazareth, but the property of

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excellence per se is not resemblance to paradigmatic Jesus. What it is that we value when we value excellence is life driven to the infinite and fulfillment of potentialities. Learning about Jesus as we have done in this chapter deepens our understanding of excellence and orients us to it in our lives. In Jesus as the New Being the highest ideal of humanhood has been instantiated. One thing that counts in his favor as Jesus the new Adam is the way in which his life transformed the perspective by which all men and women have to live their lives. And from his life we discern that excellence is the substance and the goal of life and divine imitation is potentialities made actual. Jesus’s pursuit and display of excellence can also be interpreted as an example of piety, an acknowledgment of dependence on the divine as source of existence and progress through life.33 His type of excellence was also not set apart from other virtues such as courage, hope, and love. Chapter 5 will explore the virtues of justice, love, and hope as they are directly connected to the prospects and the vigor of excellence. They are particularly good ways of being for excellence.

Notes 1. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 285, 286. 2. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 286–87. 3. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2:86ff. 4. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2:168. 5. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 204. 6. Steiner, Real Presences, 209. 7. Steiner, Real Presences, 209. He is quoting from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 8. Zimmerman, Eclipse of the Self, 141. 9. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 18. 10. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, 3. 11. Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 201), 156. 12. Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 134. 13. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 134. 14. See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 178–81. 15. Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 176–81; see also Barth, Church Dogmatics III.2.63–64. 16. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 291. 17. Daly, Pure Lust, 163. Italics in the original. 18. Daly, Pure Lust, 163.

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19. “The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.” See Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving: An Enquiry into the Nature of Love (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1956), 124n3. 20. Steiner, Real Presence, 202. 21. John Wall, “Imitatio Creatoris,” 22. 22. Martin Buber, On the Bible, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1968), 87. 23. Moses Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Michael Friedlander (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1904), 397. 24. Wall, “Imitatio Creatoris,” 36. 25. Wall, “Imitatio Creatoris,” 38. 26. Wall, “Imitatio Creatoris,” 39. 27. Wall, “Imitatio Creatoris,” 37. 28. Gioannnelli, “Goodman’s Aesthetics.” 29. Nelson Goodman, “Seven Strictures on Similarity,” in How Classification Works, ed. Mary Douglas and David Hull (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 13–22. 30. Goodman, Languages of Art, 1976. 31. The idea of imitation as a form of ethics or responding to God raises two serious issues. It begs the question of how an individual or a faith community can recognize what God is doing in its midst, and how such a person or believing community can handle the risk of being wrong. 32. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:16–17. 33. Here I have relied on Stout’s insightful definition of piety. See his Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 25–37.

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Excellence as we have seen is an opening. A clearing from which manifests what we have ordinarily called excellent objects. And we also learned that a person can deliberately choose to place him- or herself in that opening, for example, by his or her imitative or participatory relation to Jesus of Nazareth as the New Being. Not only did Jesus work out his human potentialities and thus in his life not only do we find a plausible measure of an ethically valid purpose for human life, but we can also discern potentialities for excellence. In addition, excellence has been shown as a prophetic view of the world, an intense engagement with history in four distinguishable but inseparable phases. An object or product that is deemed excellent, that has leaned toward the not-yet, is in a certain sense a critique of the present as we see everything else in its light. Then there is a movement from the current state to the reception of the product, an appropriation and ingestion into current praxis—a phase of “cultural authentication.” This ingestion provokes a dialectic between the apocalypse, that is the lifting of the veil over reality, the opening of a new window in order to see more into being, and the present praxis. All these phases, if successful, provide a new vision of transitioning from potentialities to creative realization. Finally, the phase shifts from appropriation and visioning to yet another product, object, action that starts the movement all over again. Engaging the world prophetically in this way may require an intentional, persistent disposition as well as action toward the new. In short, virtue! But 113

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what is virtue? Robert Merrihew Adams in his recent book, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good, described virtue as being for the good.1 Precisely, he defined virtue as “persisting excellence in being for the good.”2 But I have conceived excellence as the good, and virtue as the disposition or way of being for excellence. For Adams virtue is related to having excellent traits of character and the good is God who is the unifying object of all virtuous motivation.3 I am indebted to Adams’s idea of virtue as being for the good of something. This is so because with slight modification of definition I was able to press his idea into my service of describing virtues without being too “rationalistic” about it. Second, as we will see below and in the next chapter I take it that ethics is about ethos (as per Paul Tillich) and not an exercise in quandary about right and wrong—ethics as a matter of goodness rather than rightness. By defining virtue as being for the good, Adams allows me to lay an important foundation here for our subsequent discourse. [V]irtue is first and foremost a matter not of being right but of being good—not just of acting rightly, but more broadly of acting, and living well. . . . A focus on the good rather than the right in judgments about virtues is helpful here because there are typically more ways of being good than of being right. The way of virtue is less strait and narrow than the path of duty, though virtue can certainly inspire more than duty commands. An action or a character can be good in one way and bad in another; but actions, at any rate, are normally just right (in conformity with duty—with all duties) or wrong (contrary to some duty). What is right is generally in some way good, and what is wrong is certainly in some way bad. But one can be good in important ways in being wrong, and it is also all too easy to be bad in important ways (self-righteous, for example, or unfeeling) in being right.4

In this chapter I want to discuss the virtues of justice, love, and hope as ways of being for excellence, the creative realization and expansion of human potentialities and flourishing. They are forms of love of excellence. These three virtues—the selection is not meant to be exhaustive—are ways of engaging and interpreting the world, and resisting and transforming social forces that thwart or are likely to thwart abundant life. Desiring, pursuing, and taking pleasure in excellence would require them. They are relevant in our study of excellence not only because excellence in human life requires them, but also because they help us to discern potentialities for excellence. A plausible judgment about what constitutes human flourishing or human good involve judgments about these virtues. One whose thoughts are truly directed toward loving the creative realization of human potentialities will

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have the motive for aspiring to be just, loving, and hopeful, if justice, love, and hopefulness are particularly good ways of being for excellence. Justice as a way of being good for excellence idealizes excellence for the other that is universal in scope. Love gestures to the profundity and intensity in caring for the possibilities of excellence for some persons, including the self. Hope is a way of being good for excellence for its own sake. It is a way of “intending” the future that is structural rather than motivational.5 It involves organizing one’s motives, values, commitments, and goals for the birth of the new. One does not value human flourishing as one should if one does not care about excellence (the persistent creative realizations of human potentialities) for its own sake.6 Before elaborating on the virtues of justice, love, and hope let me show how praying is also a way of being for excellence. That is “as a virtue in a theistic context, as structuring a way of being for the good, even if it is not a virtue to which the non-theist would aspire.”7 This exercise will take us beyond seeing prayer as a grateful acknowledgment of one’s dependency on a wholeness larger than human life or dependency on historic God’s faithfulness and the promise of future faithfulness. It will ask us to consider prayer as part of a complex of activities of persistently being for the excellence. Prayer, ironically, could aid in shifting of the locus of human hope from eternity to future time and in changing the place where hope could be realized without fundamentally rejecting grace.8 For instance, the prayer Jesus taught his disciples is not only acknowledging God the Father but is a spiritual call, a sourcing of grace to reconfigure the existing praxis for the sake of human flourishing in history. The analysis that follows is not meant to take way from the age-old perceived spiritual qualities of his prayer, but to show that asking for the “will of God” (what Tillich calls “our essential being with all its potentialities”9) to be on earth may be one way of theonomously being for the excellence. As recorded in Matthew 6:9–10, Jesus prayed: “Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name, Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” In this prayer Jesus Christ is saying when we pray we should ask God to make our heaven to be not above us, but ahead of us. In that simple prayer we are moving “heaven” from above us to before us; not in the space before us, but into the time ahead of us. He is enjoining us to lift up our eyes and see the possibilities on the horizon that are approaching—so at least it seems to those who have a certain interpretation of heaven which I will shortly describe. There are many meanings and connotations of heaven in the Bible. There is heaven as referring to the sky. There is heaven as the region of the stars, the

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astral world. Heaven also refers to the dwelling place of God. This is talked about as singular or plural in the Bible; so we have the heaven of heavens. But the usage of heaven also includes the sense of a place of possibilities; a metaphor of alternative possibilities to what life on earth is offering.10 Heaven in this fourth sense refers to all that is beyond the limitations and frontiers of our current existence. It refers to that which can create the new. So when Jesus tells us that we should ask for God’s will to be done on earth he is telling us to let our heaven come down to earth. If the alternative possibilities to our existential angst and the hope for the principle of the new are to be on earth as they are in heaven, then our heaven is no longer above us in space but is ahead of us in time. Heaven becomes a matter of time, an anticipation of its manifestation on earth. We pray now, we act in the present, and the future is changed. Heavens, as a symbol of the new and the alternative, is no more of space but of time.11 If it is a matter of time, then it is all about the future. The prayer that is calling down a heaven is a prayer that is reconfiguring the future. This is the future that is in history, not beyond it. So every prayer is a protest against the ambiguities, distortions, and poverty of the present. In prayer, we are saying there is a better alternative; there is a heaven that can come down and no matter how glorious the present order of things there is a better option. The one in prayer is calling herself and us to be continuously creative; to create a new “us,” a new “we.” The new “we” is a people that is anticipating something new, asking themselves what are the alternatives? What is new for them? No one knows from where the new will come. For the new of God is that which is beyond the new of humans and their institutions. It is the kind of new that underlines the import of Revelation 1:8 when Jesus says, “I am . . . who is and who was and who is to come. . . .” It is not the new that flows from the trajectory of the past and the present. It is the new that asks for, creates, and sustains the alternative possibilities, the unexpected path.12 Prophet Isaiah (43:18–19) called on Israel in exile and distress to prepare for the surplus of possibility of the new breaking forth in their midst: “do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it.” I said earlier that no person knows from where the new will be coming. For as Tillich intoned: The birth of the new is . . . surprising in history. It may appear in some dark corner in our world. It may appear in a social group where it was least expected. It may appear in the pursuit of activities which seems utterly insignificant. It

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may appear in the depth of a national catastrophe, if there be in such a situation people who are able to perceive the new of which the prophet speaks. It may appear at the height of a national triumph, if there be a few people who perceive the vanity of which the Preacher speaks.13

While no one knows the source of the new, with hope a person organizes his or her life around the possibility of the breaking forth of the new unannounced. Like Saint Paul attests, hope is not just being for the good of something but also a mode of being-in-the-world that involves a certain kind of grit in pressing forward for the surplus of possibility ahead. He writes in Philippians 3:12–14: Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching to those things which are ahead. I press toward the goal of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (NKJV)

What is the overplus of possibility, the not-yet that is always ahead when it seems to have been attained? More importantly, what is the name of the process that bears and marks the person in its infinite currents streaming into the future? Can the force of currents be guided to avoid stagnating and dissipating in a swamp so as to flow into the inexhaustible ocean of iterative dynamic becoming? Yes, only in the pursuit of excellence that the stream persistently cuts new channels to the ocean. In pressing forward, in reaching toward that excess of possibility over what has already been attained, the pursuit of excellence is like a revealing, an upsurge of unconcealment. Being must always bear its becoming in resistance to those obstacles that block unfolding potentiality. Paul’s word is wooing and leading us to feel the radical interconnectivity of being with one another and with the divine. Paul seems to be enjoining us to retrieve an idea of excellence from his words and transform it into a guide for ethics, eros, fullness of living, and making ourselves transparent to God. Excellence is the yearning force of being to realize its potentialities in spite of the obstacles that lay in its path. It is to press toward what we are not yet. Excellence is an erotic drive to wholeness and thus to overcome estrangement and to participate in God because of the currents of divine energy that are coursing through us. The invitation and challenge of Paul’s idea is to create the politics, eros, and ethics of excellence in our communities so that every person will actualize his or her potentialities as modeled by Jesus of Nazareth who became the New Being and the exemplar of what human excellence should be.

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I promised to return to the task of elaboration of the virtues of justice, love, and hope and their significant contribution to human good. Excellence is united with courage, love, and justice in that all of them are movements toward the attainment of the highest good. Whether considered as the movement of the soul, the strength of mind, or the eros, each one of them has in itself the character that Tillich has called “in spite of.” They in their various ways represent an affirmation of a call that is capable of conquering whatever threatens being from fulfilling its potentialities. Courage, love, and justice are dimensions of the same movement. That is, the active concern of being to realize its potentialities by affirming itself in the face of obstacles, overcoming of separateness, or assuming forms that are adequate for this movement. In these two sentences the ontological nature of being (at least, as it has been understood so far in this study) is expressed. They say that being is not actual without the movement or striving forward of activities that unfolds it.14 Being is movement—narration of activities. Activity by definition is realized—amid tension of confrontation and resolution—in the unfolding of time.15 We say a being is a movement, but a movement of what and for what? It is an unfolding of potentialities that is rendered “material” through activities. In a certain sense, then, being is an unfolding within an unfolding. This unfolding of potentialities, the enactment of activities happens in relationality, in society, so activities do not happen in isolation. The striving-forward wherewith every being persists in its unfolding, its connectedness to other beings and its participation in God is nothing else but excellence itself. Excellence is the principle of eros by which a person affirms and unfolds (or should unfold) his or her being in perichoretic relationality, in spite of inhibitions, in accordance with the dictates of the highest good, human flourishing, participation in God.

Section 1: Excellence and Justice The notion of excellence propounded in this study embeds within it the idea of justice, pluralism, and hope. In order to grasp this insight we have to remind ourselves about an aspect of excellence we have already discussed in previous chapters. This is the idea that excellence involves the drive to deepen and broaden relations in a social order through the forging of harmony among its parts. This drive toward social harmony is not about achieving “universal commensuration” of all the parts; excellence, by definition, does not come to a rest; order is not settled at all points. There will always be an element of contingency and incommensurability or dissonance in the whole or any

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order on its path of excellence. The movement of the parts toward harmony involves continuous adjusting. There is a perpetual tempering of the whole (as in music temperament) to achieve a workable harmony or commensuration. The mutual adjustments needed to bring about commensuration in the midst of the unavoidable contingency secure the just proportion for each person, group, or class necessary for engendering and sustaining harmony in the whole system. This is precisely the idea of justice as Plato informed us in his Republic. In this work, justice connotes the sense of maintaining right relationship or keeping relationships whole, which inevitably involves rational adjustments in order to give each constituent of the community its due. The mutual adjustments needed for a community to stay on the path of excellence are unequal. Each part is given and regiven its due as necessary. The object is not to achieve universal commensuration, but to sustain the multiplicity of temperaments required to creatively and dynamically realize the common good. Albert L. Blackwell puts it well when he states that: Temperaments, both musical and social, are multifarious commensurations among the members of a community, involving both human creativity and natural orders interacting in the interest of communal ends.16

In our now familiar language of flourishing, Steven G. Smith writes: “I listen to the third movement of his [Mozart’s] 40th symphony and am immediately convinced by the demonstration of a specific, eminently tenable social order that sounds in the fugal polyphony, where a number of different voices cause the whole to flourish in their very own flourishing.”17 The commensuration achieved does not always leave the “listener” in a state of stasis, but gestures him or her toward the realm beyond the current music—the new possibility, the novum. It stretches toward the not-yet, to hope for more. Excellence is the drive toward actuality and the form in which excellence is realized is justice by which the other is acknowledged as a person, as a centered self with the power to act and to drive off disintegrating forces. Justice is the form of public laws and institutions and the degree of a person’s freedom and responsibility adequate for the actualizing work of excellence. The just act aims at the actualization of potentialities, the self in a community. This conception of justice is based on two considerations:18 (a) the idea that the individual becomes a person only within a community of persons; this is Tillich’s way of harmonizing the forces of individuation and participation; the pursuit of individuality (centered self) within the community (a form of participation) balances the polarity and serves to limit the desire of the self to assimilate the whole world into the self that will destroy the self. The second is (b) the obligation to actualize the potentialities of all in a community,

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to maximize excellence. That is, the person is to become whatever it is that the community has the power and means for him or her to become. This understanding of justice is not only a debt to Paul Tillich, but it is also indebted to the Kalabari (Niger Delta) conception of justice. The moral imperative in Kalabari is tombo tombo so’ or bukebusin, which means person be person, to become a person. According to Tillich: The moral imperative is the demand to become actually what one is essentially and therefore potentially. It is the power of man’s being, given to him by nature [So], which he shall actualize in time and space. His true being shall become his actual being—this is the moral imperative. And since his true being is the being of a person in a community of persons, the moral imperative has this content: to become a person. Every moral act is an act in which the individual self establishes itself as a person.19

Every moral act is also an act in which the community and the individual work together to establish the individual as a person capable of answering to the demand of life as the process of actualization of potentialities for the sake of the individual and the community. This involves not only giving to each person her due, but also the relevant communal institutional forms in which person-to-person encounters happen and increase life. What is the source of the moral imperative? According to Tillich, the source is from the essential being. The imperative is the law of our essential nature, the unconditioned demand to actualize our potentialities. This demand is experienced as the “the silent voice of our being” which echoes to the split between the human essential nature and its actual life. It is because of this estrangement that humans encounter the moral law that is the law of their essential nature as an imperative for action. This law that is experienced as an imperative is not what human beings impose upon themselves as autonomous selves or is heteronomously imposed on them by a power outside the self, but it is the theonomous law of God. It is the will of God for the good of the essential being. As Tillich puts it: The “Will of God” for us is precisely our essential being with all its potentialities, our created nature declared as “very good” by God, as, in terms of the Creation myth, He “saw everything that he made.” For us the “Will of God” is manifest in our essential being; and only because of this can we accept the moral imperative as valid. It is not a strange law that demands our obedience, but the “silent voice” of our own nature as man, and as man with an individual character.20

The Will of God is theonomously imperative not because it is God’s command, and not because it dovetails with our essential nature. Tillich says the

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Will becomes unconditional and theonomously so when a person chooses to affirm his or her own essential nature.21 In the Kalabari traditional religion the source of the imperative is So, the set of possibilities that not only transcends the totality of possibilities for all beings and communities, but also the ground of all possibilities under existential condition. And it is never threatened by nonactualization of possibilities as the distinction of potentialities and actualization is not within it. So gives to each individual a set of possibilities to actualize through her or his self-determination and contribute to her or his community. The so for a person is the essential nature of the person formulated in terms of not-yet realized possibilities and potentialities and given to the person as a person with an individual character. A person can affirm her so unconditionally or alter it through bibibari. With this choice to personally align with one’s essential nature, the person is set on the path to eudaimonia, which itself means “fulfillment with divine help.”22 It is not only with divine help, but also with community help. The community is at its best when it maximizes life for all. The person and her community together work out the potentialities amid the ambiguities of actual existential condition. Justice is the form this working takes in day-to-day life in the dynamic process of temperament to give each person what is due to her. The tempering is to achieve a widening pattern of general harmony and the provision of opportunities for individual advancement. This task involves constantly divining possibilities and their reckoning with actualities by all citizens (not only the philosopher king) in mutual persuasion. While justice is the adequate form excellence takes in public laws and institutions, love is the adequate form excellence takes in the private sphere of the person-to-person. It is excellence transformed to respond to the concrete demands of an individual in a special social context. It is the movement of vitality and intention, means and emotion, toward the actualization of potentialities from one person to another. Love is excellence directed toward a particular object, a particular human being. But the object of excellence is the actualizing of the potentialities of every human being.

Section 2: Excellence and Love We have already noted the similarity between excellence and love and how excellence draws within itself love. Now let us look at areas of difference. There are crucial differences between love and excellence. Love has an object that is deemed radiant and valuable. It is an opening of the self toward an object because the self pictures itself as incomplete without the solace

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provided by the object.23 Love is partial and unequal concern for one object; not a general concern. It is a response to particularity. In love, the self that is part of this world participates and identifies with another self or object in the same world. Excellence, on the other hand, has no object because it is ultimately toward being-itself, which is the ground of being, not a being alongside others and hence not graspable as an object. Excellence, like love, is also an opening toward others because of perceived incompleteness. The resistance offered by the movement of excellence to any obstacle that denies its deep need for involvement with being-itself is considered stronger than that of love because it goes beyond the love for one object in the world. Fear is to anxiety as love is to excellence. Fear, like love, has an object. I cannot say I am afraid without an object of some sort as the source of my fear. We said the same thing about love. So in this sense fear and love are like colors of objects: “the perception of the quality [color] is inseparable from perception of the object. . . . I cannot see the color red without seeing a red object of some sort.”24 A different metaphor, like sound, will aptly capture the nature of excellence. Excellence, like anxiety, has no such object. It is a concern about the whole world that surrounds the being in totality. As we have already learned concerning self-world correlation in chapter 1, the world is not “here” or “over there,” like an object. It fills the whole of the person’s “space and time.” It occupies the whole space; it is omnipresent. Excellence relates to world as sound relates to space. This feature of sound-perception, in which our attention to sound can be severed from attention to objects and entities, is exploited in music. . . . Sound is employed largely in a way which opens up a spatiality which does not depend on discrete location and mutual exclusion of entities. In the world I see, an entity cannot be in two places at the same time, and two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Visual experience and discrete location become inseparable—seeing this lamp “here” means I cannot see it “over there.” But in aural experience, although a sound may have a discrete material source whose discreet location I can identify . . . the sound I hear is not dependent on attention to that “place.” It surrounds me, it fills the whole of my aural “space.” I do not hear a sound “there” but “not there”—what I hear occupies the whole of my aural space.25

Excellence is not a partial response to the whole existential situation of humankind; it is an effort to remake the whole world and release the full potentials of humans. Excellence, unlike love that has an object, wants to participate in the universe of being; that is in the world in the Heideggerian

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sense. The world is not an object and not a matter for “throwness”; it is the structure of being. The world is structural—and structural only. The excellent-self, unlike the self-in-love, affirms itself not only as a participant in the world or as taking part in another person, but as an intense attachment to the whole world, aiding the world to fulfill itself, and re-creating the world. The active struggle to affirm one’s self, as a person-in-communion and as a being-in-the-world engaged in transforming reality, according to the demands of the expected new and embracing wholeness, is at the heart of what it means to be an excellent self. Love cannot work at the level of excellence. The act of love to open one’s self to the other has become under the demands of excellence the striving and courage to make an opening in the creative power of being and to remake the world through such an opening. Excellence is not just participation in another being; it is participation in something that transcends the current world and its humans. The excellent self is not a person just thrown into the world to survive, he or she is one gesturing to the ultimate possibilities of creativity and transformation. For [the person] is the microcosm, in whom all cosmic forces are potentially present, and who participates in all spheres and strata of the universe. Through [the person] the universe continues the creative process which first produced [the person] as the aim and the center of creation. Now man [woman] has to shape his [her] world and himself [herself], according to the productive powers given to him [her]. In him [her] nature comes to its fulfillment. . . . 26

This radiant, wonderful, and valuable “restlessness” is a trend toward being, the creative and productive ground of existence. In this endeavor there is no end—literally no stopping point (end) and no ends as set apart from means. The actualization of inexhaustible potentialities is both the means and telos (ends) of this whole alluring restlessness. “The means are more than means; they are felt as creations, as symbols of infinite possibilities implied in [human’s] productivity.”27 What I am putting forward here is essentially an idea about human beings moving, straining forward to an expectant New Being which works itself out in history. The advance is propelled by what is within human existence, and not by a metaphysical law of progressive evolution. The forward movement rides on human passion and interest. The movement is not only about emotion; but it is also a relationship. The impulse for the movement is present in mutual relationship between persons in a community and between persons and God. The emotions about the persons and God and passions about relationship and its activities are aimed at wanting and actively seeking the

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good of the community, for wholeness or completeness. It is this complexly formed coexistence of passions, interest, relationships, and the wanting and seeking of the good that I have named the motive force of excellence or eros to excellence. Eros as Plato has shown us in his Symposium is the desire, the longing, the striving toward something which is judged valuable, urgently needed, and of a higher form or dimension. This is a desire for fine wholeness or completion—the good. Eros moves the needy person to “healing,” to cure their incompleteness. To make this good one’s own, to make it one’s community’s own is to be flourishing and complete. Excellence is a search for this good. In the spirit of excellence we long to create something of ourselves to affirm ourselves. This is not just any creation; it is something that will outlive us, engendering a legacy and identity for us and our time, and to complete us as we understand completeness. The pursuit of excellence and its attendant birthing of legacy and identity may be taken as a way of experiencing God—at least for those who believe in God. In John 5:19–20 Jesus states that without God he could do nothing. I interpreted Jesus’s statement as both an acknowledgment of God as the source of being and a belief that imitating God is a key, a channel to experiencing God, to participating in the power of being. Self-affirmation and validation of action, within this perspective, is considered to come from an individual’s encounter with God. Jesus’s statement invites us to recognize the indestructibility of his actions. By linking his sayings and doings to what God is showing to him, he is claiming that his actions belong to two orders of reality. One is temporal and the other transtemporal. The relationship between the two is not numerical. They are aspects of one. For a person that is in communion with God, his or her actions participate in eternity. His or her actions, like Jesus’s “seeing and doing” become manifestations of God or are symbols that point us to God. It is this kind of participation that gives them identity and ensures their legacy. The eros to excellence, in a certain sense, is the desire to make our human doings, actions, speeches, practices, and institutions symbols of God. This longing for identity and legacy does not and cannot produce a static understanding of a being. As we will see in the next section, it is identity and legacy of protest, of being and resistance. The excellent self is always poised to embrace the startling new. Excellence is a movement that mimics horizon.28 It is a movement of actualization of potentialities in which humans are engaged and it moves with them. The realization of potentials moves along with time and time appears to invite excellence to press further ahead. Excellence as we have learned in chapters 2 and 3 is a “being” that is

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eternally becoming (or “coming”), as if it is trapped in a web of eschatological expectation of a better future.29

Section 3: Excellence and Hope This sense of horizon of expectation that is mobile and flexible has some affinity with Jürgen Moltmann’s understanding of promise, hope, and eschatology in his monumental book Theology of Hope.30 The sensibilities and orientation of hope often come in two forms: the Objectively Possible and the Real Possible.31 The reality from which objective possibilities are discerned is not expected to produce the startlingly new. For it is reality surrounded by the cycle of what has already become and is largely conditioned by the present circumstances. There is certain givenness to the possibilities. Though thoughts are drawn toward the horizon of the future and what the “seers” focus on as they peer into the future is not hope but assurance. Their focus is not on latent possibilities they cannot conceive, but palpable possibilities that are carefully conceived, calibrated, and calculated. Assurance (Objectively Possible) tries to eliminate risk of disappointments, but real hope embraces the risk of disappointment. In the case of the Real Possible there is a processive openness to possibilities. Real hope flows from ontological excellence. Those who are oriented to the Real Possible look into the future with hope, with eschatological hope. Hope can only be properly and fully understood within a comprehensive eschatological framework. This eschatological hope goes beyond what some may call passive, resigned, transcendental-plane-above-history hope.32 Do-nothing, expect-nothing hope is not the hope that is opened to the eschatological future of new creation. Do-nothing, expect-nothing hope is mummified hope; a hope that is in the deadly cold vise-grip of crippling systemic oppression. The hope that derives from excellence is a living hope that must be expected and sought. It is an adversarial,33 provocative hope whose driving logic is the logic of new creation and whose purpose is to keep the man and woman of hope always unreconciled to the demonic, destructive tendencies of modern social systems or today’s limiting circumstances.34 It is ek-static—it pulsates with overflowing impulses for straining and stretching toward new horizons of expectation and drawing us onward (note, it is not upward) into building communal structures of relationships and embrace to counter domination and injustice. Such a hope has a revelatory capacity. To use Princeton theologian Mark Lewis Taylor’s words from another context, it is revelatory because this adversarial hope “initiates certain insights, and unveils a fullness of meanings that go beyond what is seen as” sedentary complicit-to-oppressive-

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circumstances hope.”35 For the embers of this hope include practices of resistance and creativity. Resistance is recognition of imperfection in creativity and in the current global political economy. Aristotle defined a perfect work as one we would not like to change—no excesses and no deficiencies. But in my notion of being, being is not perfect; it is perpetually a work in progress. Hope induced by excellence is a hope that artfully creates and renders fantasies that aim, according to James C. Scott, to “reverse and negate particular domination.”36 It is a hope that sows a seed of “struggle to make an alternative, freer public world.”37 This hope, this “artful rendering of fantasy is itself part of that struggle.”38 The work of fantasy, these embers of hope, may some day be fanned into the purifying flames of divine transformatio mundi as God takes, according to Miroslav Volf, our work into God’s new creation.39 The dynamic creative interpretation of hope that I have articulated in this chapter is not a transcendental one: it is a this-worldly one. It is hope that has been torn out or come down from heaven to dwell, make camp, among humans. It is not a hope against the world, rather it is for the world. “It is a hope that can sustain and enrich political action.”40 It is for making a difference for the better. As Jeffrey Stout reminds us in his book, Democracy and Tradition: The question of hope is whether a difference can be made, not whether progress is being made or whether human beings will work it all out in the end. . . . You are even making a difference when your actions simply keep things from worsening to the extent they would have worsened if you had not acted. . . . If . . . you set your sights on making a difference, you can give hope a foothold in the life of the people itself.41

To speak merely of the hope of the new can be extremely abstract and formal, having no practical application. There must be the political realm for eschatological hope to be concrete. As theologian David Billings put it: “If there has to be a political realm at all, then at some point we (human beings) must act and realize the potential for the new that is already within [and among] us. The coming of God may be important, but we must do more than just wait for this coming.”42 The objective factors necessary for transforming a society do not mean much until they are grasped by a people, and until the factors grasp the people. As Tillich has explained, that which is longed for or expected is that which should come to pass.43 If it is that which should come to pass, it is that which is demanded. If it is demanded and not just wished for, it is that which is backed by human actions. Economists say wants and wishes are transmuted into demand when they flow through the currency of money. Similarly, wishes become hope when human actions can stand on the prom-

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ise of a dawning future, or to maintain the metaphor, when they flow through the currency of human actions. It is now the revolutionary decision of all dominated peoples and their allies who today commit themselves to adversarial hope and struggle for liberation to realize the concrete ideal, not abstract ideal, of realizing the economic-material tendencies of global political economy for the benefits of all humankind. Eschatological, adversarial, provocative hope, as we have explained above, is restless in pushing ahead—in releasing the Not-Yet-Become, to use Ernst Bloch’s term. So in these changeminded people (with “vocational consciousness”44) the subjective factor of adversarial hope meets the objective factors of political economic tendency and dynamics to push forward to the Real Possible, to something startlingly new.45 It is a considered or reasoned hope—it is “an engagement informed by an ‘expert knowledge of the objective trend’ and committed to its active, political transformation.”46 These kinds of change-minded men and women, as Tillich would say, are “bearers of history” in and through whom “something new can appear, meaning can be realized, future anticipated.”47 I will say that they are excellent selves. For a people who are grasped by the objective factor of material existence to become bearers of history, they must be willing to collaborate and work together to break through to the repressed elements and even to transcend them. The vitality, energy to enable the bearers of history to establish the new, to bring to fruition the internal and forward moving impetus of the global political-economic system, is supplied by expectation, the eschatological hope which anticipates the future.48 So bearers of history are also carriers of eschatological hope. Hope animates the new image of a better future or polis and holds out the promise of its incarnation. The expectation is fire in their bones which does not allow them to philosophize only “in the time after which reality has completed its formation-process and finished itself,” but also while there is day. If and when it is necessary that they should philosophize (to change the world rather than just interpret it) in the night, expectation is their pillar of fire that leads the way and lightens the “texts” they encounter. The bearers of history do not passively wait for history to happen, they work for it. One who merely hopes could just say because there is a tendency for the global political-economic system to transmute to a better system, its realization is not dependent on human action. Hope, eschatological hope, involves not just a gazing into the navel of the future, but turns on something that is demanded and that something calls for action. My thinking here is that adversarial hope is “a form of resistance and defiance, instigated by an unacceptable present”49 and also arises within “the clamor and climate of

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resistance” to the structures of command and tyranny and ordering function ensconced in the current political-economic order.

Concluding Remarks I have stated that eschatological hope is not lodged in a transcendental realm. This assertion is not so much about how hope is not transcendental above history or outside of history as it is about how hope or the impulses of expectation are there “in history to make an emancipatory difference amid” the deadening power networks of empire, especially in the global economic system. Adversarial, militant hope names the dimension of people’s emancipatory experiences and social practices toward the new. Hope “lies not in looking above and away from human history and society, but in embracing an antagonism of contestation for emancipatory ends, in pursuit of a transformation of structures to sustain emancipated living in society.”50 Eschatological hope makes a connection between what has been, what is, and what is to come. In this hope the oppressed leans out, with springs in their footsteps and anxiously too, to welcome the parousia of the creatively new.51 In the ethics of excellence all forms of hope that are driven by the orientation to the Objectively Possible and which deadens passion for change or seeks to annihilate history has been replaced by eschatological hope. In the real hope driven by the Real Possible fullness of meanings is expected from the rectifying future and is conceived in terms of the forward-moving mission of the present.52 In this sense Moltmann illuminatingly and rightly declares: “Future as a mission shows the relation of today’s tasks and decisions to what is really possible, points to open possibilities in the real and to tendencies that have to be grasped in the possible.”53 This kind of transformative, empowering, and participatory hope speaks the strange language and new grammar of strategy and tactics. Strategy is about where to lay the railroad tracks of resistance, and tactics is about making trains run on time. You cannot run an effective program to change demonic and destructive social practices “without doing both of these things extremely well, but one is not a substitute for the other.”54 The orientatio55 of the man and woman of eschatological hope, the fundamental way of situating themselves in work and world, is to strategically and tactically negate particular domination. The ethics of excellence is not only informed by eschatological hope. In previous chapters, especially in the fourth one, we have strongly suggested that human excellence is a form of participation in divine creativity. Thus, a major task of the ethics of excellence is to develop the ideational framework and cultural-moral institutions that reflect the creative ground. The job of

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ethical reasoning in this regard becomes—no doubt among many others— that of discerning how the deeper dimension of the human creative-cultural milieu can be opened up and broadened by orientation to the divine.

Notes 1. Robert Merrihew Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14–20. 2. Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 32. 3. Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 19n5, 31–35. See also his Finite and Infinite Goods. 4. Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 190–91. Italics in the original. 5. See Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 31–35, 175–76, for the definition of structural and motivational virtues. 6. See Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 89–91, for an argument about how concern for the good of persons is linked with caring for some activities for their own sake. Hope is lishmah, excellence for excellence’s own sake. The highest of these three (hope, love, and justice) in the light of this study’s elucidation of excellence is hope. Hope is love plus and it also involves the other-regarding and communal aspect (that is, justice) of excellence for excellence’s own sake. We love the family member, the neighbor, and the stranger simply for the sake of actualization of his or her potentialities. As Marc Gafni puts it: “We are engaged in the erotic when we do something simply for its own sake . . .” (Mystery of Love, 215). Hope, broadly construed as lishmah, is like the wholeness of excellence. Hope cannot be severed from any expression of excellence without destroying excellence’s character as excellence. 7. Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 205. 8. I have borrowed Richard Rorty’s words: a “massive shift in the locus of human hope: a shift from eternity to future time” from Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 208, quoted in James K. A. Smith, “Determined Hope: A Phenomenology of Christian Expectation,” in The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition Amid Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Miroslav Volf and William Katerberg (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 211. 9. Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1963), 24. 10. Moltmann, God in Creation, 158–81. 11. Moltmann, God in Creation, 178–79. 12. Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 23–28. 13. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 183. 14. See Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, and Fromm, The Art of Loving. 15. This definition is inspired by Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession, trans. Brunhilde Biebuyck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 21, quoted in Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 131.

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16. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 195. 17. Steven G. Smith, The Concept of the Spiritual: An Essay in First Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 229, quoted in Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 195. 18. Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1963). 19. Tillich, Morality and Beyond, 20. See also Galen Guengerich’s rendering of the same idea and a study of Tillich’s conception of justice in his “Comprehensive Commitments and the Public World: Tillich, Rawls, and Whitehead on the Nature of Justice,” Ph.D. diss. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004). 20. Tillich, Morality and Beyond, 24. 21. Tillich, Morality and Beyond, 24. 22. Tillich, Morality and Beyond, 29. 23. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thoughts, 460. 24. Begbie, Theology, Music, and Time, 23. 25. Begbie, Theology, Music, and Time, 24. 26. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), 104. 27. Tillich, Courage to Be, 108. 28. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 1975), 303. 29. Here I have borrowed Philip Goodchild’s description of money to elucidate my understanding of excellence. See his “Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davies, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 127–52; “Debt, Epistemology and Ecotheology,” Ecotheology 9, no. 2 (2004): 151–77. In chapter 8 of this book, I will make clearer connection between monetary policy and excellence. 30. Moltmann, Theology of Hope. 31. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 196–97, 206. 32. This of course sets up the question of whether eschatology occurs within history or lies outside the realm of history. Following Jürgen Moltmann, I would say it happens amid the process of history where boundaries are not predetermined but are themselves flexible and the hope within such history can thus be rightly described as eschatological. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 125–38. 33. Needless to say that hope is by nature adversarial. Hope is based on promise. Promise is a contradiction of the present reality, as we know it. If a potential bridegroom promises his future wife, “I am going to marry you,” he is in fact saying by tomorrow your present reality will change. What you are today will not be what you will be tomorrow. Her hope is the anticipation of a new and different condition or reality. Their joint hope includes a willingness to engage with ideologies and structures that negate the realization of the anticipated future. There is always an aspect of hope that is a “negation of negative.” 34. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 289–90, 330–33, 334–35, 337. 35. Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God, 156. 36. James C. Scott, “Domination, Acting, and Fantasy,” in The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror, ed. Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin (Berkeley:

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University of California Press, 1992), 57, 66, quoted in Mark Lewis Taylor, Executed God, 100. Theologians like Moltmann have also seen such a connection. For example, he writes, “Revelation was not written for ‘rapturists’ fleeing from the world, who tell the world ‘goodbye’ and want to go to heaven; it was meant for resistance fighters, struggling against godless powers on this earth . . .” (Moltmann, The Coming of God, 153.) See Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 76–77, 98–99, 112, 144–45, 196–97, 1307–11, and 1365–68 for how fantasies and wishful dreams work to build and sustain revolutionary hopes that aspire to overturn unjust and oppressive social orders. 37. Mark Lewis Taylor, Executed God, 100. 38. Mark Lewis Taylor, Executed God, 100. 39. Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2001), 91–102, 120–21. See also Richard J. Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001). 40. David Billings, “Natality or Advent: Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Moltmann on Hope and Politics,” in The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition Amid Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Miroslav Volf and William Katerberg (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 136. 41. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 58–59. Italics added. 42. Billings, “Natality or Advent,” 141. Italics in the original. 43. Tillich, The Socialist Decision, 104–6. 44. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3:310–11. 45. One can further underline the objectivity of the subjectivity by this observation: the eschatological hope we are talking about here is not confined to subjectivity. It emerges from the tendency and the latency of the global monetary system process. 46. Hallward, Badiou, 284. 47. Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 252. 48. Expectation supplies energy? This is so, I believe, because expectation can be and is usually a powerful source of social motivation, heightened intersubjectivity, and a “site” for mutually focused emotion and attention that can produce moral solidarity. For a discussion of how emotional energy works in interaction chains see Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). Besides, hope supplies energy because it stirs men and women not merely to take actions but to be prepared to take actions for liberation and victory over evil and demonic distortions. Every true hope (see Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1372) contains energy because of the intensity of desire ensconced in it. Let us also not forget that hope is latched on an image, that of an alternative to present negative situation, and it is this that enthuses and drives people forward. It is this that gives the strength and courage for action. 49. Ernst M. Conradie, “In Search of a Vision of Hope for a New Century,” Journal of Religion and Society 1 (1999): 1–24. See http://moses.creighton.edu/ JRS/1999/1999-1.html, (August 22, 2006).

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50. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Empire and Transcendence: Hardt and Negri’s Challenge to Theology and Ethics,” unpublished paper (October 22, 2005), 19. Italics in the original. 51. Parousia is often described as the return of someone or Christ who has departed. But this is not the only sense of the word. In fact, Moltmann (Theology of Hope, 227) argues that, “parousia actually does not mean the return of someone who has departed, but the ‘imminent arrival.’ Parousia can also mean presence, yet not a presence that is past tomorrow, but a presence that must be awaited today and tomorrow. It is the ‘presence’ of what is coming toward us, so to speak an arriving future.” Italics in the original. 52. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 260. 53. See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 260. 54. I have borrowed this simple metaphor of railroad from Professor Willie Pietersen of Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York. See Columbia Ideas at Work: Connecting Research to the Practice of Business, Columbia Business School, New York (Summer 2006): 2, http://gsb.columbia.edu/ideas. 55. On the use of this notion in theological and religious interpretations, see Mark Lewis Taylor, Executed God, 79–80, and Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1987), 11:105–7.

Part II

SOCIAL-ETHICAL FRAMEWORK

The future is not dangerous and impossible. The future only requires from us the courage to be excellent. This form of courage is a living, struggling one. Excellence is our struggle against hell (helan). True leaders, heroes of their people, pursue and unleash excellence through grace (the giving away of freedom to all) and not by works (of control). The goal, what ought to be, of every leadership is to enable its people to make heaven, that is, create a nurturing space for unconcealment and communication of potentialities and possibilities that harnesses the potency of the future. Such leaders make heaven, but do not make it just as they please; they do make it in a dynamic process of concrete realization of the principle of excellence. A principle is the power and logic of history—an expression of humankind’s essential being as historical reality—which has been grasped and formulated as a practical (existential) idea and thus stands in judgment of all spheres and aspects of historical reality. The task of all those who are vocationally conscious of the principle is to interpret and transform society in the light of the principle.

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This chapter offers an ethical framework informed by the philosophy of excellence we have developed in this study. There are two parts to this framework. The first part, which is more theological than the second, attempts not only to trace and clarify the lure of the mystery at work in the culturally creative functions of persons and social groups, but also shows how the creative functions of human life can express the unconditional eros of divine creativity. Here we are elevating our concern about divine imitation from the personal to the social level. In chapter 2, under the section “excellence and creativity” I analyzed the connection between excellence and creativity. This cleared a path that now enables us to examine the lure of the mystery in human creativity or excellence. In that section, I stated that excellence encompasses creativity and that excellence is the principle of creativity. If excellence is essentially the drive toward actualization of potentialities for all human beings, it follows that creativity of human beings is the form that is adequate for that movement. The second part of this chapter explores the ethical implications of the core concepts of excellence in national leadership. In investigating the connections between philosophy of excellence and ethics, I will imaginatively construct a “model” of a social world characterized by contingency and possibilities. This model, called “excellentist world,” is then used to investigate the interplay between excellence and ethics and to map out some of the possible decision-scenarios leaders of societies (large-scale systems) characterized by contingency and possibilities may face. More specifically, it examines 135

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how policy makers, guardians of society’s stability and norms, will react to perceived threats if they think that they are living in an excellentist world. The model also outlines a form of social ethics that is necessary for citizens to cope with the character of the excellentist world. Together, these two angles of vision—of leaders’ and citizenry’s—are used to map out the ethical framework of promoting excellence. The second part of this chapter (which is also the second part of the ethical framework) suggests that we may need to rethink some of the fundamentals of social ethics. A commitment to the philosophy of excellence obliges us to embrace the prophetic spirit. It calls for a citizenry that can readily sense the unprecedented, identify opportunities and threats, and craft the appropriate responses rooted in their creative and prophetic power. We need to fashion an ethics that will enable individuals to cope with sudden manifestations of the startling new in everyday life, to rely on the spirit rather than on rules and predetermined ethical codes for navigating what is and what must be a bewildering world.

Part 1: Theonomous Excellence The issue raised and addressed here is how human creativity can reflect divine creativity—that is, how is the cultural-moral dimension of human sociality informed, preformed, and formed by the power that sustains life, by the ground of existence. It is to ask a pertinent ethical question about excellence: What patterns of human sociality, modes of being, the unfolding of social being would indicate the necessary connection between human creativity and the “vast ceaseless creativity” in the universe? That is, what is the groundedness of human projects and work in the ultimate creativity that is in operation in the universe? Let me recast this thought. It is posited (as we shall see below) that divine creativity is widening and deepening human historical existence and human lives are situated in this trajectory-context. Then the question becomes: How can (do) culturally creative-moral projects and activities fittingly and responsibly feel “at home” in it? In responding to this concern we will turn to Paul Tillich who conceptualized ethics (which he called “science of ethos,” “science of culture”) as the reach of human sociality toward and expressing “the Unconditional.”1 I will proceed with the development of this part as follows. In section one, I will lay out Tillich’s idea of ethics as ethos. I have turned to Tillich for two reasons. First, for him ethics is about how to orient the cultural functions of human life to the underlying principle of ontological dynamic creativity, the ground of being, the Unconditional. The systematic character of Tillich’s

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“science of ethos” makes it easy to craft a framework with which to explore the nature of ethics as informed by excellence. Second, Tillich believes that humans have the obligation to actualize their potentialities, their true being to become their actual being.2 Section two actually develops such a framework. It is shown that such a framework will facilitate the realization of human potentialities, flourishing, and fulfillment. Summary and concluding remarks follow. Section 1: Tillich Concept of Ethics Human beings participate in creativity not only because they are situated in it, but also because they change what they receive to create new products of culture and in the process transform themselves. In the hands of humans the dynamics of creativity are combined with meaningful structure. Humans are both products and bearers of creativity. Thus, in their biohistorical existence, the creation of self-transforming and self-transcending acts, activities, and artifacts, they are driven by life’s inner dynamics. Tillich considers culture to be the creation of a “universe of meaning” and this creation is only the fulfillment of the universe of being, the working out of the potentialities and possibilities of the creative dynamics. In each culture or group, creativity is given its particularity and expressive ability by the form through which it is shown forth.3 According to Tillich, there are three elements in all cultural creativity: subject matter, form, and substance. Subject matter: in every culture certain objects of all that are available are chosen as significant in the universe of means and ends or in the universe of expression. Form: makes the cultural creation what it is. Substance: the encounter of every group or culture with the underlying reality of ground of being or serendipitous creativity4 differs from encounter in another culture or place, “and this encounter in its totality and its depth is the substance” of a cultural creation. Whereas its subject matter is chosen and its form intended, its substance is, so to speak, the soil out of which it grows. Substance cannot be intended. It is unconsciously present in a culture, a group, an individual, giving passion and driving power to him [sic] who creates and the significance and power of meaning to his creations.5

Based on this close connection between culture and religion, Tillich once wrote, “religion is the substance of culture, and culture is the form of religion.” Culture is the form in which the basic concerns of religion express themselves and religion gives meaning to culture.6 If this idea is refracted through the concept of excellence it means there is a two-way connection

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between divine creativity and culture. On the one hand, human historicity (excellence) expresses the creative ground and context of human lives and flourishing. On the other, it is the modality in which divine creativity makes itself known in human experience. There are aspects or dimensions of divine creativity that cannot express themselves without human historicity (excellence), and human coexistence needs the source of creative depth and unconditioned dynamism. This basic Tillichian insight works against the establishment of dualism between religion and culture (excellence) or, in our case, between culture and divine creativity. Having said that we need to quickly add that the linkage between “form and substance” in human coexistence, according to Tillich, is not always intact. The nature of the ongoing connection is discernible in three forms: theonomy, autonomy, and heteronomy. When the cultural creations express the ultimacy of meaning, when they are directed toward the ultimate in being and meaning, Tillich named it theonomy. When finite creativity, that is cultural expressions, fittingly and responsibly reflect underlying divine creativity it is tagged as theonomous. In a different language, it means the aim of cultural creations that have been grasped by the theos is “initiation” into the profound mystery of divine creativity. But when human culturalcreative projects are independent (in terms of its orientation) from the underlying infinite creativity, it is autonomous. Here it appears cultural expressions have lost (abandoned) their substance. They rely only on internal dynamics of historical life. Divine creativity is always present, but the experience of its power of the novum, the “underivable new” is not. It is heteronomous (heteros nomous, outside, strange law) when the requirement to fittingly respond is imposed upon the creators of culture—submission of culture under ecclesiastic (political or what is considered divine) laws and this destroys or suppresses its inner dynamism.7 Autonomy is sacrificed in the name of a principle that does not imply ultimacy and universality. There is a quest to intentionally (forcefully) direct autonomous creative activities to follow the norms of a deity, nationalistic state, or group that is considered “sacred.” In spite of the direction each of them may take under the circumstances it operates, Tillich is careful to note that neither heteronomy nor autonomy is totally estranged, “essentially separated” from the creative ground or context. Hence they each, together with theonomy, represent movement toward the ultimate point of reference, albeit at different degrees. But this movement is never fully realized. It is at best attained fragmentarily, but it is still a movement, an orientation by which the creative-cultural functions of human life become existentially meaningful.

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We have been considering Tillich’s idea of the connection between culture and its underlying dynamic ontological creativity. This is a necessary precursor to understanding his notion of ethics. Tillich thought of ethics not so much as discerning right and wrong, good and evil, or even the virtues of persons that sustain a flourishing polity as an orientation of the cultural functions of human life to the ground of being, the ultimate concern, the ultimate point of reference, a nonanthropomorphic God. His “ethics” was his theology of culture, his theory of culture, “the science of ethos.” Ethics is concerned with neither the good nor obligation [duty], with neither the personal order nor the legal order. It is not moral philosophy; it is the science of ethos, that is, the science of the realization of the Unconditional within meaning-fulfilling existential relationships.8

The emphasis on ethos as the subject matter of ethics invites us to think about how human creativity can orient itself to the divine creativity that pervades, encompasses, and transcends it. How can we discern the meaninggiving traces of the Unconditional that is not lodged in some supernatural plane but is with and within the human cultural and natural structures and dynamics of existence? In simple terms, one is seeking to articulate the creative powers of cultural-moral situations as a depth dimension, expressing the “presence” intrinsic to it and pointing out how it can aspire to come to full alignment with divine creativity. The question is what is the proper, acceptable thrust directionality of human creativity in the cultural realm that broadens and deepens divine creativity as it courses through biohistorical existence? This is to say that human creativity should be directed to be serving rather than restricting or countering “the forward movement into the open future on planet Earth of the cosmic serendipitous creativity to which we seek to be ultimately responsible.”9 Section 2: Creativity and Theonomous Ethics In sum, we have discerned Tillich’s ideas of ethics as an accent on disciplined reflection on broadening and deepening of the horizons of embodied being in the orientation to the Unconditional throughout the realms of culture. Tillich called such an orientation, as we have learned, theonomy. It sets forth the idea of how human cultural creations are best related to the sacred, to the symbol God (theos). As theologian Mark Lewis Taylor, a well-known interpreter of Tillich, explains it, “theonomy is being’s desire, being pulled, or ‘grasped’ as Tillich often put it, by the depth in autonomous life for which being hungers and toward which it moves, in spite of and through many forms of alienating and estranged existence.”10 This orientation is not imposed by an

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outside source; it is from the power of immanence operative within the functions of human history, within the biological, cultural, and social processes of human existence. Autonomy is only gifted with sacral normativity. Under the influence of theonomy, this inner dynamism of life deepens the human world of moral-cultural functions and connects them to their depth, elicits an awareness of the profound mystery of creativity, the ultimate concern. It is important to note, as Taylor sums up, the “donative” nature of the normativity of theonomy, that this unconditional is never forced upon culture, never imposed—it really cannot even be invited. Instead, it comes, it occurs, it is disclosed as a moral agent’s or community’s being grasped by its depth and so borne up and borne along, as it were, toward realization of its ideal norms, toward restoration of the unity of “the ought” with “the is.”11

The immediate issue for those who consider divine creativity in its various modalities as providing the actual context for human lives and for which they are a part is orientation. According to Gordon Kaufman, orientation is about the reality “toward which our lives must in fact be oriented, if we are to be in effective rapport with the actual cosmic-historical movement in which we live.”12 Based on the foregoing discussions, we can now develop a methodology of constructive theological ethics of excellence and theonomy. Both excellence and theonomy are about “being’s desire, being pulled, or ‘grasped’ . . . by the depth in [human] life for which being hungers and toward which it moves, in spite of and through many forms of alienating and estranged existence.”13 The imaginative construction of a comprehensive and coherent picture of theonomous ethics of excellence involves these six dimensions. First, disciplined reflection on ethics (the variant known as the “science of ethos”) must start with an idea of what it considers as the ultimate point of reference, ultimate mystery, ultimate reality, the ultimate concern, the Unconditional, God. “[I]t is important to recognize that if we choose to conclude that human life on its cultural and spiritual side has no metaphysical grounding, we are taking a long step toward seeing the world in nihilistic terms, that is, toward living with an underlying metaphysical despair about all human and humane values, hopes, and projects.”14 The second dimension is to show how this creative ground/context, ground of being operates to deepen and broaden being, complexifies and interconnects what it has brought forth so that life is able to flourish; life grows and new forms emerge. It cannot be overemphasized that ethics is about the social, about facilitating “humaneness” so that human life can flourish and every

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person (always person-in-communion) can be all that he or she can be. By humaneness, I am gesturing toward increasing complexity of sociocultural worlds marked by increasing interconnectedness, relationality. It is the whole complex of interlocking cultural functions that relate to meaningfulfilling existential relationships that are “emphasizing the creation and sustenance of communities of love and freedom, reconciliation and peace,” healing and inclusiveness, in the quest for union with God.15 Third, the issue of ethics becomes how can the creative cultural-moral functions (the symbolic order of meaning and purpose) of human life be oriented to this ground of being to provide meaning and fulfillment for personal and social existence? The ultimate metaphysical-grounding-of-all-that-is may be taken as the creative ground, spirit, the ground of being, dynamic ontological creativity, or substance—or whatever is considered as the originative source of human beings and the earth and its immediate environment will suffice. Or, it is simply the anthropomorphic Father in heaven or God. Any effort to show how the cultural-creative act should reflect God would involve complex cultural and philosophical analysis. The fourth dimension of the framework is showing how such reflection or approximation to the divine dynamic ontological creativity can be discerned. This involves defining some determinate ends that society desires besides creativity itself. In the biohistorical plane, divine creativity itself requires them. The coursing of infinite creativity that overcomes resistance in order to create new forms and bring the new into being needs determinate ends in terms of which the products of its overcoming of resistance are meaningfully assessed on the biohistorical plane. The indicators include flourishing human life and deepening and widening of forms of human sociality. It may be argued that the directionality of the cosmic process which has brought forth human life and social development on earth “is drawing us onward toward a humane ordering of life—the coming of the ‘kingdom of God’ in a ‘new heaven and new earth,’ as our religious traditions envisioned it. . . .”16 In other words, it is moving toward a flourishing life of love, reconciliation, peace, justice, and inclusiveness. The fifth feature is implicit in the four already mentioned. The earlier four features presuppose that human creativity and dynamism can serve as a clue or key to the Ultimate Reality or be a “sign of the possibilities and qualities of the creativity manifest within the cosmic process.”17 The creativity of humans (the struggle toward higher and higher levels of humanization and humaneness) shows forth the divine creativity itself in a finite, creaturely way. This is what in traditional theology is thought to exemplify the very “image of God.”18

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Sixth, all the five features mentioned in themselves presuppose yet another one. The whole of theological and ethical construction or reconstruction is intended to provide orientation for human beings in the world. Theological-ethical construction is always a vision of human’s place in the world and what can facilitate the flourishing of human life. The theonomous ethics of excellence aims to nudge humans to orient themselves and seek “salvation” by directing human creativity to seek to grasp the Unconditional, by reflecting divine creativity of which it is a part. This will be best done not by consciously directing “autonomy” (autos nomos, an “inner law”), not by suppressing the inner dynamism of autonomous cultural creations, and not by an imposition of an alienating law by a theocratic, nationalistic, or statist order. It would only be an attempt to fully restore the autonomous in historical developments by connecting or reconnecting it to the underlying creativity of which it is a part; to generate an awareness of its depth, a healthy sensitivity to the profound mystery of creativity in its sallying forth. “Theonomy is normative through a deepening of the autonomous, a deepening marked by orienting autonomous forms toward the ultimate, toward the unconditional. This orientation is not . . . subordination to a norm, but directedness and attraction toward a norm.”19 Section 3: Coda We have taken as the task of ethical reasoning the program of discerning how the deeper dimension of the creative-cultural milieu can be opened up and broadened by orientation to the divine. This characterization of the task of ethics is an interpretation of five crucial discursive moves that undergird the development of the ethical framework in this chapter as well as the constructive theology of excellence that informs it. The five discursive moves are: a. The import of understanding human existence within the wider cosmic context of life within which it lives, moves, and have its being impels us to ask “how best do we fit our own projects and activities into the wider and more fundamental movement” of divine creativity? b. Human life, with its deepest hopes, aspirations and value, is not fundamentally alien to the cosmic world, to the created order. c. In important ways the world in which humans live is “a humaneseeking order.” d. Ongoing human life can and do express “the immediate and continuous presence of the divine creative activity.” e. The orientation to ultimate creativity, the grounding of human projects in it is believed to give them larger and deeper meaning than is otherwise

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possible and thus more effectively facilitates the realization of distinctively human potentialities, flourishing, and continuous fulfillment.

Part 2: Governance and Prophetic Spirit We have so far expressed the connection between excellence and theological ethics as a possible orientation of cultural-creative actions of social groups toward the divine. The philosophy of excellence also expresses an ethos, an orientation to existential relationships and the existentially meaningful in the here and now. My first task in elucidating this ethos is to imaginatively construct a model of an “excellentist world.” “Excellentist” is a made-up word to describe a potential phenomenological world of excellence. This is a community that is conscious of and open to the novelty, opportunity, uncertainty, disruption, and chance that ontological excellence demands of all of forms of human sociality. For I believe that such a “model” can help us to rigorously investigate the interplay between manifestations of ontological excellence and broad ethical behavioral styles. Section 1: A Model of an Excellentist Social World An excellentist world is at its core a world of contingency plus possibilities.20 The human phenomenon of ceaseless striving for excellence presents us with pure possibilities—the novum is always becoming. Excellence carries with it the notion that in every combination of elements or factors there is a notyet which names “both a surplus and a remainder over what-has-become.”21 This promise of becoming comes at the cost of contingency. The animating power or thrust of excellence “dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy.”22 The sheer fact that some thing or process not originally present in the constituting parts of a system can surface means that matter or any system contains “an immanent reference to a not-yet beyond” and this obliges us to think of human interactions in a new way. It means that nothing is necessary or inevitable or foreordained. When no one knows the full range of possibilities that exists in any social setting there is no way to know ahead of time what is inevitable, foreordained, or even necessary. Any possibility that emerges might not have emerged. Ethics in this scenario is a game of contingency. According to Niklas Luhmann, “this concept results from excluding necessity and impossibility. Something is contingent insofar as it is neither necessary nor impossible; it is just what it is (or was or will be), though it could be otherwise.”23 Ethics, like life, is in phase space. According to J. Wentzel van Huyssteen:

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Phase space is an image for the fact that every event that does happen is surrounded by a ghostly halo of nearby events that did not happen but could have. Phase spaces are large, since they comprehend a wide range of all possibilities.24

This openness leaves open the prospect of ethics either moving toward embrace of the other and inclusiveness, or toward fear that fuels exclusion, draconian measures, and the removal of all possible limits to the administration of terror. As sociologist of religion Richard Fenn puts it: “there is an understandable terror that comes from knowing that one is operating in a field of possibilities that is open; no one knows what the sum of these possibilities may be, let alone which of them might be chosen by the other players in the game.”25 With so many possibilities, complexity, and an intensely competitive environment, the person or system is always at the margins of a breakout of new worlds and a breakthrough into a new world. And at the margins time is always running out. No system is in a position of sufficient power over events to have time on its side. At the margins creativity is also straining to burst forth in the form of emergent qualities. The philosophy of excellence represents a sensitivity to matter as being and becoming. Its orientation is utopological, not in the sense of discovering a blueprint for an elsewhere or else-when, but as a dynamic, open “utopia” of else-be. This is utopia in the sense of an acknowledgment of unfinishedness of every state, being, or totality. In the lights of philosophy of excellence the world is experimental, unfinished; it is in process and is a process. Every set of relations or systems is a being that is not yet “given,” only a transcendere. Bloch explains it this way: This Not-Yet is of course not such that, for example, in the atom or in the sub-atomic “differentials” of matter everything which comes out later or will come out later already existed according to its “disposition” in reduced form, as if encapsulated. Such a backward interpretation of the Not-Yet would suppress or fail to understand precisely the dialectical leap into the New.26

Here lies the hope, rather the ethos of hope, in the philosophy of excellence. Keep in mind that excellence by definition carries the promise that if elements or factors are synchronous in time and space there could be transition to a higher stage of complexity or consciousness, new modes of and levels of operations, functions, and behavior. This is a continuous process. The fundament of the process means that every combination or synchronicity cannot be completed; yet we as humans must strive to complete it by rearranging the elements or parts. It is hope in movement. Hu-

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mans can and do actually use their self-aware minds to creatively explore the “phase spaces” of their ethical landscape and home in on the regions of the “phase spaces” where better forms of inclusion and equity can happen. To have this hope that every arrangement can transition to a novelty that creates hitherto nonexistent properties as well as robust space for cooperation is to have an ethical practice. This is so because excellence “provides the measure to judge life [social system] in the name of what exceeds life [social system].”27 Thus, if properly handled, excellence can serve as a framework to expose the ambiguities that are present in the sociological character of society and to show all that are driving it away from transcending itself. The theological ethicist in a transversal dialogue with the social sciences may use it as a “prophetic” move to bring social systems under the unambiguous life of the Spirit by answering the questions implied in the ambiguities through justice demanded in the name of God.28 To ask for justice in the name of excellence is not a call to impose one kind of philosophical worldview on the rest of society. It is an expression for the expectation of the new, the not-yet. This expectation translates into two ideas. First, a conception and realization of society and humanity in which hindrances to venturing beyond the given have been removed. Second, it is to criticize the current socioeconomic arrangement not according to the ideal of present actuality or some social ideal, but according to justice, which is inspired by excellence and which lies beyond all forms.29 The excellentist world as described so far does not present us with a final authority to judge and control the decisions of all players in the system. It presents us with a radical openness. No nation-state is sure that what it knows about the players in the global system at any given moment represents the full range of possibilities in its interaction with them. In the face of this uncertainty and with no foreordained principles of selection of actions, a nation-state may find itself acting with a lot of anxiety. The nation-state may only be acting to reduce the range of possibilities, to limit its exposure to the uncertainties presented by infinite possibilities. Fear in the face of limitless possibilities or the self-debilitating quests to control the possibilities are not necessarily the best responses. They are not good for nations or for individuals. What may be needed is not the capability to control, which is impossible in the face of radical contingency, but the capability for imagination to propose theories to the environment in bold guesses and conjectures and the results scrutinized by ruthless criticism. A full-throated commitment to excellence “requires a social character that is correspondingly open to high levels of ambiguity, existential tension . . .”30 and enhancement of personal

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responsibility to create open spaces for challenging forms of bondage to old authorities and for imagining other possibilities. The philosophy and the implied ethics of excellence in the sense we have laid out are well suited to express both continuity with other social ethics and a new paradigm in ethical reasoning. There is something familiar about it when it is associated with other philosophies and paradigms that address the complexity and indeterminacy in life. Yet there is also something novel about it. Excellence is a process of transfiguration that offers us a new way to think about the relation between complex wholes and their parts. Thus for every ethical ordering that may stand before us either in ignominy or glory, the notion of excellence attunes us to anticipate new possibilities. A crucial task of ethics in light of this notion of excellence becomes that of raising the specter of prophetic spirit amid the citizenry to enable it to deal with the unclosed and undisclosed becoming of all systems and combinations that may confront it in the future.31 It is now time to shift focus to the mapping out some of possible decisionscenarios managers of societies (large-scale systems) characterized by contingency and possibilities face. Welcome to the imperatives of governance in an excellentist social world! Section 2: Outline of Governance Ethics Excellence, as we have already indicated, cuts both ways. We have outlined its capacity to promote and sustain an ethos of hope. It can also engender terror. In this section we want to describe the kind of terror it is likely to produce and how society and its major institutions are likely to respond to the specter of such terror. In a situation of uncertainty and numerous possibilities, the self feels like every moment and every day is unrepeatable. The past appears to have failed to cast its shadow on the present and future; and future (coming) events cannot be said to cast their shadows before them, and the present hardly lasts long enough.32 There is a sense of fragility in the face of all this and, consequently, an anxiety that one may not arrive in the future. Under these conditions it may feel like the past is literally lost and one feels continuously late because one cannot live up to the possibilities and uncertainty. One’s response always appears slow and out of date. Given this combination of “transitoriness” and temporal instability, the “managers” of society may have a pervasive feeling of time running out. The society itself and its major institutions appear not to be able to oversee human history, not able to stand the test of time, and are thus bereft of their sacred trappings. They can no longer defer the passage of time and do not have a surplus of time. Even the best of institutions begin to appear provisional. No one

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can claim to be the same today, yesterday, and forever. No one can anticipate a collective destination for all. As Fenn forcibly and clearly remarks: In societies where institutions themselves are clearly provisional and therefore likely to change or disappear in time, it is difficult for a people to imagine a collective future that encompasses everyone. There is no single vision of the future, no common fate, and, hence no shared sense of mission or destiny. . . . As the state’s claims to transcendence [and to call for public sacrifices33] come to be regarded as questionable, its charisma appears to be false: an artificial halo gilded by time, burnished by scholars who reinterpret the founding documents according to special interests and pragmatic considerations.34

Successful dealing with the excellentist world may require a struggle of the institutions of governance against their own tendency to circumscribe the possibilities open to the governed, or to cover the knowledge of their own temporality. Alas, there are multiple response patterns. The response patterns as a whole are full of ambiguities and tensions. The first type of response we will examine is the draconian or belligerent type. When a society is faced with approaching threats in an uncertain environment time is of the essence for the social life. It needs time to respond otherwise it would perish. But it is precisely at this point that time is perceived to run out on it. When the passage of time becomes so filled with significance and danger there is often a call for sacrifice, for draconian measures. There are also attempts to redeem time by restoring vigor and harmony through the removal of agents deemed to be sapping the strength of the society.35 It may be deemed necessary to purify the country of the pollution of some internal elements. The hope is that by taking these measures the imagined destructions will pass overhead and be visited on other societies. This kind of response pattern is an attempt to offer a purchase on the future by draconian measures, which gives the impression that one’s own society can transcend the passage of time or be relieved from the exposure to the uncertainty and uncontrollable possibilities. But this is a false impression and besides it may lead to militarization of society or a state of perpetual “war on terror.” There are other ways to respond to the uncertainty. The acute awareness of the openness of the excellentist world and the existential anxieties that it generates may also elicit a different type of response: waiting. Waiting is problematic in an excellentist world. Waiting as a strategy may point to a belief that in the end all things will work out right, indicating a certain belief in providence (secular or not). This kind of belief does not go well with the conceptual underpinnings of an excellentist world that does not dispense existential guarantees. Time may not heal all things and one

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may be a fool for missing opportunities. “The modern hero is the one who seizes the moment and exposes himself or herself like Faust to the ‘torrents of time.’”36 All this notwithstanding, the excellentist world imposes waiting on all and makes all to experience their existential anxiety without the usual anesthetics provided by some “sacred canopy” or transcendent power that can administer grace or bring order to chaos. In a world of uncertainty and immense possibilities, even belief in providence does not relieve one of the pressures of exposure to time. There is always a dilemma of the length of the waiting period, knowing where it ends and when the time has come to act. There is a third type of response. Leaders may buy time by building up surplus today against future use. Consider the New Testament story of ten virgins who were waiting for the bridegroom to come.37 The time of his coming was uncertain. They waited and fell sleep. As they slept time was running out of them for the bridegroom to arrive. The five foolish ones did not have their lamps filled with oil. They subsequently ran out of oil and were locked out of the banquet when he arrived. They were late both literally and in terms of social death. The wise virgins who filled their lamps were endowed with time. They made the “large and preemptive commitment of resources—betting bigger and betting earlier.” They met him and rejoiced with him; for they were fully prepared for his coming. But they were not as equally endowed as the bridegroom who can be waited upon and can keep the ten virgins waiting. In an excellentist world no one can really buy enough time to create the environment he or she can control. No one can really be fully prepared. It is a dangerous illusion to entertain. No army can monitor all the “hot spots” and potential trouble-places and control them all at once. No one can preemptively put out all flames in all places before they start burning. No one can have access to the “oil,” the inexhaustible sources of support and security in the face of the flow of time. The leader has to stretch and leverage his or her resources.38 The bridegroom in the parable to which we are alluding transcends time and as such there is plenty of time in his presence. Only those who equate themselves to the bridegroom, to some sort of controllable divine presence in the midst of humans, or think that they have some privilege to be continuously in communion with the divine presence, can afford to think they can control the complex world by transcending the constraints of time. In an excellentist world it may even be considered counterproductive for an organization or system to buy time so as to seemingly control the environment. It is better to flow with the time; for it is by flowing with time—remaining flexible in determining responses in the adaptive process—that one can harbor the hope of “stumbling up” into emergent qualities in the phase space.

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There is another way leaders tend to buy time apart from support and security of resources. They can buy time, that is, temporize, by holding on to old certainties or by “attenuating” their hold on them. Systems that feel threatened by the forces of the present and future may choose to nibble on the pleasures of their past adaptations and successes. The system tries the old ways of damming the flood of changes. One of such reactions is to blame the “usual suspects” or turn against some segments of society, the enemies within. Looking for the enemies within could be a very dangerous strategy of dealing with threats and fears. It can introduce a split in the society’s psyche, so to speak. There will appear an old self that is resisting adaptation and an emerging self that is adapting and making the best of new circumstances. There is an old self gradually becoming moribund in the face of the changing environment and there is the “excellent self.” The old self that is being perpetuated in the face of the new reality will be attacking the new, emerging society as a newcomer or parvenu. The preachers, demagogues, and politicians will blame the new society for developing prematurely; berate its presumed leaders for opening the society too quickly to embrace new elements, and they will advocate the deflation of commitments to the larger environment. It is important to mention that the old-self advocates may not necessarily see their actions as causing a split in the inner psyche of society. They see their actions as an antidote to the experience that time is running out for the society. They think they are drawing from the old society’s reservoir of time and experiences for the beleaguered society to “buy time.” The old self, the old guard (the old hatred, racism, xenophobia, and so on) “is brought into play . . . as a reservoir of experiences that seem relatively immune to the passage of time and thus offer a defense against the feeling that time is dangerously scarce.”39 Overall, the third response (that is, the option of buying time) in all its variants is flawed as it tends to produce leaders who have a dangerous messianic complex, who tear society against itself, and above all put it in limbo. Fighting a rearguard action is not the best way to respond to a complexity filled with possibilities. Besides it is opposed to, what for a lack of a better word I would call, the animating vigor of excellence which reveres the dynamics that belong to openness, possibilities, and the novum. The fourth option is to exploit the openness that excellence entails and engenders to enable catholic inclusiveness and to question the dominant and domineering structures of power that oppose freedom and justice. The principle of excellence may be considered a transformative force that transgresses boundaries as it intensifies and complexifies organic (social) life and connections. As it enables all kinds of complex combinatorial novelties, it also

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transgresses formulatable or unformulatable boundaries. The ethical task is to formulate norms that will not stifle the impulses of cooperation while resisting the exclusionary tendencies that are built into it. We analyzed such exclusionary tendencies when we examined the first governance pattern that is likely to arise as leaders deal with the bundle of uncertainties and possibilities that an excellentist world throws at them. Against such exclusionary tendencies, we need to develop and nurture what Taylor calls the prophetic spirit,40 a way of being that broadens and deepens relationality and can “stir up in us the courage to care and empower us to change our lives and our historical circumstances.”41 This spirit lives and operates in communities of social practice that embody the viewpoints and values of excellence and justice. Section 3: Excellence and the Prophetic Spirit According to Taylor, the “prophetic spirit is a way of being that is always at work broadening and deepening the horizon of our lives and, in the process, giving rise to ever new awareness of breadth and depth in our understanding of being.”42 Taylor’s prophetic spirit is particularly useful as a conceptual resource for further elucidation of the ethics of excellence, especially for insights on institutions and power that may exclude persons from living according to the best of themselves. He examines the human situation through the spatial, multidimensional vision of history, identifying centers and peripheries (sites that may often be in flux) in the control, display, and exercise of power. Taylor argues that the “virtues of liberal society are lost without the spatial consciousness that turns continually, and give strategic priority, to the multiple and ever-changing sites of people who suffer and resist at the margins and on the undersides of history.”43 In his development of the notion of the prophetic spirit, he pays close attention to the social structuring created by exclusion (what he calls the breadth dimension of the spirit) and hierarchical structures created by gender, class, race, and other domination (depth dimension) of historical social existence. The issue for society managers is how to respond to the ever-present time pressures and permanent emergency of the excellentist world, while remaining inclusive of those in “other” social spaces. Or can our systems work to broaden and deepen the horizons of our lives? How can we exploit and benefit from the openness that is encoded in excellence, so to speak? Is our move to embrace prophetic spirit, which according to the Taylorian insight puts the accent on spatial dimension of social existence, in conflict with the excellence that happens to emphasize the temporal dimension? Taylor would insist that his preference to lead the discourse on the prophetic spirit with spatial metaphors is not a rejection of temporal consciousness. He states that:

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Prophetic spirit’s broadening and deepening being is not without a temporal awareness of the whence and whither of humanity and creation. . . . Nevertheless, prophetic spirit’s consciousness is more shaped by spatial discourses than it is by temporal ones, or better, it analyzes human movement through time by looking through the lenses that broaden and deepen our views of temporal life. . . . In this way, broadening and deepening being creates prophetic spirit’s unique view of history, discerning spatial dimensions (broader realms, deeper levels, encompassing wholes) within historical life.44

The impetus for historical life, he argues, does not come from “an above” or from some forces of progress directing development. Human historical development is powered only by human consciousness—which has evolved and is evolving in the heat of the dynamic interplay of conflicts and antagonism, cooperation, and coordination between social groups—as the immanent moving impetus of history. The prophetic spirit arises when that consciousness deliberately discerns inequalities, injustice, misery, exclusion, and hindrances to encompassing wholes within historical life and stirs up the courage to change the circumstances that breed and sustain them. Or at least rises up to expose their hiddenness in the interstices of relationships and structures of society. In this sense the prophetic spirit is what erotically connects being and resistance to engender becoming or to cut an opening in the oppressive lattices of any system so that human life can flourish anew. Note that in the preceding paragraph I used the phrase, “deliberately discerns” in the transformation of consciousness into prophetic spirit. For Taylor, the prophetic spirit is not an alien or heteronomous imposition on social life. It is a profoundly human dimension of the cultural and historical practices constituting social life. This argumentative stance is adopted in order to revive a “notion of the spirit that is not opposite to matter but intrinsic to it—an animating vitality of sensuous earth, a dynamic at work in the biological, historical, cultural, and social powers of earth.”45 It becomes prophetic when it chooses to strain and lean to touch the real “crucial for human freedom as a kind of flourishing related to the occurrence of the new.”46 If I understood Taylor correctly, the prophetic spirit is consciousness leaning anxiously over the opening of the new being and putting pressures on the borders of the possible in order to deal with temporal pressures exerted by uncertainty and historicality of existence instead of succumbing to them. Prophetic spirit chooses to focus on the possibility side of the excellence equation of possibility plus contingency (uncertainty). Now this common cause with possibility is not equivalent to the faith that all things are possible, and is not a reluctance to draw a line between the possible and impossible. It is an ethos of hope in the midst of struggle to change historical circumstance

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with the eyes wide open to obstacles. For Taylor once the hope of possibilities passes for lethargic (do-nothing) faith in the sense that with God all things are possible it is tantamount to abdication of the prophetic spirit. Taylor’s concept of prophetic spirit needs some reworking before it can serve our purpose of a directing principle of ethics in an excellentist world. He has interpreted the spirit as a complex dimension of a cultural-historical existence. The spirit (the noun part of his prophetic spirit) is unduly limited to the interpersonal sphere of human coexistence and does not touch the inwardly personal. His prophetic spirit is multi- and interpersonalistic without being personal. It is like tying to be multidisciplinary in a transversal dialogue without having disciplines. His is focused on systemic transformation and not enough on individual moral and behavioral transformation. He has stretched the emancipatory spirit over the very large canvas of social existence and certain individual details are lost or blurred as a consequence. I want to work from a smaller canvas to complement the big picture he has painted. I want to use the spirit to also refer to individual capacity to be fluid and nimble as he or she engages an uncertain, contingent environment. I want to use the notion of the spirit to empower individuals who, in the face of predetermined prescriptive ethical codes that are inherently unsuited to uncertain environments, may need to move from the letter of the codes and norms of prevailing forms of human sociality to their spirit (more on this later). For me the spirit also represents a morally superior aspect of character and new fluidity in response to our environment in ways that can sustain widening relationality at the individual level. The prophetic spirit as he presented it is too focused on the ethical object (the ethical demand) of emancipation, and not enough on the ethical subject, the “I.” To be on an even keel, we need the triangular focus on the self, the other, and God, as Richard Niebuhr reminded us many decades ago.47 In an excellentist world where uncertainty and possibilities abound we need the gametheoretic ethics of Niebuhr as expressed in his The Responsible Self. The ethical subject needs to be constantly asking: What is going on and how do I respond that is in line with the ethos of the society? The ethical person starts by interpreting the situation, equipping herself to fittingly respond to it, and being accountable for the response. And in formulating her response she attempts to go beyond the legalities, idealisms, and goals presented before her to consider the universal community, the encompassing whole. Contra Taylor, no amount of persuasion and goal-focusing can ignore the role of the subject as a key player in a game-theoretic world of contingency and possibilities. With this focus on the subject, as theologians and ethicists, we cannot altogether ignore the role that theology and religion can play in motivating

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the ethical subject for prophetic engagement with his or her society. It is true that religion can be a conservative force against the new, but history has also shown us that it is a source for good and has provided vitality to individuals as they struggle against evil. In this regard we should not be too quick to dismiss grace from “an above” as it can be an impetus for broadening and deepening being. (We saw in chapter 5 that prayer can be an impetus to prophetic spirit and is a form of protest and resistance.) The tongue of fire that Taylor is beckoning to lighten the prophetic spirit in the complex dimension of cultural-historical existence may first need to alight on individuals in order to set the whole “motley crew” on fire. Grace that flows from a person’s source of existence and progress through life can (also) supply the energy, courage, willingness, and nourishment that enable a fitting or just response to confront evil.48 It can be the fire in the bones that stills the nerves and will and moves the legs and hands into action. There could be an impulse that comes from an above. Grace could supply the impulse to keep an existing relationship open, to touch and re-feel the jagged threads of a broken relationship and to transcend them and take them along to an ever-bigger encompassing whole. The old self can then squeeze from itself a loving (prophetically spirited) action as an appropriate expression of gratitude and loyalty to that rhythm of grace that it listens to or has grasped. The rhythms of grace that individuals take as their sources of existences and progress through life can make them say, “the law and order is made for humans and not humans for law and order” and thus produce a fitting response in a moment of acute uncertainty and harsh fear. In our daily encounters with the other we may need this kind of grace so that as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, we would not devote our gaze and energy to order rather than to justice. We need it so that moral (or is it immoral?) human in immoral society will not prefer “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”49 I think Taylor would not reject this kind of grace. Section 4: The Prophetic Spirit and the Law A few paragraphs ago while critiquing Taylor’s restriction of the prophetic spirit to the interpersonal sphere, I promised to use the notion of the spirit to empower individuals, when faced with predetermined prescriptive ethical codes (“laws”), to move to the spirit of the law in order to promote human flourishing. In fulfilling this promise I will expand my starting focus on prophetic spirit in the personal realm to include the communal sphere—a strategic balancing act Taylor did not make. I want to do all of this by examining (philosophizing, not exegeting) what Saint Paul calls the “epistle written in our hearts” in 2 Corinthians 3:1–6.

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In doing this I will further undergird the proposition that ethics is not so much as discerning right and wrong, good and evil, as an orientation of the cultural-moral life to the ground of being, the deepening and widening of being. Do we begin again to commend ourselves? Or do we need, as some others, epistles of commendation to you or letters of commendation from you? You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart. And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:1–6, NKJV)

One way to begin the interpretation of Paul’s thoughts here is to start from the distinction he is making between writing in ink and in spirit. The idea of a new covenant written in something that is intangible, invisible, and airy seems exciting, but it is also fraught with dangers. When Paul says the law is written in our hearts rather than on stones it raises for me a concern about backward movement, not progress. Was it not the same Paul who told us in Romans 2:15 that the Gentiles had the work of the law written in their hearts while the Law of Moses given to Israel at Sinai was engraved in stone? What is this new covenant that appears not to usher in a new way of writing the law? Or is it the conversion of a linear movement (heart to stone) into an embracing circular one (heart-stone-heart)? The second concern I have is that by moving the law inside the heart from the tablets of stone we are also given an imagery of a different kind of backward progress. Tablets of stone standing before a group of people connect them and serve as a focal point for the group’s attention. Everyone knows that a group needs an object to concentrate and sustain its attention for any reasonable length of time. It does not help if each one of them reads the law with the mind’s eyes, each person looking deep inside him or herself—some sort of navel gazing. Does Paul’s insight represent anything more than narcissistic individualism? Paul is giving us this imagery when he knows full well that the church as an ecclesia is a people called out by the truth of the Christevent. How can we be faithful to the universality and communality inherent in the call when we are busy gazing at the beauty inside of us with the being’s eyes? So how do you reconcile the tension between my current reading of the passage and the familiar celebratory interpretation it has historically

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received? Releasing this tension is tantamount to deriving perspective of the law under the impact of the prophetic spirit that deepens and widens being. The key to releasing the tension is to understand the relationship between word and spirit. In a certain deep theological sense, to turn your eyes toward words written in spirit deep in your mind is to lift up your sensuous, breathing body and spirit to recognize the deep interconnectivity of being. The letters of our phonetic (the Greek phonein: to “sound”) aleph-beth represent sounded breath, structured ruach. As David Abram informed us more than a decade ago, every letter or word is a sign and product of controlled or structured sound, breath, wind, spirit.50 Words and letters are living, animate, and spiritual. So in speaking and writing one is connected to the rhythm and texture of life and the interconnectivity of all existence. So when Paul says that the word, the letters of the law, are now written in our hearts he is saying that the Spirit of God has taken structured breath, controlled pneuma and inscribed it inside of us and thus (re-)connecting us to our airy root. We are both a product of structured and unstructured breath and we depend on the airy depths of the universe to live. In Genesis 1 we are created by God’s speaking—structured breath. In Genesis 2 we learn that God breathed on the molded clay, earthling, and it became a living soul. In Genesis 2 it is pouring out of unstructured breath that is personal and individualized as in neshamah. So with Paul we now know that we are bearers of three forms of divine breath: unstructured (unsounded), structured (sounded), and inscribed. In the light of the creation story and the breath-full beginning of letters one cannot help but imagine that Paul’s borrowed imagery of writing the letters of the law inside of our hearts by the Spirit is about the deep calling unto deep. The wind that blows where it wishes is now touching, caressing, and mingling with the wind deep within our being to shed abroad the love of God. The word that is spelled out on the tablets of the hearts (or the spell that is cast on us) by the mingling of the outside and inside winds is communion, not individualism—not about navel gazing. With the living alphabets arranged within our animated bodies, our communion with one another is no longer mediated by the presence of literal and figurative “stones,” but by the irreducible presence of the Spirit of Christ. The presence of the Spirit is moved from stone, “congealed life” (or of any mediating thing) to the community, into the dynamic fluidity that is the vibrancy of life. The new understanding is that our ownmost personal communion with God is now seen as communion with humans. The sharing of freedom of (in) the Spirit immanently present in the world is the sign of the communion with God. This is, indeed, a differ-

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ent way to experience the presence of God. In the words of French Catholic philosopher Jean Luc Marion, it is presence, which no thing here comes to render real, no longer remains distinct from the collective consciousness, but strictly coincides with it, hence as long as, in that consciousness, presence endures. Or even: presence is valid only in the present, and in the present of the community consciousness. Presence— ceasing to rely on a res—henceforth depends entirely on the consciousness of it possessed, here and now, by that community communion.51

So instead of Paul’s appropriation of the Old Testament’s (in Jeremiah 31:31–36) promise being used to separate believers to gaze at their navels, it is a powerful reminder to connect them to one another and to the whole of creation. Instead of seeing their calling as Christians under the new covenant as tearing persons apart from one another and from the animals and plants and non-Christians, the imagery of law “spirited” away in their hearts calls them to be aware of their common medium of existence. It appears Paul is saying to the Corinthians, just in case you did not get it before, the truth of your relationality with God and all of God’s creation is to be embodied and enacted in physical life. This interpretation of the Corinthian passage somewhat mimics the general Protestant understanding of the Eucharist (Holy Communion). The accent of Christ’s presence during the meal is not on the elements or objects before the faithful gathered at the common table, but in their collective consciousness, in their midst, because of what is believed to be in their hearts. Both bread and law have been decentered. To move the laws from the tablets into minds, to use the words of Catherine Keller, “is to resist the dispiriting absolutism that will lock the mystery of God into single venue [culture, people, nation, institution, class, point of view, or era].”52 Unlike the tablets of the stone, the word in our hearts is not confined to one space, to a passive and insensate bearer. The laws after being kissed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ have become the law of love in search of a new home. A home that is, in the words of Keller, an “animating spatiality [that] is comprised not of territories to be guarded or invaded, but of a process of interactivity. Not just any interactive process, but one characterized by the flow of truth.”53 The new law, that is, the decentered law that opens us up for others to read is the “prescription” for transparency before God and before one another and for the healing of our individual souls and communities. What kind of transparency and healing is implied here? It is openness to the new, the new place, and the new comers. But the epistle that Paul says is to be read by all

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is hidden deep in inside of us, in dense darkness. How do we go from reading what is obvious on tablets of stone to what is hidden in the dark? Paul is making a surprising demand on us. “The birth of the new,” according to Paul Tillich, is just as surprising in history. It may appear in some dark corner in our world. It may appear in a social group where it was least expected. It may appear in the pursuit of activities which seems utterly insignificant. It may appear in the depth of a national catastrophe, if there be in such a situation people who are able to perceive the new of which the prophet speaks. It may appear at the height of a national triumph, if there be a few people who perceive the vanity of which the Preacher speaks.54

The new covenant that is so written in the heart is the principle and ethos of the new that comes and never goes away. We carry it along with us everywhere we go. It is not the appearance of the permanent new, but the permanent readiness to expect the appearance of the new in the midst of the forsaken old and even among the scintillating, glorious new. This is the power of the new in the new covenant. It is actually the new from the Eternal Spirit that is always renewing creation in the middle of despair, fear, and anxiety. The covenant that is written in our hearts literally puts us in the middle. As bearers of the living word we now stand between the past and the future of the earth that sustains the air that keeps the rhythm of life going. We are between Jesus and the world, reflecting him to all and reflecting them to him. We are between the good and evil, in the midst of the ambiguities of life, and we need courage to affirm life and challenge all that thwarts life. We are between the first words, “let there be light” and future words which will declare that God is all in all. We are the animate letters of the Spirit that are between emptiness and fullness and are called to step into the margin, the void that has been created by exclusions in order to fill it with the divine voice. As Rabbi Marc Gafni urges us, we are not to avoid the void, not to dance around the void, a-void-dance.55 This is the whole idea of the prophetic spirit today under the new covenant or to use Paul Tillich’s phrase, the Spiritual Presence. If we are not to avoid the void, then we need to go into it—spiritedly. The zeal and act of accessing the void is often propelled by a small set of questions: How can that which makes a break with the status quo come into the world? How can the event which is entirely new find a place in the world? How can every individual be a site for the production of this kind of new? Such a new can only come into the world “through a process that breaks decisively with

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all established criteria for judging (or interpreting) the validity (or profundity) of opinions (or understandings).”56 This new begins with a break, with sometimes abruptly inventive decisions, “against-the-grain-of-the-world” personal commitment to resistance—resisting both falsehoods and established truths, and affirming innovation as such. “Such decisions are quite literally founded on nothing. Nothing—no knowledge, no familiarity with the rules, no ‘feel for the game,’ no understanding of habitus or tradition—will allow for the deduction of the decision from ‘the way things are’ or indeed from any operation (rationalization, clarification, extrapolation, exaggeration, variation, derivation, etc.) performed upon the way things are. Each such decision begins with a principled break with the way things are.”57 Section 5: Coda This part of the chapter has provided a basic framework for theological and ethical reflection on the excellentist social world. I set out to ask whether in a constructive excellentist world an inclusive social ethics is possible, what might it look like, and how might it orient political responses and decisions in a landscape defined by possibilities and uncertainty? I argued that the character of proper responses is to broaden and deepen relationality and communality. In a society bent on venturing beyond, there will always be surprises. In any community leaning to the real there will always be eruptions from the creative basis of relationality. It appears there is nothing we can do about this. While we cannot put out our palms as a dike for the resilient creative effusiveness in an excellentist world, there is something we can do to manage the eruptions. We either work to ensure that they do not destroy the forms of our democratic, inclusive way of being or respond to them in ways that shoo away or stamp out the new that is so crucial for human freedom and human flourishing. We have a choice—and we always do in spite of what our leaders are wont to tell us. If our interpretation of excellentist-world philosophy as creativity that is ever straining toward openness, the realm of new possibilities, and tipping over to touch the “front” or “horizon” is essentially correct, then it means that our ethics must aim to prepare the citizenry to deal with a world of increasing complexity, openness, possibilities, and uncertainty. The fundaments of the organization of society should lead to intensification of possibilities and potentialities at all levels as we deal with uncertainty while holding onto the expectation of new emergent qualities at any moment. This requires a new ethos that embodies hope and a prophetic expectation. On one hand, such a commitment to principle of excellence requires “an ethos that embodies an inventive, but evaluative, relation with the world that

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trusts that potentialities or possibilities exceed what has become”58 in the organization of society, the distribution of its rewards, and its response to crises. On the other, such a commitment obliges us to embrace the prophetic spirit. We need a citizenry that can sense the unprecedented, identify opportunities and threats, and craft the appropriate responses rooted in their creative and prophetic power.59 We need to continuously fashion an ethics that will enable individuals to cope with excellence, whereby they rely on the spirit rather than on rules, archaic traditions, and predetermined ethical codes for navigating what is and what must be a bewildering world. An important aspect of this fashioning process will be an updating of the received wisdom on social practice. We need to rethink social practice in ways that can provide us a better handle on the connection between cooperative human activities and a society’s capability to manage the bewildering amount of possibilities open to it. In the following chapter I will not only endeavor to do this, but I will also reconceptualize social practice to bring out its implicit directedness and attraction toward the norms of prophetic spirit.

Notes 1. Paul Tillich, The System of Sciences According to Objects and Methods, trans. with introduction by Paul Wiebe (London: Associated University Press, 1981); and Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3. 2. Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond, 20–24. 3. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3:84–85. 4. To use Gordon Kaufman’s word, In the Beginning . . . Creativity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 43. 5. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3:60. 6. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 42. 7. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3:249–52. 8. Tillich, The System of Sciences, 203. 9. Kaufman, In the Beginning . . . Creativity, 62. 10. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Paul Tillich’s Ethics: Between Politics and Ontology,” unpublished paper, (2006), 18. 11. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Paul Tillich’s Ethics,” 25. 12. Gordon Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 139; for the same idea see also 330, 337–39, 358, 370–71, and his An Essay on Theological Method, 3rd ed. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 64–67, 70–71. 13. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Paul Tillich’s Ethics,” 18. 14. Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery, 268. 15. Gordon Kaufman, Jesus and Creativity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 26. 16. Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery, 339. 17. Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery, 138, 266.

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18. Kaufman, In the Face of Mystery, 297. See also John Wall, “Imitatio Creatoris: The Hermeneutical Primordiality of Creativity in Moral Life,” The Journal of Religion 87, no. 1 (January 2007): 21–42; Wall, Moral Creativity: Paul Ricouer and the Poetics of Possibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19. Mark Lewis Taylor, “Paul Tillich’s Ethics,” 18. 20. For a discussion of the interplay of contingency and possibility, see J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? Human Consciousness in Science and Theology (Grand Rapid, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006), 54–56. 21. Ben Anderson, “‘Transcending Without Transcendence’: Utopianism and an Ethos of Hope,” Antipode 38, no. 4 (2006): 696. 22. Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays, trans. Andrew Joron (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 69. 23. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 106. 24. Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World? 56, citing Ian Stewart. 25. Richard Fenn, Time Exposure: The Personal Experience of Time in Secular Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 18. 26. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1986), 1373. 27. Anderson, “‘Transcending Without Transcendence,’” 702. 28. Paul Tillich, Political Expectation (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 29. Tillich, Political Expectation, 10–39. 30. Fenn, Time Exposure, 4–5. 31. “Prophetic spirit is a way of being that is always at work broadening and deepening the horizon of our lives and, in the process, giving rise to ever new awareness of breadth and depth in our understanding of being.” See Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post 9/11 Powers and American Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 97. 32. I have borrowed this phrasing from Paul Samuelson. He wrote: “We would expect people in the marketplace, in pursuit of avid and intelligent self-interest, to take account of those elements of future events that in a probability sense may be discerned to be casting their shadows before them. (Because past events cast their shadows after them, future [coming] events can be said to cast their shadows before them.)” See Paul Samuelson, “Proof that Properly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly,” Industrial Management Review 6 (Spring 1965): 44. 33. “Any attempt to require a sacrifice of the self needs to suggest that there is a larger temporal framework in which no sacrifice is ever lost or unrewarded. To demand that others link their personal fates with the destiny of the larger society and to disregard their personal needs or desires, it is necessary to evoke more than a time that ‘wears away’ and takes all its sons and daughters to their graves; it is necessary to evoke a common belief in a shared time that enshrines collective memory” (Fenn, Time Exposure, 109). 34. Fenn, Time Exposure, 61. 35. Richard Fenn, The End of Time: Religion, Ritual, and the Forging of the Soul (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1997), 1–9.

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36. Fenn, Time Exposure, 65. 37. Matthew 25:1–13. 38. According to Hamel and Prahalad, “the essential element of the new strategy frame is an aspiration that creates by design a chasm between ambition and resources. . . . The notion of strategy as stretch helps to bridge the gap between those who see strategy as a grand plan thought up by great minds and those who see strategy as no more than a pattern in a stream of incremental decisions.” Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, “Strategy as Stretch and Leverage,” Harvard Business Review (March–April 1993): 84. 39. Fenn, Time Exposure, 149. 40. Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right, 97. 41. Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 115, quoted in Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right, 97. 42. Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right, 97. 43. Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right, 128. Italics in the original. 44. Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right, 98. 45. Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right, 105–6. 46. Mark Lewis Taylor, Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right, 105–6. 47. Richard H. Niebuhr, The Responsible Self (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 48. I have here in mind Jeffrey Stout’s definition of piety. See his Democracy and Tradition, 20. 49. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1986), 295. 50. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World (New York: Random House, 1996), 93–135, 225–60. 51. Jean Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 166. 52. Keller, On the Mystery, 32. 53. Keller, On the Mystery, 32. 54. Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, 183. 55. Gafni, The Mystery of Love, xi. 56. Hallward, Badiou, xxiii. 57. Hallward, Badiou, xxiv. Italics in the original. 58. Anderson, “‘Transcending Without Transcendence,’” 704. 59. As Hardt and Negri asked, “don’t the necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the multitude?” See Hardt and Negri, Empire, 65.

CHAPTER SEVEN

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Social Practice as Boundary of Possibilities

In this chapter we will investigate the possibility of developing a fresh understanding of social practice based on the concept of excellence already forged in this study. The concept of excellence turns on possibilities, actualization of possibilities, and the straining toward the future—the actualization of potentialities in the future. It is from this encompassing perspective of possibilities that I will reconfigure the received concept of social practices in social ethics. Social practices function to limit human actions: a process of directing all discharges of instinctual energies and impulses through socially approved channels, followed by canalization of them from primitive and primal purposes to what is considered or constructed as higher cultural aim. It does this by demarcating the possibilities as acceptable or excluded. Social practices cut human responses and dialogue into two broad sets of possibilities. They help to domesticate some of the possibilities so that their level of wild danger is reduced. Those possibilities that are “inside,” those that are governed, vastly reduced into manageable portions become social practices. Those excluded are the wild, the uncouth and they may be dangerous and frightful. Among them are destructive passions. To conceive of social practice this way is not to put social practice and nonsocial practice, the included and excluded, in opposition. The included, that is social practice, is actually the image of the excluded that “they seek to evoke and yet propitiate and fend off.”1 It is like a doctor who introduces a nonpotent dose of virus to fight off the infection of the actual disease. 163

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Social practice limits and constrains because it sets boundaries and continuously reminds us of them. While it must keep the excluded possibilities at bay for the sake of society it still tries to incorporate its vitality in ways that support the system rather than destroy it. The ethics of social practice thus depends on what aspects of the possibilities in a given interaction are considered beyond the pale. The ethics is the boundary markers to keep the excluded in check. Ethical reflection may do well to examine the foreclosed possibilities and imagine which one of them is practicable. This is one reason it is dangerous to insist too rigidly, as some pragmatists do, that social practice is ethics.2 The ethics that is social practice emphasizes the normative boundaries and keeps off possibilities considered beyond imagination. In that emphasis it defines the acceptable way of being human. But it may be necessary to define new ways of being human, to descend into the realm of the excluded possibilities to capture new vitality for existing social systems. The reservoir of excluded possibilities—possibilities that did not make it into social practice; meaning they are outside the social system—is filled with vitality. The viruses that have not been captured in the immunization vial are full of vitality. This outside is where the religious, the numen of every social practice lives. And when certain gatherings occasion the spirit, not only are the excluded possibilities called forth into the “house,” but the overplus of energy that is the spirit also opens up the suppressed desires and possibilities. The excluded by definition is resistant to social control and thus when by some prophetic action a portion of it is corralled and released it becomes subversive to established order. The prophet who is able to corral and release excluded possibility may be taking fire into his or her bosom and even that of society. The prophet is always a danger to both the system and him- or herself. The prophet is the one who is saying that in order for the society to respond to new opportunities, avert dangers, and respond to threats it must peer into what the system has excluded. The descent into excluded zone dredges up old bitterness and threats while promising a new future which is often still ahead. For instance, the prophet may insist that capitalist power needs to be overthrown for all the evils done but the promise of a classless society is only anticipated for now. The church folks are promised that there is a day of judgment in which all those who put them down will be thrown into hell fire. But they have to patiently wait for that day. This process of settling old quarrels and raising expectation can cause problems for the prophet in a revolution of rising expectation. If only we can adequately understand social practice we may remember it to promote flourishing life. The search for adequate understanding is not helped

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by the pragmatic-ethicist thinking that social practice is ethics. This is too circumscribed a view of social ethics. A full-orbed ethics will demand that we look into the excluded zone. As society develops, becoming more complex, accumulating more technologies, it will appear to have included more and more of the excluded possibilities into its core. But then, these new skills, insights, and technologies that enable the society to develop create their own practices by excluding certain possibilities, vitalities. From the perspective of excellence and that of prophetic resistance, social practice is not the soul of any society. The soul is in the excluded possibility for the society to reform and transform itself. The spirit that arises from social practice is formed, informed, and transformed by the soul (excluded possibility) that can engender unimaginable possibilities to support or kill an existing sociality. Having established the perspective within which I am going to develop a concept of social practice that is in consonance with the philosophy of excellence, let us now enter into conversation with arguably the leading concept of social practice as developed by Alasdair MacIntyre.3 This exercise will serve to further critique the received wisdom on social practice and in so doing advance our understanding of the new perspective.

Section 1: Social Practice: The Tension between Included and Excluded Possibilities The notion of social practice occupies a principal position in social ethics discourse, and it is closely connected with what some ethicists consider as excellence (areteµ) in any society. Pragmatists regard social practice as ethics itself. Those ethicists who are of the virtue school consider social practice as the vehicle for the achievement of standards of excellence (virtue) in a given field of human cooperative activity and for the extension of the human powers to achieve excellence. The virtue ethicists’ theory of social practice does not deal with potentiality, only actuality; with the past and not with the future. It is governed by the fixed standards (measures) of virtue; gathering up evidence for evaluation of performance from past, “exercised,” habituated, acts. It does not permit eventful acts as the standards have actually been decided once and for all—habit is the result of repetition (and expected repetition) of past behavior. In this section, I want to investigate how the conception of social practice is affected by the conception of excellence I have put forward and, in so doing, alter the received wisdom in the field. Among those ethicists who see an indispensable connection between social practice and virtue is MacIntyre. For MacIntyre, social practice is:

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any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.4

In putting forward MacIntyre’s concept of social practice for consideration there are two crucial ideas about cultivation of virtues we need to bear in mind. First is the notion of goods that are internal to a form of activity and external goods. “Internal goods are those that can be realized only by participating in the activity well, as judged by its standards of excellence.”5 Second, external goods, in contrast, include prestige, status, honor, and power and can be achieved without excellence in the activity in question and, when achieved, are always some individual’s property or possession. “External goods are therefore characteristically objects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners. Internal goods are indeed the outcome of competition to excel, but it is characteristic of them that their achievement is good for the whole community who participate in the community.”6 Virtues are the habits that will enable the person to achieve internal goods in the cooperative activity and satisfy the standards of excellence in performance. They are cultivated in the context of social practice. He defines virtue as “an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”7 Every social practice expresses an ethics—ethics are cultivated in relation to social practice. In this MacIntyre is right. But he is wrong when he states that the ethics expressed is about excellence. This is the standard approach of virtue ethicists like MacIntyre. Following them, many ethicists look for the ethical element in a social practice only in the approved standards of performance (behavior) or so-called goods internal, which is another way of viewing the standards. Given the alternative understanding of excellence we have developed in this study, it is problematic to see ethics of any form of “socially established cooperative human activity” as expressed by standard (mean) behavior. For the ethics of social practice arises from the uncompleted, unresolved depths of social practice, not from the completed and rationalized part. It is the numinous quality of the social practice that produces and expresses its ethics. There are two frameworks for envisioning how a social practice comes to express an ethics: priestly and prophetic. From the priestly perspective, ethics

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is authority imposed on competing demands and directly exercises control over them. In the other, ethics emerges from the conversations of equal demands in conflict. MacIntyre’s view is a priestly one insofar as ethics is that which by its pursuit rationalizes the practice, excluding emotions, passions, impulses, and prejudices that threaten the order of practices. His concept of excellence as ethics of social practices is in the realm of the priestly perchance to bring order and rationality to what may appear temporary, specific, immediate, and pragmatic. With the priestly mindset the pursuit of excellence in a social practice imposes authority, pattern, and order on it—for it is considered as a primary ordering principle. Excellence is taken to be a principle or center that manages competing emotions and goods external to the form of activity. Like Aristotle’s areteµ it is a very controlled display of desires and emotions; it is the dominant voice of reason. It disguises or expresses social tendencies toward the rationalization of the social order, the polis. The areteµ as Aristotle and MacIntyre would have us believe is the single principle of order for a rationalized practice. It is the essence of the whole social practice and the casing of action is areteological. If one read MacIntyre correctly, the pursuit and realization of such a principle by an individual become a source of moral obligation to the society as a whole—the areteµ a citizen owes to another. And this is ethics, he insists. What if there is no single principle, but rather many principles competing and every principle is peripheral to all others. If, as MacIntyre argues, a practice is any coherent and complex form of cooperative human activity and if modern society is also complex, it is not a big step to imagine both (practice and society) within a bigger set of practices and in a larger system. In the modern large-scale society everything is an environment to everything else.8 A system’s environment is always impinging on the system; the boundaries of a set of practices are very permeable to outside influences; and as a result the environment of every practice has become much larger and it has become very difficult to differentiate the set of practice (“coherent and complex set form of socially established cooperative human activity”) from its environment. MacIntyre’s idea of social practice presumes that social practice started primarily as a means to good citizenry in a functioning polis. Each person in this polis is working to be a good citizen; and in that striving, the participants in a social practice discharge a debt, the debt of areteµ they owe to one another. Thus the moral character of the individual or the social practice is disclosed in the striving to attain and keep ideals of moral perfection. The attainment makes the individual a good citizen. But what if social practice did not begin with aspirations or debt but with the moral claim of others on the self? The response to this moral claim starts with not by asking what is

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the telos for which I am to strive, but how I am to interpret and respond to the demand made on me? We are in a better position to adequately understand social practice if we started with the self believing the ends the other person is seeking and in the other person’s claim on the self. What is the demand on the self as it encounters another person, another power of being trying to actualize his or her potentialities as the self is doing the same? Social practice arises from responding to each other’s action or claims in line with our interpretation of the action and in anticipation of the possible responses to our response. It is not that teleological actions are not important, but in reacting to the other in an encounter I am trying to imitate the other to protect myself. It is the interpretation of the other’s motives, goals, and actions that are more important than striving for areteµ or the definition of what constitutes perfection. Social practice in this sense becomes a set of actions in dialogue that answers to responses, anticipates answers, and elicits responses; it demands both the self and other to account for answers of each person to responses, and renews commitment to a cause (continuing discourse). “It is made as part of a total conversation that leads forward and is to have meaning as a whole.”9 I would argue that social practice is brought into being by our consciousness of the other who limits us. Social practice becomes both a response to and a device for managing our encounters with one another that limit us. We govern our humanity and presence of being to being by social practice. On one hand, social practices limit us and also limit the existence of the other. On the other hand, it provides the web of sustaining support for our interpersonal interactions and our mutual drive toward the creative realization of our possibilities. Social practices must be thought of as the articulation of moral, legal, and political spaces in which certain forms of interaction become possible and are condoned in the human-to-human encounter. Any of these spaces is never a done deal, never a clearly bounded arena, but it is continuously articulated, affirmed, and rearticulated. The energy for this ever-continuing unwinding comes from inter alia, the desire of the self to expand its boundaries in the act of participating in the world both for nourishment, communication, and relation—in short, to maintain and expand its power of being. The energy may also come from the feeling that there is a gap between actuality and the ideal, the self and the not-yet self. There is also energy from the eros toward the other and from the power of being. Another source of animation is the threat of insignificance. As Richard Fenn puts it: [H]umans generally need some “heroic belonging to a victorious cause” if they are to feel that their own lives are significant. . . . Their daily victories over

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despair require participation in power and in a wholeness more glorious by far than their own achievements. . . . The basic need to feel that one’s life counts for something is . . . a reaction to the threat of cosmic insignificance and a breeding ground for continual struggles for supremacy.10

In this light, the constitutive fact of moral existence is not the self or the community striving for “areteological perfection” but the limitation of the self in and through encounters with others on the endless, winding road to creative realization of humanity’s potentialities. But this recognition does not mean that we can formulate “ethics as social practice” and think we have explored all the moral dimensions of social practice. Social practice is not only about the moral, but is also about the religious. It is religious neither in the Tillichian sense of social practice relating individuals to what is ultimate to them nor because human existence is absolutely dependent on social practices. It is also not religious because being arises out of doing or religion itself is a social practice. It is religious because the person-to-person encounter that is generative of the moral-ethical also constitutes a ground for the “holy” to emerge. It is religious because in the encounter of the other on which social practice supervenes there are traces of the charisma, qualities of the sacred. While a particular social practice fulfills a finite set of possibilities, the originative space of the encounter of being-to-being that engenders the social practice is a horizon of unfulfilled possibilities. The excluded or the unfulfilled is a primordial soup out of which can crawl the religious, the sacred. This originative site is the sphere that social practices try to exclude from view or reckoning. What is excluded and unfulfilled transcends the passage of time and this makes it sacred. What is sacred in any society is believed to always have a purchase on eternity. As Fenn has recently argued, the sacred is the embodiment of unfulfilled possibilities: Because the sacred embodies only unfulfilled possibilities, it always points beyond itself to the full range of possibilities for either salvation or destruction. This set of all possibilities, both actual and hypothetical, I call the Sacred, and it is to the sociology of religion what dark matter is to astrophysicists, or “the god above the god of theism” is to theologian.11

Thus, the space of the encounter in which the moral ensconces itself is an infinity or depth that is not only the canvas upon which the social practices paints itself or the background on which it is enacted, but is also acting on the social practice itself and the individuals involved in it. This realm of unfulfilled possibilities haunts the realm of realized possibilities and pushes

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it toward the not-yet. In every human-to-human encounter that both limits and enhances the power of being in each self, something develops that lies beyond such an encounter. There is another perspective from which we can examine the religious element in any social practice. Every social practice is not self-contained and it is happening in and responding to other social practices in a mesh of practices. It transcends itself by pointing and gesturing to a whole beyond it and in which it is involved. It transcends itself when it gestures to the projected horizon of the continuing discourse. This transcending totality, the community of social practices, is not a heteronomous imposition. The totality or the universal is born in the particular as when the particulars show general pattern in their interactions, in their quest for evaluation, accountability, and validation. The whole in which each social practice lives, moves, and has its being is the ultimate reference, which is only transcendentally immanent. To remind ourselves: I argue that social practices are religious and constitute a ground for the “holy” to emerge. Our immediate reason for embarking upon this task is to dislodge the MacIntyrean vise grip in which the concept of social practice has been lodged for too long. The remote goal is to offer a fresh perspective that will unearth the proper fundamental connection between excellence and social practice. I will argue that this numen exists in every social practice and we can channel it for prophetic resistance, which as we have seen is integral for governance in an excellentist world. Since the numen dwells in the realm of unfulfilled possibilities, prophetic spirit can enable us to imagine the unimaginable, to overthrow the imaginable, and create alternative spaces for human freedom and flourishing. No matter how innovative a social practice is it always defines the limits of aspirations and “institutionalizes” the set of possibilities of human interaction that the system of society is willing to allow at a given moment or deems practicable. Yet it is haunted by the unfulfilled possibilities. The prophetic spirit that goes where it wants blows the awareness of such unfulfilled possibilities into popular consciousness for a more abundant life. This means that today’s prophets need to attempt to free the sacred and release it into the body of society so as to foster fresh longings for human flourishing, fresh desires for transcending humanity. The idea that the holy emerges from social practice has long been something that many in traditional African cultures take for granted. Among the Kalabari of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the holy, godliness is an emergent phenomenon of human worship; like social systems it realizes itself through practices. The holy emerges and is ensconced in the social practice of worship. The gods arise from such practice insofar as their power of being is in

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it. The gods are conceived as a source of tremendous power. But the power that the gods possess is believed to depend on the social practice of human worship. Their powers derive from human worship and as such humans can reduce or completely efface the power of any god by withdrawing worship.12 It is believed that spirits and gods do not have intrinsic powers of their own such that the withdrawal of worship from or worshipful dependence on a god deprives it of power and authority to act on humans or control human activities. Kalabari insist that a god that is not worshipped loses its power. So if a god becomes too furious or demanding they will tell it from which tree it was carved (“agu-nsi owi baka kuma en ke o kara sin en dugo o piriba”13). This means that a community can unanimously annul the power of a god by refusing it worship.14 Robin Horton interprets the aphorism this way: Literally, if a spirit’s demands become too burdensome, the whole congregation can join together to destroy its cult objects, and by this unanimous act of rejection render it powerless to trouble them further. . . . Broadly, then, the more people lavish offerings, invocations, and festivals upon any spirit, the more powerful it becomes both to reward and punish them. And conversely, the less they attend to it the less powerful it becomes—up to the point at which unanimous rejection results in the complete loss of power. Generally, of course, a single man cannot reject a spirit at will; for while he is only one among a congregation of many, it will have the power to punish him.15

This way of thinking is not at all surprising once one grasps the importance of relations as constitutive of both society and personhood in Kalabari communities. Worship is not just reverence, obeisance, praise and exaltation, or appropriate response to deity, but the dynamic maintenance of deep, thick relations, social bond with a deity. All forms of power, be it political or spiritual, are always predicated on the strength of social bonds among persons and the fracture or rupture of the bond or the displacement of harmony in the bond means erosion of power and authority. In the Western tradition, Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, long pointed out to us that individuals generate some sort of divinity when they come together. In the collective occasion they discover their connectedness with each other, deem themselves transformed and transfigured, and discern a set of possibilities that lie beyond the community. The sacred emerges in this setting of corporate identity and “collective effervescence” which claims for itself the capacity to transcend the ravages and passage of time. The numen is generated when the individual sense of identity is merged with that of the group or collective. Under these conditions the sense of possibilities soars to new heights, repressed elements jostle to float to the surface, and

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the numen emerges. The crowd or the collective comes to embody—however temporally—the impulse of the numen. To experience the numen “is to find oneself in the grip of a passion or presence that seems to come from beyond oneself.”16 But often this feeling of being affected by a presence that seems physically absent or distant is also the experience of ecstasy, “of being beside oneself, or being captivated by the presence of another soul who seems to take precedence over one’s own.”17 To experience the primitive (numen) one may feel that it is God, a distant and invisible being, who is present and at work beneath the forms of everyday life. Alternatively, one may settle for the unseen but palpable presences of angels and saints.18

Section 2: The Myth of Goods: Internal versus External The theory of excellence, as presented by MacIntyre, conveys to the reader the idea that social practice is a coherent and stable domain with its own internal dynamic. Excellence is only the fruit of this dynamic when the participants keep their eyes on the ball, when they gaze on the goods internal to the domain. But it is highly doubtful if MacIntyrean excellence is a fruit of a locus of activities or result of a moral problematization of goods external to the domain. MacIntyre problematized the so-called external goods and constructed a gradation (differentiation, classification) of goods to enable the regulation and normalization of goods internal. Articulating a mythical categorization of goods, internal and external, his method implies that immorality is not located in the practice but in the surplus, excess, and exaggeration. In his schema, it is through the emphasis on the external, the excess, the tail of the distribution that the normal, the excellence is able to emerge. What if morality and immorality are in the nature of the activity? What if there is no clear tail or hump in the distribution? What if every practice is demonic in the Tillichian sense? There are other problems with the MacIntyrean approach to social practice. Is it not obvious that excellence is constructed or defined in the very model of social practice that is supposed to reveal it? The fact that MacIntyre’s definition of social practice constructs a contingent image of excellence according to a specific conception of virtue that performatively creates excellence has been generally disregarded for too long. Although excellence is articulated as a teleological goal or performance indicator it reflexively denotes not how social practices are but how they ought to be. If we stepped outside the normality defined by MacIntyre and its attendant exclusionary discourses into the hurly-burly world of real social practices there

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may not be a single locus of excellence or source of perfections; no pure law of distinction. Instead there is plurality of excellences in any one practice, each of them a specific case. Not many scholars have realized that MacIntyre’s concept of excellence surreptitiously carries a philosophy asking people to differentiate between “commercial” motivation and a “private” one. This kind of stance reminds me of the nineteenth-century debate on Wall Street (United States) about speculation and gambling. The stock exchanges were struggling with the bucketshops (small brokerage houses which were not members of official or established exchanges and were considered inferior by the big stock trading houses) for market share and respectability. The exchanges tried to make a distinction between speculation (which they regarded as legitimate and took place on their floors) and immoral gambling on stocks and futures that took place in bucketshops. According to the argument, speculators accept and offset commercial risk borne by investors and producers and hence help to smoothen and develop financial markets. Speculators make an excellent contribution to the pricing mechanism, they say. On the other hand, the exchanges maintained that gamblers are engaged in searching for gains or profits and their focus on excellence (oiling of the pricing system and managing risk) is not primary, only secondary at best. They argued that gambling on stocks is not about accepting commercial risk but about gains, about private gains. But this discursive separation, like that of MacIntyre between internal and external good, is not natural, but a political one. It is not inherent in the nature of transactions but on perceptions of morality. Risk acceptance (what was deemed “excellence” in speculation) must not be viewed simply as an end in itself but also a condition for gain. Gain is also a prerequisite for risk acceptance. Each must be fostered for the other to occur, not to speak of to flourish. Risk and gain in the security business are not necessarily pulling at each other from opposite ends. They are mutually constitutive and one cannot exist without the other. It is only under the hegemony of MacIntyrean “excellence” imperative that one may see goods internal as a rejection of goods external. Social practice does not appear as centered as it was once thought (or as virtue ethicists want us to believe) because as Niklas Luhmann pointed out, the environment of every system is impinging on its core (excellence or “internal goods”). And it is very difficult to distinguish the boundaries of a social practice itself from its environment. The vaulted medical practice today can no longer define excellence of its caregiving without reference to insurance companies’ demands, fear of liability lawyers, demands of health management organizations, and “defensive” procedures and tests. In the absence of

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the structural, systemic singular unity that virtue ethicists (MacIntyre) once thought social practice to be, excellence is no longer an either-or matter. If there is no singular, systemic unity there cannot be singular excellence, but plurality of excellences involving internal and external goods. When the once “sacred” doctor-patient relationship escapes from the tight control of the doctor’s room, that is, becomes less institutionalized under professional medical control, the notion of excellence in that care becomes highly contestable.19 Under this condition excellence in medical care becomes also an aspect of other systems that impinge on the hospital’s role so much so that they too may be regarded as “sacred.” Or at least their forms of organization sacralized regardless of their ability to achieve their stated goals. Once excellence in doctor’s caregiving becomes encompassed in complex settings its definition becomes relatively abstract as the semantic range is widened and it becomes contested in the public arena. The notion of excellence becomes a range of code words to attack doctors for carelessness by liability lawyers or to be used to demonize insurance companies and liability lawyers for putting profits above well-intended care.20 Here once again we have brought to view the difficulty of keeping the excluded possibilities, “goods external” at bay. Herein is also the numen, the religious in the closely guarded sphere of the goods internal to a practice. In the encounter of two human beings, the encounter between any set of practices in a system there is, once again, this finding that not all parts of the encounter can be conditioned. There is a living, vigorous energy that permeates human coexistence that keeps erupting into our finely demarcated world and does not like to abide where moral philosophers and ethicists want it to stay. We have been told by MacIntyre that social practice fulfills its purpose when it is pursued for its “goods internal.” Now there can be no doubt that social practice has internal goods and the pursuit of them works in a myriad of ways for its endurance and excellence, but this is not the point. The salient question is whether the pursuit of goods internal can explain social practice as such. The answer has to be negative. The pursuit of internal goods in order to function presupposes an already existing social bond that restricts and disciplines spontaneous human conduct and destructive self-preference. A well-functioning social practice totally bent toward goods internal is in constant danger of being disrupted by force or fraud and thus cannot sustain cooperative activities unless it is backed by an “action-limiting” social bond. This is a primary and primitive fact of social practice. This bond itself presupposes another set of practices that anchors, limits, and defines it. Put differently, a social practice could not happen at all unless there is a setting, an opening in which it can happen. If a social practice

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itself is conditioned and enabled by an other, then its power to define what is ultimately internal to it will run into significant limit. Invariably, the power of any cooperative human activity to endow itself with predicates refers to something for its act of self-endowing or self-positing. This further act, as we have already noted, is the limit that arises from the claim on the self as selves are engaged in self-realization and self-transcendence. MacIntyre’s idea of social practice has an idea of identity embedded in it. Goods internal, by their abidingness in a given practice, give it its own identity. Take for instance, if chess is played for money alone it is then really no different from basketball played for money. In MacIntyre’s lights, it is the good internal to playing chess and that alone gives chess its distinct identity as a social practice. The cooperative human activity abides by the virtue of the continuing existence (or pursuit) of goods internal. In a world of contingency and possibilities it may be considered unwise to restrict the abiding “whatness” of an activity to goods internal rather than to the configurative processes of the practice itself. A social practice is a continuously developing process whose identity may not lie in the persistence of goods internal but in the continuous succession of bodily activities that carries the cooperation forward. MacIntyre’s definition of social practice as cooperative human activities obscures a question that begs for an answer. That is, how a set of “temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings” came to constitute a social practice?21 Once this question is ignored or glossed over, the MacIntyrean approach inevitably hides the crucial nature of social practice as a design mechanism. Social practice is a form of design mechanism that enables a dispersed nexus of doings and sayings to express how a realm of possibilities stands in a nexus of human coexistence. The primary problem of every social practice is not how to express goods internal to patterns of actions, speeches, and behaviors or how to allocate goods (internal or external), but how to collate and use spatially dispersed doings and sayings in a mutually understandable way. The beginning point for a social practice is what things matter to people. It is about which possibilities of interaction or existence the parties want to achieve and what makes sense to them in terms of these possibilities. It is the role of social practice to ensure that in the encounter of humans possibilities are not untethered to drift and intensify into destructive proportions.

Concluding Remarks The problem of social practice, therefore, is not a problem about how to pursue the good, or to do the right thing, but to mobilize and utilize the

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knowledge dispersed throughout human interactions in the society. Virtue theory that relies on a given goal and right theory that relies on motivation for the good have obscured this problem. Social practices are mechanisms to mobilize the dispersed knowledge in human interactions in a way that would permit relationships not to fracture, but rather to realize gains from interactions and to innovate. The dread with which the tribal or primitive man confronts the stranger is not at first something rational or moral. The knowledge he and his fellow men and women need to organize themselves is dispersed among them and no one has an immediate incentive to reveal it. In a fresh encounter, none of the parties know the value the other places on continuity and maintenance of the relationship. None of them know whether or not the other party wants to maintain continuity or fracture the relationship. The knowledge each has or does not have is private information. Now think of social practice as a mechanism—participants put in their information, their knowledge, hoping to attune their actions to the other. Think of it as an attempt to tune the encounter each time it is made. There is a mutual tuning of agency and this attunement structures each individual’s future stream of behavior. Now their doings and sayings constitute a practice “because of the contexts in which it is performed and against the background of the understanding of X-ing (and Y-ing and Z-ing, etc.).”22 Any given standard of excellence, consequently, presupposes this background of understanding and of the included and excluded possibilities that defined the limits of actions. It is only as they learn to deal with each other, restrain each other in repeated encounters (that is, if they survive the first encounter), that something that philosophy can call “rational” standard of excellence of social practice comes into view. What really is happening is that social practice creates not only a neighbor for the primitive man but also a neighbor for the stranger. They reciprocally constitute one another. And in constituting one another they limit one another by preventing certain possibilities in their relationships while they must keep at bay the excluded possibilities. In an aleatory world where the excluded must intrude to the center of attention from time to time, it helps to find a way to use its vitality to push life further ahead. An important task of social ethics is to imagine new possibilities that will enable humanity to reach forward to a new level of flourishing. The careful reader may have identified two opposing tendencies in my explication of the possible emergence and functioning of social practice. Social practice provides the form and process to embody sanctioned possibilities; it attempts to define “the agreed upon limits on what individuals

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could claim for themselves.”23 Opposing this drive is the excluded possibility that disregards the limits set by the social practice and which has the tendency to degrade established structures about “what can be imagined and claimed for the individual’s own purposes and satisfactions.”24 Now if the included possibilities are not injected from time to time with otherwise unimaginable possibilities from the excluded for higher realization of human potentials, the society runs into a social dead. Any serious concept of social practice with interest on the immortal longings of men and women to transcend humanity must never put the majority of its emphasis on rational standard of excellence as MacIntyre and other virtue ethicists have done. Instead it must put its accent on the real agencies of the excluded possibilities that have historically formed humanity, moved it toward the actualization of potentialities, and “are drawing it into the future” and capable of opening a “pathway for the emergence of a wholly new vision of” humanity.25 This is why we need to keep the prophetic spirit alive in any society that is willing to be on the path of excellence and human flourishing. And in this matter, the much-harangued discipline of economics may have something going for it. Economics is one academic discipline where its major theoreticians maintain that all social practices in a modern economy should be a seedbed of some kind of prophetic spirit; that is, it needs to be opened to vitalities coming from the outside. Economists talk about “creative destructions” as the power of the new coming from the outside to destabilize the inside (and sometimes destroy some of the contents of the inside) so as to push the system toward the novum, to higher levels of realized potentialities. As Joseph Schumpeter puts it in its 1942 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the new always breaks into the inside to revolutionize existing structures.26 This theoretical stance notwithstanding, the actual working of the modern economic system is to say the least not prophetically spirit-minded from the perspective of the people in the down below of the giant global economic ship. Within the spaces they function, all they see and experience is “destruction” which has been sundered from the “creative.” Running an economy with an eye toward releasing the potentials of all human beings in it is one good way of suturing the “creative” and “destructive ” together to help such marginalized agents to flourish. This is the true prophetism in the so-called creative destruction. In the next chapter, we will extend our philosophy of excellence to the theory of economic development. I argue that a human being is not only the end and means of economic development, but together with others is also the clearing to allow development to manifest.

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Notes 1. Richard Fenn, The Return of the Primitive: A New Sociological Theory of Religion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 2. 2. See Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), and his Democracy and Tradition. 3. MacIntyre, After Virtue. 4. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 187. 5. Stout, Ethics After Babel, 267. 6. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 190–91. 7. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 191. 8. Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Fenn, The End of Time, 8. 9. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, 64. 10. Richard Fenn, The Spirit of Revolt: Anarchism and the Cult of Authority (Totowa N. J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), 165. 11. Richard Fenn, “Sociology and Religion: Searching for the Sacred,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 259. Italics in the original. 12. Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work, 37–39. 13. “Agu-nsi” is an Igbo word that has been adopted in Kalabari. The Kalabari word for carved or sculptured idol is e.ke.ke.-tamu.no>; and e.ke.ke. means stone, piece of stone or rock. 14. Robin Horton, Kalabari Sculpture (Lagos: Department of Antiquities, Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1965), 8–9. See also Robin Horton, “The Kalabari Worldview: An Outline and Interpretation,” Africa 32, no. 3 (July 1962): 204. Horton relates the story of how a spirit who misbehaved was summoned before an assembly of its worshippers, found guilty, and fined. Robin Horton, “A Hundred Years of Change in Kalabari Religion,” in Black Africa: Its People and their Cultures Today, ed. John Middleton (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1971), 194–98. 15. Horton, “The Kalabari Worldview,” 204. I have heard of at least two cases of gods that have been disrobed of their powers. One is the Owu Akpana (shark) cult and the other is Ogboloma (called Kun-ma in Okrika, also a Niger Delta community) cult. 16. Fenn, The Return of the Primitive, 59. 17. Fenn, The Return of the Primitive, 60. 18. Fenn, The Return of the Primitive, 60. 19. In this and the next three sentences I am indebted to Richard Fenn’s idea of the deinstitutionalizing of the sacred and the ritualizing of everyday life. See his, “Sociology and Religion,” 253–70, especially 261–63. 20. The discussions in this paragraph benefited from Fenn, The End of Time, 7–9. 21. Theodore E. R. Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89. 22. Schatzki, Social Practices, 92. 23. Fenn, The Return of the Primitive, 24. 24. Fenn, The Return of the Primitive, 24.

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25. Robert E. Ulanowicz, “Emergence, Naturally!” Zygon 42, no. 4 (December 2007): 959. 26. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942), 82–85.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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The history of humans is a story of the expansion of human capabilities, the enhancement of the quality of life, and increasing interconnections between persons and people. No doubt this process has been thwarted in multiple places and at several times, but by and large this has been the trend of development. The central part of the exercise of this development, as Amartya Sen argues, has been the overcoming of problems, the removal of “unfreedoms” that thwart human flourishing.1 The very view of development that makes a discursive space for overcoming of obstacles to human freedom includes, by definition, an eros to freedom, a strong attachment of human beings to freedom. It begs for a conceptualanalytical endeavor to investigate and clarify the engine (force) behind the attachment or the principle of such an eros. While I find Sen’s insights about development as freedom both provocative and relevant, I still think that his failure to relate this eros toward what it means to be human in the first place leaves room for the kind of study undertaken in this book. It can indeed be argued that a proper understanding of what human flourishing and development are—their content and force—require an analysis of the endowment and possibilities of the human nature. The attraction of endowment and possibilities to higher forms of realization is behind the human’s drive to overcome all unfreedoms. The self does not strive for human flourishing with something it does not have, an object besides itself. Human nature—and by extension human sociality—preserves and transcends itself by participation in excellence. 181

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Excellence is the self’s power to actualize itself by overcoming obstacles in life that negate life. Excellence is also self’s power over itself. It is an expression of the essential act of human beings. It is not a contingent aspect of being and it makes a human what he or she is. Thus, to strive for human flourishing—the development of capabilities and opportunities—is to act according to human nature. In a positive twist of a familiar Benedict Spinoza idea, I will argue that excellence is the power of acting according to one’s true nature. And the degree of excellence is the degree to which somebody is striving for and able to affirm increasing levels of human flourishing.2 Excellence in this light is the ontological foundation of human flourishing and virtue altogether. Excellence is a virtue; the highest and most prior virtue, is living, acting, and doing according to one’s true nature.3

Section 1: The Theological Character of Economic Development The pursuit of economic development, which has often been characterized by fits and starts, rides on a basic creative propensity in human nature and, arguably, the most important virtue in human coexistence. This undergirding power I have named excellence, and the task of this section is to explore the theological character of economic development through its lenses. There is a theological character to economic development and it exists in the transversal region of two disciplinary concerns. Economists are concerned about economic development. Theologians are concerned about human flourishing within Godworld relatedness. But none of these two groups is explicitly considering the creative process through which economic goods come into being in the context of the theological character of economic development. It is true to say that the knowledge of the theological character of economic development is not only an inducement to seek after the creative processes of economic advancement, but likewise a considerable aid toward attaining human flourishing. It is also true that no theologian can arrive at the true knowledge of human development (flourishing) without having first contemplated its economic character and then proceed to the consideration of his or her own disciplinary concern. Theologians need to relate their knowledge of self-transcendence in the self-world correlation or human-divine relatedness to their knowledge of economic development. They need to speak of excellence (the ceaseless, erotic drive of humans to exceed the given, the finite), which gives the inner and essential basis for understanding economic development. And they also need to speak of economic development (and civilizational shifts), which gives an existential basis for understanding excellence.

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The concern about economic development is a question about human existence. Economists respond to questions about human existence with answers that point to differences in the wealth of nations and disparities of wealth in various eras in human economic existence. They develop their answer unaware that economic existence itself is the question. Such answers typically presume modern economic behavior for human nature: humancapability enhancement for self-transcendence and economic strides for human excellence, while overlooking any gap between them. Theologically, if we stick to this reasoning, it means that we can only explain excellence as the product of human economic self-realization in the progressive process of economic history. This is a wrong path to take. For if they are correct, then all who are estranged right now from the lofty economic achievements of the advanced nations may be lacking excellence. Excellence is not a creation of economic self-realization; rather it is the ontological drive of human life to exceed forms and to be directed toward the infinite. In and through economic creations and progress, the urge of excellence can actualize itself, become manifest. Economic progress is a medium, a bearer pointing beyond itself. Economic development is not itself the excellence; it is a process whereby the regime of possibility that structures an economy, a regime of the excellence, is modified. It is an active transformation of excellence, a moving of the boundaries of excellence. Its ultimate goal consists in making possible precisely that level of human flourishing which from within the extant regime of possibility is declared impossible. Economic development is, therefore, of interest theologically not from the point of view of increase in gross national product or even economic welfare (though all these are important), but from the point of view of its power of expressing aspects of excellence in and through the drive to exceed forms insofar as such drive conditions our “being.” The purpose here is to analyze how an understanding of the concept of excellence will impact our thinking about economic development. What kind of light will be shed on the Nobel Prize–winning economist Sen’s notion of development as freedom? He has argued that economic development is not just about quantitative increases in gross national product, but principally about giving people the freedoms, the capabilities to become both the means (agents) and the end (goals and recipients) of their own economic development. Bringing this about, he argues, involves deliberate successive removal and vigilant resistance to unfreedoms. Particularly, Sen has famously described economic development as freedom. By this he means the continuous and calculated attempt to remove unfreedoms, endowing people with capabilities so that they will become both

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the agents (means) and end of their economic development process. I find two major shortcomings in his analysis. First, the idea of development as freedom is not philosophically linked to humans who have the “future in their being.” Humans are by nature future-oriented and we need to know how the constant struggle to eliminate unfreedoms is related to their basic nature. Second, there is no discussion of the basic ontological foundation of freedom. Is the human struggle to create and sustain freedom—of which economic development is just one major aspect—basic to what it means to be human? What is it about human beings that may possibly undergird the search for freedom? In this chapter, I argue that what undergirds economic development and its aim of freedom is excellence. Excellence is the matrix from which freedoms come forth. So I will argue for a new perspective in economic development: development as excellence. This is not to say that economic development and excellence are identical. And I am not positing that we should think of excellence only in terms of economic development, only within the territory of developed countries, or even only in terms of scientific-technological breakthrough. I believe that material economic development can never be the ground and essence of excellence but the latter can flash in its manifestedness in the dimension of development or scientifictechnological breakthrough. As already noted above, Sen has made a fine distinction between economic development as increase in total output and economic development as freedom. He writes about development as freedom; development is presented as release from unfreedoms, as the veritable engine (agent, cause) of development. I interpret this notion of freedom as the dynamic quality of human existence. Freedom as an agent of development points beyond itself, demanding for its completion in further development. Development (rising gross national product) itself points beyond itself, also demanding more development, more unshackling from unfreedoms. But the nature of the demand for completion is different in each case. When economic development points beyond itself, to demand completion, it is about the filling in of what is lacking in human well-being. We add what we consider to be lacking to our basic well-being. Electricity, education, and medical services, for example, are added to complete the incomplete life of dehumanizing (incomplete) existence. “Such is the case, for example, with the restoration of a mutilated statue, of a partially destroyed painting. We see the need for completion, see too in what general direction it points; by supplying what has been missing, we make the incomplete complete.”4 But when economic development as freedom demands completion, when it points beyond itself, it is not about filling or adding, but is strictly about

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replacing. The demand for completion of every gain of freedom “is not only toward the appearance of something that is not yet [more freedoms], but at the same time toward the disappearance of what is now present.”5 For example, the state of incompleteness, the absence of adequate capability to properly weigh and trade agricultural produce by an illiterate village woman expresses itself in the demand for education. The demand for education will not be satisfied (the inability to weigh properly will not go away) if a government measuring agency were simply provided to her. The appearance of the proper skills of measurement demands for the disappearance of illiteracy. For the education to be a complete freedom, illiteracy must disappear. What is lacking must appear in the place of what is given. In economic development as quantitative increment what was lacking now appears besides the lack, but in development as freedom what was lacking succeeds to take the place of the lack. As Victor Zuckerkandl put it in his comparison of visual incompleteness and auditory-incompleteness in music: “the demand for completion on the part of a tone is a demand to cease being and to let something else, something that is not yet, appear.”6 What is common to both cases (freedom and material quantitative development) is the “something dynamic, the pointing beyond itself, a demand for completion,”7 and this common basis is excellence. Excellence is the dynamic that undergirds economic development either as an addition to current level of well-being or as the generator of freedoms that must necessarily displace unfreedoms. This common basis needs to be investigated and properly understood by economists, but it has been largely ignored. I find the neglect of this basic human dynamic in the general debate toward defining economic development unacceptable. This book is an attempt to respond to this neglect. Economists have interpreted economic development with the purpose of delivering it. With a few notable exceptions this concern has been limited to making (creating, engineering) development and not with understanding it. To put it in a rather gross comparison: the problems of economists are the problems of composition rather than music. What they have mainly said is all about the difficult technique of producing development. There is nothing much to hang on to when it comes to understanding development itself, its nature, its essence. Development must be properly related to human nature in all of its physical, social, and spiritual dimensions via excellence. All this is not intended as a blame or reproach, but to point out that there is a need to understand the inner core of development. In other words, how can economic ethics, philosophy, or theology of development focus on the problems of electricity rather than on the problems of the electrician, to use Victor

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Zuckerkandl’s analogy.8 In this study I want to ask and address the questions that are internal to the development phenomenon. Both economists and ethicists appear not to be focused on the inner core of development. Some of them need to play the role of the nineteenthcentury English physicist Michael Faraday to understand the “electricity” of economic development, and others need to play the role of Hollywood technicians who set up the neon lights to dazzle people. But this is not happening. Economists and ethicists are arguing against each other from the same side of the fence. A third voice is needed to both enrich the flow of the debate and nudge it away from the eddy in which it is trapped. Economists say development—no matter how it is sliced and diced—conveys the sense of a series of gains in well-being, flourishing. Ethicists: It is the positive changes in well-being that makes a series of steps in innovations, inventions, and transformation meaningful. This writer: Series of innovations or growths in gross domestic product will no more make the essence of development than successions of tones will a melody make. “A melody is a series of tones that makes sense.”9 Strictly speaking melody and rhythm happens in between the tones.10 It happens in the “margin” and this is useful knowledge to have. As we have seen and will further see in this study, excellence happens in the margin too. At first blush, it may appear that ethicists and neoclassical economists greatly differ on the idea of economic development. The debate between neoclassical economists and ethicists is not about the succession of progress that marks development but the meaning in the progress. Yet neither meaning nor succession is at the inner core of development. What is it then that adheres in a succession of progress? Or what adheres in the changes in meaning of the series of material and immaterial gains that is at the core of what it means to be developing in general? In all these there is a pointing toward—every movement is dictating a direction, placing itself in a direction, wants to pass beyond itself, and does not want itself.11 This is in the nature of all succession and every take on development consciously or unconsciously presupposes it. Thus no series of progress, no amount of changes in ethical meaning, or interpretation of economic progress is capable of making a good conclusion. The dynamic quality that accrues (attends) to human existence is the inner core of development. It is this inner core which encompasses and transcends every form of economic development that I have been investigating or theologizing in this book. This dynamic quality is properly the human quality of development. It is a universal quality of the finite being, the concrete actuality of being called human. It is a universal dimension of human existence. This dynamic quality

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is in a certain sense what makes us human and undergirds the development process. This demand to proceed, this unfinishedness of every step that accrues to every activity, every meaning in the context of existence is integral to what it means to be human. It is a process in which a human becomes a person and ceases to be a “thing.”12 It is the original fact and act of every self-creativity and self-transcendence. The dynamic self-realization, self-affirmation is a fundamental character of the human life. It gives validity to every development and it is present in every development or progress. In every progress, innovation, invention, or transformation the human personhood actualizes itself. This dynamic quality of human existence can be analyzed philosophically or theologically. Philosophically, only if we examine it just as it is, but theologically if we also affirm it as a manifestation of the infinite or show how it can penetrate through the finite to its infinite ground. Christian theology, in particular, will further interpret it as belonging to the created goodness of humanity. This study has treated both aspects—starting with the philosophical side and only after thoroughly understanding it, introducing the theological dimensions. Once we understand economic development or freedoms as embedded in, empowered by, and released by excellence as clearing, the task of inducing and sustaining economic growth and development becomes the task of creating and maintaining a healthy vibrant clearing. Development is no longer only about quantitative increases in national output or acquisition of capabilities for freedom as it moves beyond development as freedom to fundamentally development as excellence. This excellentist philosophy is the philosophy of economic development that leads us beyond economic development itself. Development as freedom is a particular perspective that reveals merely the context of an opposition to the current paradigm of economic development but not the development of humanity itself. The holistic perspective is this: It is in knowing the human in her self-transcendence to grasp the being in which freedoms proper to capability enhancement flow and by that she comes to development and so comes to herself and there she goes beyond herself. Her ability to be and seize her own possibilities is the primitive and primary freedom to participate in this process of self-enactment that is economic development. She acts economically or developmentally as she has being (ability to be) and is in her being. Economic development is one of the freedoms to participate fully in the process of transcendence and it is itself embedded in this process. Development as excellence asks not about particular paradigm of economic development, but about human development as such, about the human

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nature, human impulse toward the future, and human self-transcendence, which are presupposed in any encounter with economic reality. It is also about the philosophical-theological character of every economic action that is in it insofar as it is. Economic development is a category of human excellence and has its basis in it. Economic growth or development presupposes a human subject and an object (for example, human flourishing) about which it is directed that in turn presupposes beings actualizing their potentialities. The philosophy of excellence is the system of ideas in terms of which every form of economic achievement can be interpreted and which expresses ultimately the general principles that are requisite to the ethical analysis of any paradigm of economic development whatsoever. Excellence is the depth of economic development and is manifest through it—and both point to the ground of existence. Economic development keeps endlessly transcending the finite realities of forms of economic organization, production and distribution, and freedoms, yet remains bound to excellence, which bears it along. In this way of putting the matter the theological character of every form, phase, and era of economic development is easy to discern. The power of transcendence points to a subject (man, woman) whose mind is directed to experience its own unlimited potentialities and who belongs to that which lies beyond the margin of the achieved and not-yet achieved, beyond nothing, beyond nonbeing—to being-itself. As Paul Tillich puts it: The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself. Being-itself is not infinity; it is that which lies beyond the polarity of finitude and infinite self-transcendence. Being-itself manifests itself to finite being in the infinite drive of the finite beyond itself.13

In the light of these points, the ethical framework developed in the previous chapters becomes not only the basis of ideas for forging a suitable social ethics or theology of excellence, but also ideas that speak directly to the design and dynamics of economic development—and indeed the theology of economic development.

Section 2: Modeling Excellence on Factors of Economic Development I have so far tried to understand economic development in terms of the excellence as a clearing. Here I will try to deepen our understanding of economic development by casting excellence in economic language. Albert

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Einstein had long ago shown us that if two things are related it may make sense to examine one in terms of the other and vice versa. His famous equation for mass-energy equivalence, E=MC2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, makes the point that mass and energy are the same thing, interchangeable at the most fundamental level. Now I will not be bold enough to state that economic development and excellence are interchangeable. For they are not! But I will venture to assemble some key factors familiar to development economists to show that what they already know about development can be recast in the now familiar language of excellence. I will use only two factors—population and the speed of information flow—and a playful allusion to Einstein’s famous equation here and there to make my case. The point of this exercise is not to convince anyone that physics or economic modeling can be a substitute for rigorous ethical thinking, but to show that some kind of analogical thinking may shed a light or two in a different field of inquiry. In the previous chapters I have described excellence as a moving force immanently present in history. I presented it also as a human phenomenon and not as something mysteriously zapped into history from elsewhere—though it is open toward the infinite. In order to understand this immanent, in-history, infinite dynamics I was inspired to think of it as a kind of social energy. I considered it as a power for actualization of possibilities that arises from and is sustained by the combinatorial and multiplicative implications of population size and the speed of information flow (that is, the speed of connectivity, cooperativeness, social integration, communion). The argument linking excellence to population density (mass) and the speed of information flow is not very difficult to conceive. One only has to accept that there is some close connection between the striving for excellence and the collective rate of innovation in any given society. The two factors of population and speed of information flow behind technical innovations, cultural evolution, and cultural complexification have long been accepted by economists and other social analysts.14 Besides, we have already noted that excellence is the clearing that allows innovative products and ideas to manifest. Let us come back to Einstein’s equation. The equation enables us to see the same thing in two perspectives: a pen is either a mass or a bundle of energy. A tiny piece of mass, like a nut, is seen in its potentialities as a bundle of almost limitless energy. A human being is at the same time a person and a source of excellence, a site of the energy for excellence, a clearing for the manifestation of innovative ideas or potentialities of the whole of humanity. This site, this clearing is always a part of and a location within the intersubjective sphere of human existence.

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I will now fiddle with the Einstein’s equation to help us see excellence not only as an energy bundle, but also as an alternative way of speaking about persons as beings-in-communion. The degree of manifested excellence at any given time can be considered as a product of the mass of people in a given community and a possible three-dimensional communion between them. It is the power unleashable in the interaction of human beings; the social energy stored up in relationality or communion. Excellence is not only a power coming into manifestation at the interactions of a mass of persons in relations. It is also the in-between of persons. Excellence not only creates this space within which it functions and persons encounter one another, but such a space constitutes a clearing for the transformative, shaping power of creativity in an intersubjective context. Excellence equals population (“M”) times the speed of information flow or connectance (“C”) raised to at least power three, for obvious reasons that I will shortly explain. (This is not an equation requiring the reader to get his or her pencil and paper out to work out some hard numbers. It is an “equation” to stimulate thinking, to nudge the reader’s attention [especially those ethicists who are mathematically challenged] to some key issues of economic development.) The power or energy implied in the product of population and the multiplicity of interactivity between the subjects in the population gestures to the power of unfolding life in history; the process of intensification of life and actualization of potentialities in history. And history here is the communication between persons, the relationship and exchange that is shared by all and surrounds all. It is the common sphere within which life happens simultaneously and connectively for all persons. Excellence is the configuration of processes that allow and give economic agents the means to express their potentialities, the opportunity to shape their own sphere of history, and deepen their connectivity to being. The earmark of the presence of life, as explained by biologist Robert E. Ulanowicz, is the drive “toward ever more organized and coherent configuration of processes” which occur because of “autocatalysis,” “increasing ascendency,” and “centripetality” in the face of tendencies toward disorder, disintegration, and “overhead.”15 Why do we have to multiply the population by the speed of information flow to suggest how much capacity exists for excellence in a given society? Before answering this question directly, let us first try to understand the importance of information exchanges in the growth and development of societies. It was Fernand Braudel who long ago told us that, “All thought draws life from contacts and exchanges.”16 History has shown that innovation, the emergence of new ideas are quickest in society where people have come together to constitute a social information-processing system. This allows for

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social cooperation, integration, and non-zero-sum gains. Robert Wright, a social scientist, likened human society to a social brain and had this to say: Its neutrons are people. The more neutrons there are in regular and easy contact, the better the brains works—the more finely it can divide economic labor, the more diverse the resulting products. And, not incidentally, the more rapidly technological innovations take shape and spread. As economists who espouse “new growth theory” have stressed, it takes only one person to invent something that the whole group can then adopt (since information is a “non-rival” good). So the more possible inventors—that is, the larger the group—the higher its collective rate of innovation.17

Now we can formulate an answer to the question: Why do we have to multiply the population by the speed of information flow three-times over to estimate how much potential capacity exists for excellence in a given society? The reason is that if a person is to affect the collective rate of innovation in his or her society or what we may call the overall clearing for innovative ideas and thoughts, if she is to “convert” her being into energy that will fuel collective excellence, the resulting idea (excelleme) has to spread, by definition, at the existing speed of information flow in the society. Why then do we say that communion amongst people in a community has to be at least three-dimensional? I will first present a biological argument and quickly move on to the more familiar social theory argument. The biologist Ulanowicz, using information theory to understand connections in an ecosystem, has worked out some kind of upper bound of connections per node. According to him, the greatest number of connections per node in a stable system is in the range of three.18 Human society can be considered a certain kind of ecosystem. Another reason for saying that the speed of information has to be considered in three dimensions has to do with the nature of information-ing and our understanding of excellence as the font of possibilities. Information-ing is the process in which potential direction (un-formed social life) becomes actual direction (formed social life) in the participatory movements of life. There are possibly three dimensions to this forming process and all of them appear to be happening at the same time as possibilities are evaluated, validated, and designed for actions. First, there is depth to the relationality that is the basis of information exchange. This depth is the matrix of possibilities, the inexhaustible source from which every decision is a cutting away of some. Second, the possibilities chosen have to be organized, shaped, and molded to fit the ideal and futural character of human existence. This second aspect we shall call form and meaning of relationality. The third dimension is fulfill-

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ment; their ecstatic transformation. It is the actualization of the structural elements of the forming or decision-making process in their unity and in their tension. It is the union of the earlier two dimensions; the principle of unity within the relationality and by which the process finds its fulfillment. It is a way of currents that carries the two elements to the fulfillment of the telos of life. And life, as Tillich reminded us decades ago, “is the process in which potential being becomes actual being.”19 In his work, The Depth and Destiny of Work, ethicist Nimi Wariboko identified three crucial features of divine creativity as it courses through forms of human sociality.20 He identified three features of the dynamics of the working of divine creativity that is akin to the three aspects of relationality that we have mentioned above. Using medieval theological concepts, he named these features complicatio, explication, and implicatio.21 Complicatio is the folding together of possibilities, the matrix of possibilities. It is what contains all—all pathways and opportunities before any decision or cutting is made. (Decision comes from the Latin word de plus caedere and points to the practice of mentally cutting away alternatives or possibilities to decide on one.) The possibilities are realized or unfold (explicatio) as each entity “divine and actualize” its possibilities in participatory movements. Explicatio points to the going out of the self and returning to the self (in a process Paul Tillich calls individuation and participation) and thus to the unoriginative originating set of possibilities. In participation each penetrates the other in a way that defines being and becoming. All human creativity or actions are in possibility and possibilities are in all actions. All actions or human creativity begin in relations and are continually in relations. “And that relation, ‘the relation of relations’ may be called by implication” the human community.22 This brings the two (possibilities and participation) together in interdependence. All three are rooted in the spirit, the font of and groundless ground of relations. Here the notion of spirit I have in mind is akin to that of Jürgen Moltmann, as laid out in his work, God in Creation. It is the common sphere (that is “elevated above the requirements of necessity”) in which human beings act and live out their lives and that binds and weaves them into a higher life with one another. In this book, he described the spirit in these terms: As long as people can distinguish past and future, and can recognize in the temporal dimension of the future the open scope of the possibilities ahead of them, we shall be able to interpret the anticipatory structure of their organism and their social organization as “spirit.” . . . Since we have described the anticipatory structure of the human constitution as “spirit,” we have to interpret its complementary structure of communication as spirit too. Human life is dependent on natural and social communication and only exists in such

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communication. Life is relationship. Life is exchange. . . . This exchange creates community and is only possible in community. . . . It is communication in communion. Human life is what happens between individuals.23

We can get another perspective on the three-dimensional nature of communion by examining Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s conception of the constituent power of the multitude in empire. In their 2004 book, Multitude, they examined the dynamic relationship between communication, collaboration, and cooperation and the multitude that is capable of releasing the energy (the necessary dynamism) to configure and transform empire. Their argument could be summed up in stepwise ways. First, they reasoned that the multitude as a “multiplicity of singularities” must first produce the common (clearing in our language) that allows them to communicate and act together.24 “[The] communication, collaboration, and cooperation are only based on the common, but they in turn produce the common in an expanding spiral relationship.”25 Second, they argued that the energy (constituent motor, virtual power) that sustains, transforms, and moves the common is a function of the multitude and its attendant fusion power of communication, collaboration, and cooperation.26 From the above discussions about life, relationality, and communication, the idea of modeling excellence as somewhat equivalent to the product of population and the various dimensions of ongoing communication amid them should not be construed as pointing us to some inanimate abstractions or a mathematical identity, but to the dynamics of social life. The elements in the equation are to be considered as symbols of the answer to the question of actualization of potentials implied in the “common sphere” of human existence. The elements are symbols of the analogy between the basic structure and dynamics of human coexistence and the energy in the universe (as revealed by Einstein) that undergirds human life. I hope that this analogy provides us with a promise for possible new thinking on how people and the relationships they form can be transformed into sites for excellence for human flourishing. This promise notwithstanding, I would like to quickly add that we should not set great store on the “excellence equation.” For the equation does not provide precise information as Einstein’s equation;27 it is only a heuristic device to stimulate thinking, it is to make a difficult economic argument rather simple for theological ethicists. There are a couple of reasons why we cannot at this point go beyond using it as a heuristic device to organize thinking about excellence. When dealing with electrons one is dealing largely with perfectly homogenous sets whose behavior can be determined by laws. But

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when we are dealing with social systems or persons-in-communion we are dealing with heterogeneous groupings whose dynamics are fixed not by laws but by processes.28 There is also the problem that there has been no reliable and generally acceptable constant, as the speed of light, worked out for the speed of information flows in modern globalizing societies. In fact there need not be a constant for the speed of information.29 As new innovations come on stream, as excellemes pile on excellemes, the speed of interaction between economic agents changes, making it unreasonable to fix the speed of information flows for all times.30 The speed not only affects the pace of excellence it is itself also a function of the advance of excellence. Instead of focusing on precise numbers for the speed of information flows and the mass, the import of the equation is on how it points us to two crucial areas of managing economic development. The “mass” in the equation calls attention to human capability development, human capital. The higher the quality of human capital in each subject in the population base the higher the potential energy that can be released for economic development. The speed of information flow can be accelerated by focusing on raising social capital (intensification of relationality among economic agents), social trust, participatory democracy, urban-rural articulation, and physical infrastructures that will ease the burden of interaction at all levels in the community. This kind of approach will trigger economic development as an inevitable outcome of increasing range of the clearing we have named excellence, the power of unfolding life in history.

Section 3: Excellence and Money Excellence in this study has been portrayed as a “being” that is eternally becoming (or “coming”), as if trapped in a web of eschatological expectation of a better future. Money is also a being that is always becoming, trapped in a similar web. This raises some hope that if some perspicacious mind can connect both forces together, align them to work for the benefit of human flourishing, we can move the poor out of poverty much faster. In the section below I will attempt to think through how eros of money could be unleashed to function within the clearing that is excellence. The task of releasing the potentialities of money for rapid eradication of poverty is hindered by widespread neoclassical economic approach to money. Economists and bankers understand the becoming nature of money but they approach it with the sensibility and orientation of the Objectively Possible instead of the Real Possible as explained in chapter 5. One important and urgent task of development ethics is to change this orientation and align

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money and excellence together to support higher levels of flourishing than what is currently obtained. Nowhere is the force of perpetual becoming more discernible than in the “eschatological structuring” that is imbedded in the discounted cashflow model of security valuation used by economists. Under this methodology, the value of assets is based on its expected (projected) cash flows. An analyst will forecast the future net cashflows or income stream from given assets and then discount them by the appropriate discount (interest, return) rate to arrive at the net present value of assets. Money—value of assets and liabilities—is deemed “eschatological in its structuring,” because “the present is created from the future.”31 Economists and bankers calculate the value of assets or liabilities by evaluating anticipated flows of income, anticipated returns, promises of expansion in an imagined better future. Managers make asset allocation decisions (deployment or withdrawal from the market) by also looking at projections about value and income flows from assets in the future. Yet when this imagined future arrives the value of the asset would still be based on the next expectations of what it will be in a further imagined future. Capital, as if, is trapped in a web of eschatological expectation of a better future—a being that is eternally becoming or “coming.”32 According to the British theologian Philip Goodchild: Capital is not merely a flow because it is always an anticipation of an imagined future—whether we are concerned with speculation or credit, it is always an anticipated rate of return that determines how much there will be. What there is now is dependent upon what we believe there will be. . . .33

Precisely, valuation is always about the future, the redemptive eternity the economists call “the long run.”34 It is also about totality. The depiction of value in modern neoclassical economic thought far from opening the object (the item so valued) to the rest of the world traps it within its own dynamics and trajectory. Valuation aspires to a kind of totality, that is, an integrated perspective that subordinates everything, every dynamics in the whole economy and environment to the common principle expressive of the value of the object. There is a question being asked and answered in the discounted cash flow model used for valuation: How does the whole set of dynamics in an economy and indeed the global marketplace impact the future cash stream of the asset? The totalizing orientation of valuation gives the impression of being open to the future, but what is actually happening is that the future is imagined and created and it is mysteriously birthed, appropriated, and consumed in

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the present. What is happening is that the vitalities (or potentialities) of the future are divided and appropriated even before they are born. The data or information about the asset is projected into the future as series of potential flows and then pulled back or down by the mathematics of discounting and cajoled, conjured, and “shaved” to appear in the present as what is euphemistically called net present value. The name “present value” is a misnomer. What has been calculated and tagged “net present value” has no present being. It is a “value” between values. The asset or security that was evaluated had a past record of cashflows that were known and has a future value that is only expected. By calling it “present value” the economists assume that the future is the present. This presentized future is then sold and bought in the marketplace. In valuation the unborn children of time are sold and consumed; time like an ever-rolling stream is not allowed to bear its children away. There is a profound ambiguity in all this. From one angle of vision it appears that capitalist investors are open to the future, ready to risk the future, but actually they are afraid of the future. So the future is discounted and heavily depreciated—this is why the method of valuation is called discounted cash flow method (DCF). The bigger the fear the higher the discount factor (interest rate) and lower the growth rate that is applied to the current earnings that donate their possibilities to the future stream of income. It is important to mention that the possibilities that are being calibrated and calculated are not the same as possibilities which noneconomic scholars, like theologian Jürgen Moltmann and philosopher Ernst Bloch, call the Real Possible.35 The economists’ notion of possibilities as discernible in the valuation model is Objectively Possible. The reality from which possibilities are discerned by economists for the working of their model is not expected to produce the startlingly new. For it is reality surrounded by the cycle of what has already become and is largely conditioned by the parameters of the model, the theories behind the model, and the present circumstances of the asset. In the case of the neoclassical economic model, there is certain givenness to the possibilities; in the Bloch-Moltmannian theological model there is a processive openness to them. Frankly, economists are focused on trend rather than on possibilities. So though economists may be concerned with the redemptive long run as this study of excellence is, they are laden with different sensibilities and orientations. The theologian of excellence looks into the future with hope, eschatological hope. This is not so for the economists. As was stated earlier, in calculating the value of an exchangeable item (an asset), the analyst’s thoughts are drawn toward the horizon of the future and what she focuses on as she peers into the future is not hope but assurance—not latent possibilities

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she cannot conceive, but palpable possibilities that are carefully conceived, calibrated, and calculated (trend-mentality). Assurance tries to eliminate risk of disappointments, but hope embraces the risk of disappointment. It is with such a hope that is open to the future—the Real Possible—that I am going to make an attempt to provide a basic framework for monetary policy that will fit with the theology of excellence ventured here. I will construct an alternative perspective from which the world of monetary policy is to be seen. The major issue in doing this is to show how monetary policy should be thought about and crafted to identify the true potentials of an economy, region, sector, or market situation and enable them to be realized. In doing all this I will rely both on my skill as an ethicist and a former investment banker on Wall Street. This imaginative framework is important to develop even if political and economic realities block its immediate implementation. The alternative thinking this framework provides, at the minimum, exposes the values of the current monetary policy regime that are threatening the moral order of many a nation and thus serves as a critique of the current monetary thought that dominates development thinking. I will discuss the monetary policy issues together with work because the primary goal of monetary policy is to order work aright in any economy. If money—in the forms of credit economy, exchange, and capital—is the condition of possibility for work, what should function as the condition of possibility for money itself?

Section 4: Economic Development: The Role of Work and Monetary Policy Here I want to discuss the conceptions of work and monetary policy that are likely going to promote economic development as a manifestation of the clearing that we have named excellence. What is work? And what is monetary policy? Work is the unfurling of humanity toward a wholeness in which all selves and others are inextricably linked.36 Work is the daily means (involving body, mind, and spirit) of humanity to begin, to cut open (be-ginnan) the iterative dynamic of becoming itself that we have named excellence. That a fresh beginning be made in the fluid dynamics of transcending humanity work is done. Working is fundamentally the communication and exchange of that by which a human being is in dynamism of positing a new possible world.37 The that that is communicated is the set of possibilities (potentials) for forward movement. Work is that by which the human being “stand in” and “stand out” of excellence, the processive openness toward the not-yet. Excellence is working on working.

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The importance of monetary policy in producing the right environment for excellent selves to triumph and prosper in their work cannot be overstated. Monetary policy is what orders work in any modern economy. Monetary policy is the mobilization of an economy’s monetary and financial resources for the preservation, promotion, and ordering of its work. Productive and reproductive work—organization and distribution of rewards thereof—maintains the structure of mutuality of life through which a people shape their lives and cope with their day-to-day problems. The control of the money supply in any economy affects which work prospers and which work weakens in it; and so determine, “who shall benefit and who shall sacrifice” in the production and reproduction processes of life.38 Every organization of monetary system and for that matter work is coded with its own peculiar set of principles, motivations, and information for either supporting or thwarting (even if unwittingly) the clearing that is excellence. It is, therefore, important for us to spend some time reflecting on the approach to monetary policy that will foster economic development as an opportunity for and a process and product of increasing the range of the clearing. Everywhere, monetary policy shapes the landscape of economic and social lives. How it does this is dependent on a philosophical-ethical understanding of the role of monetary policy in modern economies. Is monetary policy simply technical adjustment of quantities of money in an economy or sophistic manipulation of interest rates with no connections to deep national aspirations? Or is it rather suffused with discernment of entrepreneurial passions and highly ethical judgment as to what is of value and importance to the development of a national economy? I will argue that there can be no adequate ethical perspective on monetary policy without an adequate understanding of what I will call the eros of money. The crucial role of monetary policy is to tap the wellspring of vital energies in the socioeconomic phenomenon that is money for economic growth and development. A good and development-oriented national monetary policy should offer the experience of both the fulfillment and endless awakening of the creative force and yearning for mutuality in the national economy. There is a connection-making power of money that a good monetary policy is meant to unleash. A monetary policy is good, among other considerations, when it expresses possibilities for wider integration, cooperation, and transformation at both the personal and transpersonal levels in an economy. It is good when it can positively shape communal relationships. Additionally, from a nationalistic point of view it is good when citizens can see their own “spirit,” values, ideals, and hopes incarnated in it.

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Some neoclassical economists may consider the above ethical stance on monetary policy “strange.” But the stance came after reflection on the received neoclassical economic wisdom on money and the need to transcend the limited perspective it offers. Those of us who are interested in liberating the poor from “unfreedoms” should learn to think new thoughts even as we think the thoughts of Milton Friedman and his cohorts. I am offering a “strange” perspective on monetary policy not out of a desire to stand outside the ballpark of mainstream monetary thinking, but to unconceal a new vista in monetary-policy thinking. It is my hope that this vista may give us an opening for new possibilities in poor economies; to enable them move from lower levels of performance to the highest possible levels. It does no good to only focus on the quantity of money in monetary-policy decisions as this is generally done in the leading central banks of the world. Money is not a mere quantitative thing. It is something that has the vitality to grow and expand, to connect and nourish all those persons and sectors it touches. It has the power to transform and deepen relationships between economic actors and their economy if properly handled.39 It is this vitality, energy, impulse that I have named as the eros of money. Eros is the power of creativity, the impulse to move from a lower standing to a higher dimension; the transition from brokenness to wholeness. It is power in human sociality to secure that which is salient and essential to its well-being and greater flourishing. It was Plato, in his Symposium, who put out the argument that there is an impulse in all beings to move from incompleteness to wholeness, to desire that which will complete them. This movement, the transitions to higher levels of fulfillment, he named as eros. The purpose of the movement or desire is not just for the sake of coming together, but it is to release the power of creativity in humanity for the sake of a flourishing life. Eros is a power that underlies all of human creativity, from procreation to the love of philosophical wisdom, he argued. As already noted in this study, eros is a life-giving power and the driving force in all of human coexistence, including economic togetherness and cultural creativity. Eros is both an awareness and movement in the direction of greater flourishing. It is about a painful awareness of a gap and the desire to close that separateness, a demand to possess that which the person does not wholly possess. The sheer separateness from that which will make one whole releases one’s vitality for the pursuit of wholeness and greatness necessary for happiness or eudaimonia. The kind of separateness and incompleteness that have been undermining economic development in the Majority World economies are not hard to discern. What has been hard to notice is a deliberate attempt to release the kind

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of creative eros that can raise them beyond poverty and underdevelopment. Incompleteness in their economies is revealed in their dependency, decades of failure to raise living standards, monetary systems that are not geared to development of internal resources, crippling urban and rural disarticulation, and massive income inequality that eviscerates the well-being of the poor. For too long, poor countries have been separated from the flourishing economies they should have. Everywhere their people look they experience the pathos of separation and poverty in their midst. Monetary policy then should both be a paradigm and a series of steps that aim to bring their longing and incompleteness to an end. Majority World’s central bank should be aiming at releasing the creative and animating force that is in money so that it can exert positive influence in all spheres of their economies, connecting regions and sectors. Those charged with making their monetary policies need to make all good efforts to understand the “essential nature of money,” not simply its twisted expressions under the conditions of underdevelopment, neocolonialism, and empire as we currently find all over Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The “essence” of money is its creative eros. The telos of developing economies’ central banks should be to remove the cleavage between the “essence” of money and its twisted and ambiguous expressions in their countries; to overcome the chasm between their potentialities and current levels of achievement, to encourage every economic agent to strive and yearn to raise him- or herself toward higher levels. Monetary policy should be a source of movement of the citizens toward integrated, internally powered development. In order for us to understand how monetary policy can be a source of movement toward a well-articulated economy, we need to decipher the elements of eros and lift them up as norms of monetary policy. The hope is that the pursuit of these norms in decision making by central banks will fruitfully enable poor economies to resist underdevelopment (a kind of nonbeing) and preserve and promote development (being). Following Paul Tillich, I interpret eros as the umbrella Greek word for love with four components: epithymia, philia, eros, agape.40 Epithymia (longing) names the desire to fulfill need. Simply, it is the recognition of a need and the movement to satisfy the need. This word in Latin is libido and in the hands of Freud it came to stand for unlimited sexual desire, the desire for pleasure through another being, and thus acquired a very bad name. In the old sense, epithymia refers, for example, to hunger for knowledge, food, power, material wealth, spiritual values, sex, and participation in group. It referred to the thirst and hunger in all human praxis in which needy persons move toward the objects that fulfill their needs. The focus is not on pleasure, but

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that which fulfills one’s desire. Freud is wrong to reduce it to a pain-pleasure principle. Philia is the movement toward union between equals. The part within eros that bears its name points to a movement of that which is lower in a scale of value toward that which is higher. Agape is the part of love that affirms the other unconditionally; it affirms not because the other is higher or lower, pleasant or unpleasant, desirable or undesirable. The only interest is to draw the other into a union. When agape is present in a relationship, it can transform and purify the other components of love and move them to their pure forms as dynamic movements of the separated to union. The Platonic-Greek philosophical idea of love as eros is not about pleasurable feeling, but a creative, dynamic, primal power that moves the world toward fulfillment and deepens relationships. It is the connection-making power in human life and the whole of the universe. Money is a form of eros in any modern economy because it is the moving power of economic life. Money is not a mere tool of exchange; it is a force (a form of social relation41) that calls persons, regions, and sectors beyond themselves and draws them from separation, detachment, and disarticulation into integration, articulation, and participation in the unfolding creative processes of an economy. Money is actually a two-edged sword. Money connects, money separates. It cuts and attaches. Money looks inward and outward. It is both constructive and destructive. The creative eros of money reveals the constructive power of money over its negation. Money embraces within itself destructive forces that are opposed to its creative eros. When we speak of the creative eros of money, it is only with an affirmation of money’s positive constructive force in recognition of its destructive potentials. Monetary policy is, simply, an affirmation of money’s creative forces while resisting its destructive tendencies. The real expertise in central banking is to acquire and preserve the power to affirm the creative forces of money in spite of the destructive ones over and over again. This is one of the ways central bankers can affirm the creative eros of money through policy. They set and abide by some basic norms that can induce and sustain relationality, mutuality, and transition to higher levels of economic performance and human flourishing in their economies. The norms come from adapting and transforming Tillich’s elements of love into a set of ethical canons for monetary policy. First, the criterion of stimulation (epithymia) is the capacity of monetary policy to drive economic agents into more and more intercourse and interdependence, to stimulate the movement of the less vibrant, less efficient sectors and agents toward sectors, areas, and resource centers that fulfill them. In order to promote economic interdependence and eliminate all forms of insidious economic duality, monetary

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policies most encourage the movement of the deficit (that is, needful, less vibrant, less efficient, less articulated) industries toward the sectors and resource centers that will help to liberate their potentials and fulfill them. The second norm is about the criterion of integration (philia). Monetary policy should not only stimulate intersectoral intercourse but also encourage and sustain movement toward better integration and union within each sector and region. While stimulation is an external movement of sectors, integration is about internal movement within sectors and regions. Monetary and fiscal policies must encourage movement toward better integration and union within each sector and region. In terms of persons, this involves providing equality of access to the present and accumulated economic and social resources so that most persons will have equal opportunity to develop their capabilities and fully participate in the preservation and promotion of their community well-being. The third norm is transformative; monetary policy should promote right relationship, pushing or pulling all sectors, industries, regions, and persons from levels lower in cooperativeness and possibilities toward their highest forms. The fourth norm is that of promotion of sociality inherent in the social practice of work. The issue is how to know whether a certain monetary policy regime is structured to include all groups and classes to participate fully in the economy so as to create flourishing lives for themselves or it is not. Does it foster participation and communion, human mutuality, and reciprocity? The right monetary policy that fosters participation and communion points to an eros quality in every interpersonal and intersectoral relation in the economy. Mutuality is the key category for understanding both the reality of money, work, and monetary policy. Mutuality is also the central symbol as well as the source of norms. The accent of mutuality is on comprehensive inclusiveness; that is, to include all groups, classes, sectors, and regions to participate fully in the economy so as to create flourishing lives for themselves. The knowledge of how to generate and sustain the creative eros of money is the mother of all forms of monetary knowledge. This knowledge is about initiating and sustaining collective capacity, knowing how to integrate sectors, discerning how to harness the dispersed energies of the citizens to the goal of national flourishing, how to marshal individual economic resources to act on the common good, and how to orient all men and women toward excellence.

Concluding Remarks Economic development lives and moves in the tension that arises from the synthesis of immanence and transcendence; that is, the form of excellence

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and the inexhaustibility of excellence. To grasp this point is to understand economic development as deeply multidimensional. Every economic progress or development and thus every actualization of a people’s economic potentials comprises three dimensions. First, it is an interconnection and articulation of improvements. Individual improvements or sectoral advancements are never fully apprehended in isolation, but always from within the context of the whole economy. Economic development and its interpretation and apprehension always presuppose a synthesis. This synthesis from which particular sectoral advancement or regional growth makes sense is human flourishing. Yet human flourishing does not represent the source of import of the particular improvement or progress.42 The source is the second dimension, which we have named human self-actualization and it resides (rather it is imbued) in any particular improvement. But it transcends every particular improvement too. It is the living power that stands over, above, and beyond every particular form of improvement. This explains the fact that every level of economic development cannot be satisfied with itself; it cannot be self-enclosed. Self-actualization as a living power is form-bursting, demanding that every level, stage, phase, or range of societal development positively annuls itself so it can preserve itself in a higher synthesis. This is the way to elevating and transforming human flourishing positively, moving it toward increasing interconnections of being and meaning. The process of economic development is a dialectical tension experienced as actualization of potentials and as a demand, as an “ought to be.” This demand is the third dimension of economic development. By this I mean that the actualization of economic development potentials of any people presupposes an awareness of this demand, the demand for excellence as a clearing, the demand to fulfill humanity. All this suggests it is a spiritual process; that is, economic development is a spiritual process. For through it the human spirit fulfills its being with meaning and points beyond itself. As Tillich insisted long ago, all particular human forms of meaning point beyond themselves and need to be connected, transparent, or open to the Unconditional meaning which resides in and transcends every particular meaning. The metalogical method to economic development, as indicated in this chapter, does not argue for the formalism of development, about which economics makes statements, but it gives a critical analysis of the dynamics of development with respect to its power and finds through this analysis its transcending quality.43 It is doubly pointing beyond its current form (manifestation). The task of the theological analysis of economic development is to grasp the inner dynamism of form in the extant form (phase, level, stage)

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of economic development and show how it can be prophetically gingered to a higher synthesis and also how it can be theonomously guided toward the Unconditioned, the Holy.

Notes 1. Sen, Development as Freedom. 2. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, trans. W. Halle White (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), part IV, prop xxii, 97. 3. Tillich, Courage to Be, 21. 4. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 252. 5. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 252. 6. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 253. 7. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 252. 8. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 12. 9. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 15. 10. For the generation of melody and rhythms, this is what Zuckerkandl (Sound and Symbol, 248) says: “A tone sounding on uninterruptedly is not yet melody and not yet rhythm. Strictly speaking, melody begins not with the first tone but with the first step from tone to tone. In the same way, rhythm is not born with the first sounding of a tone but with the first interruption and the sounding of a new tone (or the new sounding of the same tone).” 11. Here I am writing under the inspiration of Zuckerkandl’s analysis of tones. See his Sound and Symbol, 20. 12. This is a reversal of Tillich’s thought in Systematic Theology, 2:25. 13. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:191. 14. Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Random House, 2000), 48–51. 15. Robert E. Ulanowicz, “Ecosystem Dynamics: A Natural Middle,” Theology and Science 2, no. 2 (2004): 231–53; “Emergence, Naturally!” 945–60; and “Ecology, a Dialog between the Quick and the Dead,” Emergence 4, nos. 1/2 (2002): 34–52. 16. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York: Harper Row, 1981), 401, quoted in Wright, Nonzero, 45. 17. Wright, Nonzero, 48. 18. Ulanowicz, Ecology, 114–15. 19. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:241. 20. Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work, 238–39. 21. See Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), 205–8, 231–32. 22. Keller, Face of the Deep, 232. Italics in the original. 23. Moltmann, God in Creation, 266. Italics in the original. 24. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), xiv–xv, 197, 225.

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25. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xv. 26. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 348–51; Empire, 357–59. 27. If you care for a mathematical representation, this is it: E=MC3. 28. Ulanowicz, “Emergence, Naturally!” 945–60. The absence of laws should not be taken to mean that there are no orders in social interactions that characterize a society. We have to only take our glance off from laws into what biologist Ulanowicz calls configurative processes. He defined a process as “an interaction of random events upon a configuration of constraints that result in a nonrandom but indeterminate outcome.” See page 950 for quote. 29. In a recent paper, researchers at Microsoft suggested that there may be a social-connectivity constant for humanity of about 7, precisely 6.6 steps—it takes about seven steps to link everybody up in a community. That is, any two persons are linked by an average of six to seven acquaintances. See Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz, “Planetary-Scale View on a Large Instant-Messaging Network,” paper presented at International World Wide Web Conference, April 21–25, 2008, Beijing, China. It should be noted that social connectivity is not exactly the same thing as a constant for speed of information flow that will be a function of population size, communication technology, and the freedom of information and its related social practices, among other things. 30. In a configuration process as the clearing that is excellence, one should expect unique and not repeatable events and what might be called “miracles.” In any system like that of a social system or ecosystem having thousands and millions of distinguishable elements will come up with a number of possible combinations that will exceed the Walter Elsasser’s limit on reality. And thus there will be singular events that are unique, never again to be repeated, though there is great immensity of stochastic events. Mechanical laws or law-like explanations are not usually helpful in these cases as they are overwhelmed by “variety and combinatorics,” to use Ulanowicz’s words. “In complex systems so many combinations become possible that a multiplicity of configurations is always available to satisfy any set of parameters in the applicable laws. Laws continue to constrain what can happen, but they become insufficient to determine which configurations eventually prevail.” See Ulanowicz, “Emergence, Naturally!” 950. 31. This nature appears akin to life as conceived by Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2003), 134–37. See also Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The God of Hope,” in Basic Questions in Theology 2 (London: SCM Press, 1971), 234–49. 32. Alternatively, one can argue that money’s being is not in its becoming. For the fact that it refuses to pass away (when the imagined future arrives the value of the asset would still be based on expectations of what it would yet be in a further imagined future), the being is in its coming. Value as conceived in valuation techniques of assets is always on the move and coming toward the asset owner. As the coming value, the present and past are set in the light of the future. Value (the present value of assets as calculated by the discounted cash flow method) “flows” out of the future into the present. It has the future in its being, so to speak with my tongue in cheek. For a theological play on the words, “coming” and “becoming” by Jürgen Moltmann, see his The Coming of God, 13, 23–24.

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33. Philip Goodchild, “Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology,” in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davies, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press: 2005), 143. My specific characterization of excellence and capital as “eternally becoming,” as if “trapped in a web of eschatological explanation of a better future” in this paragraph and at the very beginning of this section is indebted to Goodchild. 34. James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (New York: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2001), 61. 35. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vols. 1–3, 196–97, 206. 36. Wariboko, Depth and Destiny of Work, 4–14, 233–8. 37. I have reworked Albino Barrera’s phrasing for my purpose here. See his God and Evil of Scarcity, 219. 38. Gibson Winter, Community and Spiritual Transformation: Religion and Politics in a Communal Age (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989), 104. 39. See Nimi Wariboko, God and Money: A Theology of Money in a Globalizing World (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008). 40. My analysis is drawn from Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 25–34, 116. 41. See Wariboko, God and Money, chapter 4. 42. Import is a Tillichian concept that refers to “power,” “substance,” or “principium vitae.” For a discussion of this see Ihuoma, Paul Tillich’s Theology, 63–102. 43. For the metalogical method see Ihuoma, Paul Tillich’s Theology, 99–100.

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The Good, Truth, and Beauty The careful reader would have noticed that in this book’s conception of excellence there is a fusion of five strands of thought into one. First, excellence is conceptualized as the actualization of potentialities such that an act of excellence is an invention of a new form, a change of something. Based on this perspective, excellence is tied with genesis—the genesis of a new form. Second, excellence is seen as involving the transformation of humans. Excellence is a process and a product that modify humans. Third, excellence is also a clearing, a site for the revelation of new object and knowledge. In studying and interpreting excellence we are understanding the unfolding, the deepening and widening, of being. All this allows us to gain or renew knowledge of the principles of being. Fourth, excellence is about the interconnectivity of being, eros of relationality. The beauty of excellence is the weaving of an erotic braid with a new thread, drawing all to the edge of the void only to strain toward the not-yet, to seek and draw in another new thread into the fabric of social existence. Finally, excellence is conceived as an infinite longing of human beings, using human capabilities to struggle “against the limits that constrain human life.” One can view this fusion of categories into the conception of excellence— to use philosopher Oliver Feltham’s words—as “yet one more philosophical answer to the philosophy’s oldest question: ‘what is the good life?’” And if excellence as conceptualized in this study is “both effortful construction 207

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and as the revelation of something already at work, then one has a fusion of freedom and necessity. Such is the good life for philosophy.”1 Indeed, this is the kind of connection between excellence and flourishing life we sought to investigate from the start. It is a connection that enables us to see how—on a hyperbolic note—the good, truth, and beauty are manifested in social existence through the opaque lens of immanent human transcendence. More circumspectly, we only glimpsed the good, truth, and beauty of excellence. The good of excellence is the endless sequence of approximation to eudaimonia, enrichment of life, which is embodied in the humans’ engagement with actualization of potentialities. It is the movement toward the Good as defined by each community.2 The Oxford University don, Professor Keith Ward, has elevated the human striving for realization of potentials and flourishing to the level of religion. He deems the realization of human capacities as the universal good, the highest moral ideal; maintaining that even God wills the full realization of capacities of persons to grow and flourish in the world God has made. Faith under his scheme is belief in the value of human striving for the good and the sovereignty of good. Morality is the universal obligation to full realization and flourishing of personal capacities.3 I have not found it as reasonable as Ward to make excellence into a religious principle. I have only argued in chapter 4 that Jesus Christ is an exemplar of excellence. The Tillichian idea of Jesus of Nazareth as the New Being can strengthen the realization of human capacities by providing a godly orientation within which personal efforts has an achievable goal in a Christian context. The truth of excellence is the working out of possibilities that forever cannot arrive at the ultimate possibility, the possibility of all possibilities, the ultimate truth. Truth is the one (or the many counted as one) possibility that many types of possibility try to approximate through fidelity to realized possibility and its potential future becoming. Possibility is the link between potentialities and actuality. Truth is ultimately about the existence of Absolute Infinity. All that a truth procedure (as in the faithful pursuit of “internal transcendence”) can do is to put us on a path between potential infinities and actual infinities as we approach the rationally unknowable, unconceivable Absolute Infinity. But because of what is known as the Reflection Principle in modern set theory we can find partial truths that satisfy the truth of the Absolute Infinity.4 Beauty is the eros of the good and the truth, drawing all into a whole only to step on the path outward again. It is the fabric of good-truth, the interface of good and truth that runs through all experiences of life. It gestures to the integrity, harmony, and wholesomeness of dense relationality that enables

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the process of actualization of potentials to go on. Beauty refers to the set of mediating relations between persons, objects, and ideas around, with, and in which good and truth happen. Each relation in turn stands in higher order relations to other relations, persons, objects, and ideas. This process can go on ad infinitum.5 Eros is about the power and enhancement of this mediating relation that enables life to hang together. The conception of excellence as undertaken in this book also sheds some light on the issues of justice, love, and hope. These are ways of being for excellence, for the creative realization and expansion of human potentialities and flourishing. Justice as a way of being good for excellence idealizes excellence for the other that is universal in scope. To truly create the necessary space for the all others to actualize their potentialities, to be all that they can be, to create possibilities for a flourishing life for all, will often require restructuring, re-membering, and realigning existing social orders. Love gestures to the profundity and intensity in caring for the possibilities of excellence for some persons, including the self. Hope is a way of being good for excellence for its own sake. It is a way of “intending” the future that is structural rather than motivational.6 It involves organizing one’s motives, values, commitments, and goals for the birth of the new. One does not value human flourishing as one should if one does not care about excellence (the persistent creative realizations of human potentialities) for its own sake.7 This way of thinking of the good, truth, beauty, justice, love, and hope is against the grain of modern “bureaucratic” thinking on ethics. Contemporary ethics has settled comfortably into technocratic management of society (economy). The constant and reliable has come to dominate the novel and the dynamic. In the technocratic conception of politics, faith in the power of political subject is not faith in a revolutionary event. Politics, in fact, is only a negative assertion: the social order does not die, it does not change. In a nontechnocratic conception, politics is a positive assertion: the whole system, which has really died a thousand deaths by exclusions and marginalization, is (can be) resurrected by a new act of creation orchestrated by the agent(s) subject to the good, truth, and beauty of excellence.8 Today, politics is no longer about re-membering the social order, developing a new structure for justice. Politics has long past the era when it was about starting a new praxis from a point (or moments) of social dysfunction in the system in order to move society to an alternative path. Alas, it is no longer about unfolding being as a consequence of subjects’ decisions about liberatory and life-enhancement potentials, but it is all about positing being as a manipulation of institutions’ and bureaucratic practices. Politics is no longer about encountering the real. Modern social

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ethics has inaugurated a forgetting of real behind current forms of sociality and behind all sources of new solution. In this work I have indicated the possibility of change in every social order—insofar as change is understood as an openness to the unfinishedness of life and the emergence of new alternatives. In doing this, I have not rejected the management orientation of politics, but I have redefined and expanded it in order to incorporate the management of novelty and concentration on possibility for perpetual orientation to the good of excellence, the enrichment of life. If the pursuit of this good is totally severed from a transcendent source or norm it could become a serious threat to life. Though the motivational and convictional energies—the infinite longing—that power civilizations are on the immanent plane their expression and working can be realistically related to God and the eschatological new creation.

The Depth and Destiny of Excellence The mention of God and new creation raises the issue of the destiny of human excellence. While we are it, why not say something also about the depth of excellence? We have already dealt explicitly with the depth of excellence in discussions of ontological and technical excellence and dynamic divine creativity, and implicitly in various other parts of this study. In sum, this is how the matter was presented. The depth of any product, action, artifact, or idea that is deemed excellent is the urge of a human being to fulfill him- or herself, to actualize his or her potentials. It is from here the animus of creativity feeds into the making of the excellent item. The notion of ontologicaltechnical excellence we have constructed in chapter 2 connects means to meaning and encompasses them. Meaning (in terms of ontological excellence) determines ends and only then the means and products (technical excellence). Ontological excellence is the movement of technical excellence toward ultimate meaning and significance. Technical excellence is the presupposition of ontological excellence, and ontological excellence is the fulfillment of technical excellence. The two concepts of excellence are in a means-end relationship. Ontological excellence stands in judgment over-against technical excellence. This is not a “heteronomous” oversight, but a “theonomous” one. Ontological excellence does not reject any breakthrough, achievement, or actualization of human potentialities that may appear under technical excellence, but it does not take any actualization as the ultimate except the one that is yet to be reached. Some philosophers and ethicists may separate means (technical excellence) from meaning (ontological excellence) in their analysis of excellent

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items or give the impression that means and reasoning about means are separated from meaning and reason. Though, they are distinguishable for the purpose of analysis and discourse they are not really separated. This is so because means is used to fulfill the demands of meaning and meaning stands in judgment of means.9 Excellence expresses the function of the person through which he or she actualizes himself or herself and grasps and shapes the world. And in the process the person is also shaped by the world in the inescapable milieu of self-world correlation that embeds self and world. Excellence combines actions and purposes and also stands for the principle of form structuring the productive activities and satisfaction of social wants, as well as the engendering, organization, and governing of socialities for the sake of human flourishing. Now we turn to the question of destiny of human excellence. The idea of new creation, eschatological transformatio mundi, is an important one, especially for excellence which at its core is eschatological. We have presented excellence as always involving an anticipatory experience of the new and a hope of its future advancement. Do we then need to link the totality of human excellence to its future consummation in the coming new creation? Yes, for any Christian theologian who believes that the Christian faith is eschatological in its core and that there will be future cosmopolitan civilization. It will be splendid to pursue this line of inquiry further, but we have come to the end of our work here and it would demand another major effort to explore how excellence is related to the eschatological new creation. To explore it now, however briefly, is to enter into an archaeological trench leading to strata of questions starting with: What products of excellence (accumulative human achievements) will be incorporated into the new creation? What can go into the New Jerusalem, the cosmopolitan civilization (Rev. 21:2, 17, 24–27)? What will be the criteria of divine judgment (1 Cor. 3:12–15) to decide what parts of the totality of human achievements will go into the New Jerusalem?10 How do we reconceptualize the spatial and temporal movements of excellence as discussed in the concluding part of chapter 2? If one assumes that human excellence will be incorporated into the new heaven and new earth, does it suggest that human excellence only finds its ultimate significance in its use by God in the transformation of the world? For theologians, ethicists, and philosophers who reject the idea of final end or redemption the answer to the question of connecting the totality of human accomplishments to a final consummation is one big no. This stance is at least informed by two viewpoints: those of open possibility and self-referentiality. First, from a particular perspective the whole idea of destiny sounds incompatible to this study’s analysis of excellence. In this book

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excellence has been firmly linked to possibilities and this link appears to pose a major conceptual problem if excellence is combined with the idea of new creation, insofar as the doctrine of new creation is taken to mean bringing the temporal mode of the future to a close. With the idea of new creation, the past gives the future in the New Jerusalem (both as city and “the people,” Rev. 21:2 and 17) the contents to unify and transform, but it appears not to sufficiently allow the present to shift the possibilities of the new creation toward new actualities. It seems the future, a temporal mode, will come to a close and there will be no more relevant open future. For postmodern theologians like Mark C. Taylor the problem with the question is what it takes for granted: the redemption of the world. He argues that there is no need for redemption or order from without in social systems.11 Taylor maintains that order and redemption grow from within, endogenous and spontaneous, and not imposed by a providential God or an institution. It is self-referential. As he puts it: Since redemption presupposes closure as well as satisfaction, however it is figured, the ceaseless flux of life in network culture renders redemption impossible. Rather than the sign of certain death, the impossibility of redemption is the mark of endless life. To affirm this life is to embrace the infinitely complex networks that make us what we are and are not. . . . In the final analysis, the problem is not to find redemption from a world that often seems dark but to learn to live without redemption in a world where the interplay of light and darkness creates infinite shades of difference, which are inescapably disruptive, overwhelmingly beautiful, and infinitely complex.12

Taylor’s idea of self-referentiality presupposes a certain view of the world and time. According to British theologian Philip Goodchild, the theory of self-referentiality in modern epistemology is built upon the secular order— which is “the sphere of the present age untrammeled by obligation to repeat the past, or anxious expectation of the judgments of the future, where all causes are mediated to their consequences by our knowledge.”13

Closing Remarks I want to conclude with a brief reflection on the general nature of excellence and the overall purpose of this study. Excellence is an ekstatic possibility in human life. It is not fully revealed by matching objects with standards of evaluation. Excellence cannot be simply understood as a designation of things in the world because there is an unconcealment prior to the naming of an object as excellent. There is the openness in human coexistence that

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allows a fitting disclosure to us to take place in the first place. Humans and their objects are always embedded and environed in social relations. Excellence involves humans, sociality, and objects implicated in the possibilities for human flourishing and life’s towardness to the not-yet. Owing to the bipolar self-world correlation, excellence is an opening up of the world and pertains to a striving toward a not-yet (an absence) in the world, to a movement of actualization of potentialities. This is a movement that unfolds because of the tension between an “already” and a “not-yet” in the midst of past and future of concrete lived experience. Thus, excellence is the specific ways (having a process-character) the world is disclosed in the light of a particular social arrangement. And there are different kinds of excellence as worlds are disclosed given the appropriate setting and obstacles (support) to human flourishing. Our approach to developing a concept of excellence has resisted understanding it as an extant actuality rather than as an imaginative bringing-forth of possibilities. We have avoided designating it as a noun rather than a verb, which is the coming-to-be in ekstatic unfolding. We have not portrayed it as a full presence, rather as an absence mingled with presence, something yet to be disclosed. We have endeavored to see it as a clearing, the ekstatic presencing in the midst of inheritance (past) and coming-forth (future), rather than as an object. It is an ekstatically temporal context of possibilities and emergence and also a context of meaning organized around creative birthing of possibilities for enhancement of life. Excellence is disclosive of potentiality-for-being, unconcealing elements of sociality (historicality) and possibilities for de-structuring of traditions as pertinent to the revealing, deepening, and widening of being. In this light, meaning is sought from future possibilities and goals ahead to which the not-yet lived life could be oriented and the already-lived life interpreted. The meaningful (the nonself-sufficient) now in which all orientations and interpretations occur is always in the midst of the past and the future, leaning forward and outward to unrealized potentialities. In this conception of excellence, I am not claiming that traditional, analytical, and virtue ethicist conceptions are outdated, trivial, or dispensable, only that they did not consider excellence as pertaining to possibility, as implicated in humans’ potentiality-for-being. These theories disclose varied and valid insights that are important for understanding excellence, but their disclosures conceal the temporal structure of excellence as a “temporal toward-which and not-yet.”14 They often present it as an actuality, a full presence and not as a confluence of absence (void) and presence. It has been too easily confined to organized harmony; and especially for virtue ethicists,

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is the best of existing norms, standard, balanced social normalcy for eudaimonia. I unsettle the confinement. I accent the excesses and ambiguities that disrupt existing cultural norms and ethical paradigm and these are no less appropriate to human flourishing and living well. Excellence’s “essence” is its existential possibilities. Possibilities precede, exceed, and are higher than virtues. The purpose of this book is, therefore, to reorient our ethical thinking about excellence for the better.

The Exit and Tagline: Africa and Excellence I had long wondered, even before writing this book, if my fascination with excellence might, in fact, be a product of my lifelong encounter with underdevelopment and poverty experienced by the people of sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps, it is a little hesitation against what could be achieved but left unattended to all over the world. In any case, I was interested in excellence and started investigating its dynamics in historicity partly because of my people; Africans, blacks, who have been raped of their excellence by their own leaders of the same flesh and blood. I want to speak to the people directly, those born and yet-to-be-born. I want to tell them that every human being has built into him- or herself strivings for excellence to continually surpass the self and the very contours of any particular existence. This places a demand on us all as Africans, as black men and women. There is another demand on every African. A demand necessitated by the emerging global civilization, the poverty and humiliation of Africans, and the circumstantially contingent ground-level placement of blackness among the human race. The civilizing, globalizing process unfolding itself before us raises questions about blackness, placing demand on all Africans. Blackness is now a claim for a chance for excellence and the attainment of contemporary excellence. Our originative blackness today places an unconditional and inescapable call to us all. The demand “calls for something that does not yet exist but should exist, should come to fulfillment.”15 Blackness is, was, and is the one to come. It is the expected New Being. The demand that confronts us is the urgent need to express our excellence, to fulfill that which is not alien to our nature. The demand for excellence is our own essence and it is grounded in blackness. Today’s actuality of blackness is not the true complete blackness, not the fulfillment of what is intended for black people. At best, it is a forward reference to fulfillment, an ignored prompting to perform the musical score that has never been performed. The fulfillment of blackness involves confronting and affirming the demand as an ought. We experience this demand not only for ourselves but also in our encounter with other races

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and colors. The content of the demand is that Africans be accorded the same dignity as others. This is the dignity of lifting humanity to its intended fulfillment, being a sturdy bearer of excellence, being free from crushing poverty and dilapidating diseases. The bearer of excellence faces four segments of time: past, present, and two tomorrows. The first tomorrow can only bring what is in the pipeline, which is originated, symbolized, managed, and propelled by the past and present. The second tomorrow is about calling into existence that which is not, creating a new world, the arrival of underivable new. This is the tomorrow that belongs to all humanity as a whole and Africans must step into it with the rest of the world. If Africans have lost the present and first tomorrow, then they and the rest of the world (brown, yellow, white) cannot afford to have them lose the second tomorrow. All this must begin with a solitary decision by each person to purely engage in an exceptional process of essentially principled passionate intervention. Each person must decide to be a subject for Africa’s economic emancipation, an excellent self. Economic development, excellent self, and excellence are all aspects of a single process: Africa’s economic development will come into being through the agents who militantly proclaim excellence and, in doing so, constitute themselves as excellent selves in their fidelity to excellence, in their conviction to become first and foremost sites for the invention of something new. Africa needs her own people at various levels and spheres, corners and centers, generations and regions whose identity can rest entirely on such a commitment. It needs persons whose identity is forged by determined liberatory struggles for higher levels of human flourishing in the continent. Africa needs her sons and daughters who can say I am because we are struggling for a new Africa.

Notes 1. Feltham, Alain Badiou, 123. 2. For the mere actualization of potentialities without any goal commitment toward human flourishing (life enhancement) cannot be used as a general formula in place of the good. Actualization is ambiguous on its own because of the human proclivity to use their capabilities for both good and evil. This is why in this study we have insisted on examining excellence within the context of human flourishing, enhancement of life. 3. Ward, Religion and Human Fulfillment, 2–4, 6, 22–24, 185. This is one of the ways he puts the matter: “[T]he moral input of religion should not be in the promulgation of specific rules on the basis of revelation. Such specific rules may and do change in response to new knowledge and understanding. The relevant religious prin-

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ciple will be the primacy of the personal, which encourages a continuing search for all that makes for the flourishing of personal life” (p. 185, italics added). 4. Rucker, Infinity of the Mind, 50–51, 78, 203. 5. Rucker, Infinity of the Mind, 145–48. 6. See Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 31–35, 175–76 for the definition of structural and motivational virtues. 7. See Adams, A Theory of Virtue, 89–91 for an argument about how concern for the good of persons is linked with caring for some activities for their own sake. 8. I have borrowed the rhetorical flourish of Oscar Cullman in different context for my purpose here. See Cullman et al., “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead,” 19. 9. I have relied on Paul Tillich to think through the issues of means and meaning here. 10. See Volf, Work in the Spirit, 120–21. 11. See Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games. 12. Taylor, Confidence Games, 330–31. 13. Goodchild, “Debt, Epistemology and Ecotheology,” 166. 14. Hatab, Ethics and Finitude, 73, 85–86. 15. Tillich, The Socialist Decision, 4.

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Acknowledgments

Producing this work was akin to performing orchestra music. Many bodies were assembled to make what you are about to hear possible. Virtuosos like Peter Paris, Mark Lewis Taylor, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Simeon Ilesanmi, and Wapaemi (spouse) variously contributed their minds, hands, hearts, or time to me so that you could have this piece of music in your hands today. Receive it like a true piece of music and let your reading be a performance of it. Theology is a score through which we seek to deepen our understanding of our world and our relationship with God, and to express our present selfunderstanding and hope. Music is ekstatic architecture of sound. Theology is an expressive architecture of Unconditional sound. My friend, it is the theologian’s work: sounds to divine, to interpret, and to reveal. Believe me, this is the theologian’s true hope: his (or her) writing to be converted to classical music, producing a form and energy of that original multiple Oneness as music and as fillip to human flourishing. In chapter 6, I have incorporated material from my article, “Emergence and ‘Science of Ethos’: Toward a Tillichian Ethical Framework,” which appeared in Theology and Science 7, no. 2 (May 2009): 189–206. Copyright 2009 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. Finally, I need to thank my six-year-old son, Favor, who during the long period of writing turned on the computer for me every morning on his way to catch the school bus. After getting it up and running he would announce lyrically, “Daddy, I have turned it on.” Thanks also to Nancy Shoptaw who 217

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brought such an uncommon care and competency to her task of copyediting the final manuscript that she changed my understanding of the work and worth of copyeditors in the relationship between an author and his or her audience. Jessica Bradfield, my editor at Rowman and Littlefield, worked tirelessly to navigate this book through the stages of publication. Thanks to you, Jessica.

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Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Adams, Robert Merrihew. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Anderson, Ben. “‘Transcending Without Transcendence’: Utopianism and an Ethos of Hope.” Antipode 38, no. 4 (2006): 691–710. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. ———. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999. Atherton, John. Transfiguring Capitalism: An Enquiry into Religion and Global Change. London: SCM Press, 2008. Backman, Jussi. “Divine and Mortal Motivation: On the Movement of Life in Aristotle and Heidegger.” Continental Philosophy Review 38 (2006): 241–61. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005. ———. Number and Numbers. Translated by Robin Mackay. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. ———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Barrera Albino. God and Evil of Scarcity: Moral Foundations of Economic Agency. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.

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

Index

Abram, David, 155 absence, 25, 49, 213 Absolute Infinity, 208 abstract, 10, 62, 67–68, 108, 126, 127. See also excellence abyss, 5, 7, 33, 93 accidents, 55 Adam, 38, 88, 99, 110 Adams, Robert Merrihew, 9, 54, 114 affirmation, 7, 25, 42, 66, 118, 201. See also self-affirmation Africa, 200, 214–15; African conception of excellence, 82–89; Africans, 214–15. See also laabo agape, 26, 200–201 agu nsi, 171, 178n13. See also Kalabari aleph-beth, 155 amateme-so, 86–87. See also Kalabari antimatter, 13 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint arete¯, 25–26, 49–50, 92, 165, 167–69 Aristophanes, 34 Aristotle, 1, 23–25, 75n4, 76nn15–16, 109, 167; excellence as overcoming

of obstacles, 45–46; theory of virtue, 50–53, 71 articulation, 168, 194, 201, 203 ascendency, 190 assets, 195, 205 audacity of life, 13, 62 authenticity, 53 authority, 145, 167, 171 autocatalysis, 190 autonomy, 138, 140, 142 Badiou, Alain, 28, 30, 31, 32, 52, 70, 90 baseball, 55–56, 78n36 batting averages, 55–56 bearers, 41, 137; of divine breath, 155; of history, 127; of image of God, xi, 105; of the living word, 157 beauty, ix, 1, 3, 18, 207, 208–9 Beckett, Samuel, 32 becoming, 42n2, 51, 85–88, 125, 144, 192; money, 194–95, 197, 205n32; novum, 143; prophetic spirit, 146, 151 be-ginnan, 197

227

228

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Index

being, 1, 5, 16–18, 66; Aristotle on, 50–52; and the divine, 25, 33, 73–74, 91, 93, 100; and economic development, 199–203; eros of, 72, 199–200; of excellence, 12, 67; and human nature, 37–39; impasse of, 31; moral imperative of, 120–21; nonbeing, 5, 13, 42, 63, 71–72, 188, 200; orientation to the future, 66–67; Plato on, 91; promise in, 103; and prophetic spirit, 151–55; restlessness of, 123, 126; subjectobject structure, 39–42; unfolding of, x, 1, 42, 72–75, 81–82, 102, 109, 117–88, 207–9. See also excellence being-in-the-world, 62, 117 being-itself, 63, 122, 188 belonging, 29, 87–88, 168 bibi, 83. See also Kalabari bibibari, 85, 88, 121. See also Kalabari Bible, 10, 100, 115–16; 1 Corinthians, 211; 2 Corinthians, 153–54, 156; Ezekiel, 59; Genesis, 105–6, 109, 155; John, 10, 28, 97–103, 106, 108, 124; Isaiah, 116; Jeremiah, 156; Luke, 59; Mark, 59; Matthew, 115, 161n37; New Testament, 148; Old Testament, 38, 156; Philippians, 117; Revelation, 116, 130n36; Romans, 154 Billings, David, 126 bipolar, 213 blackness, 214 Blackwell, Albert, L. 119 Bloch, Ernst, 17, 38, 127, 144, 196 Borgmann, Albert, 61 born again, 28 Boston Red Sox, 55 braid, 207 Braudel, Fernand, 190 breath, 155–56 bringing-forth, 95, 213 Brooks, David, 60

Buber, Martin, 13, 37, 105 bucketshop, 173 bukebusinbo, 82. See also excellent self bunimibo, 82. See also excellent self bureaucratic thinking, 209 call, 32, 63, 65, 86, 106, 109; for action, 127, 136, 157; of Dasein, 53; of deep, 31, 155; of God, 97–98 capability, 12, 55, 74, 80n86, 105, 194; creative, 64, 145, 183 capital, 57, 194–95, 197 cashflows. See discounted cash flow category, ix, 2, 37, 48, 64, 188, 202 central bank. See money central function, 23, 25, 51 centripetality, 190 choice, 5, 121, 158 Christ. See Jesus Christian, 10–11, 84, 89, 92, 156 Christianity, 10, 83–84, 88 Christology, ix, 10, 16, 98–99. See also Jesus: akin to Kalabari community hero; Jesus: as new being circle, 63, 81–82, 95 citizenry, x, 2, 16, 136, 146, 158–59, 167 civilization, 30, 35, 65–66, 182, 210–11, 214 clearing, x, 7, 11–12, 19n3, 25, 203, 213; and economic development, 18, 177, 189–90; as excellence, x, 2–3, 16, 24, 70, 194, 207; union of eros and limitations, 4 collective effervescence, 171 collective rate of innovation, 189, 191 common good, xi, 8, 61, 92, 119, 202 communality, 11, 92, 154, 158 communicative praxis, 68. See also praxis communion, 87–88, 91, 155–56, 189– 91; between humans and God, 13, 91, 100, 124, 148, 155

Index

community, 67–69, 90, 121; criteria for judging, 8–9; reception for excellence, 2, 24 complicatio, 192 composition. See music concrete, 16, 67–69, 108, 126, 127, 133 condition of possibility, ix, xi, 14, 197 configuration of process, 190 connectance, 190 connectedness, 3, 48, 72–74, 109, 118, 141, 171 connection-making power, 88, 198, 201 connections per node, 191 consciousness, 37–38, 82–83, 127, 150–51, 156, 168, 170 consistence, 34 contingency, 17, 43, 118–19, 135, 143– 46, 151–52, 175 conviction, 60, 210, 215 core, 94, 106, 185–86, 211 correspond, 103 cosmic order, 53 cosmic play of life, 13, 25 counted as one, 31, 70, 208 courage, 5, 10, 13, 24, 65, 133; united with excellence, 118 covenant, 154, 156–57 crack, 28, 32 creare, 71 creative destructions, 177 creative imperative, 106, 109 creativity, 55, 94–95, 190, 192, 199, 106–9, 135; and clearing, x, 70, 71–74 credit, 195, 197 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 60 cycle, 125, 196 Damon, William, 60 dark matter, 169 darkness, 24, 93, 157, 212 Darwin, Charles, 55 Dasein, 52–53, 66



229

DCF. See discounted cash flow debt, 167 decentered, 156 decision, 25, 30, 32, 85, 95, 108; decision scenario, 17, 135, 145–46; economic, 195, 199–200; information, 191–92; revolutionary, 127, 158, 209, 215 demand, 108, 152, 165, 184–85, 187, 199; on Africans, 214–16; from excellence, 66–67, 72, 123, 143, 203, 211; for justice, 100, 106, 121, 145; of life, 13, 63, 71, 120; of moral imperative, 120, 123, 168; for selfactualization, 203 demioergos, 92 democracy, 194 density, 28, 35, 189 depth, 36, 47, 109, 137, 210–12; of being, 12, 14, 33, 91, 150; of economic development, 188; of human potentialities, 65, 93, 138– 40, 142, 191; of social practice, 169 destiny, 63, 72, 83–85, 99, 210–12 discounted cash flow, 195–96, 205n32 discount factor, 196 disintegration, 190 divine creativity, 103, 109, 128, 136–42, 191–92 divine ontological creativity, 13, 73, 80n82 divine urge. See lure D’Sa, Francis X., 66 dunamis, 25 Durkheim, Emile, 171 E=MC2, 189 earthling, 155 ecclesia, 154 economic development, 14–16, 60–61, 177, 181–204; of Africa, 214–16; dialectical tension of, 203; dimensions of, 191–92, 203;

230



Index

disarticulation, 201–2; as excellence, x, 18, 184–85, 187–89; as freedom, x, 12, 18, 181–85; and monetary policy, 194–202; as spiritual process, 203–4; theological character of, 182–88; and work, 197–202 ecosystem, 191 education, 8, 60, 104, 111n19, 184–85 ego, 7, 12 Einstein, Albert, 189–90, 193 ekstatic, 69, 212, 213, 217 emergence, 29, 84, 210 energy, 35–37, 44n16, 88, 109, 127, 199; physical, 189; social, 74–75, 163, 189–91, 193–94, 198, 202; spiritual, 16, 35–37, 94–95, 104, 117, 153, 210 environment, 38, 40 epiphanic self, 4 epistemology, 23, 33, 71, 107, 212 epithymia, 200, 201 equation, 189–90, 193–94 eros, 3, 25–26, 34–36, 81–82, 86–92, 124, 199–202 eschatology, 36, 100, 125–28, 194–96, 210–11 estrangement, 16, 89, 91–92, 117, 120 ethical framework. See framework ethical object, 152 ethics of liberation, 1 ethos, 16, 73, 86–87, 114, 136–40, 140, 143 Eucharist, 156 eudaimonia, 26, 50–52, 121, 199, 208, 214 Eve. See Adam event, 24, 40–41, 43n8, 84, 90, 165; revolutionary, 29–31, 209 evolution, 31, 33, 55–57, 189 excelleme, 5–7, 191, 194 excellence, ix–x, 2–15; abstract form, 67–70; as an answer, 68; as apocalyptic, 13, 113; being of, 12,

69; Christology of, ix, 16, 98–99; as circle, 63, 82, 95; compared to anxiety, 122; compared to sound, 122; concrete form, 68; as current of life, 4, 117, 192; as deep structure of economic development, 14; as demand for something new, 72; as description, 67–68; development as, ix, 184, 187; dwelling for, 25; as ex, 2, 7, 39, 49, 63, 94; as excess of meaning, 13; excess of possibility, 7, 117; as exemplar, 10, 16, 208, 54; as fundamentally social, 69; as immanent principle of activity, 26; as locus and means of shared participation, 68; as next small thing, 59, 67, 95; not as ideal or perfection, 4, 10; as noun, 213; ontological, 65–66; as principle, 13, 26–27, 81–82, 133–35; as process, 2, 26, 49, 144, 146, 207; as product, 26, 95, 190; as property, 10, 109–10, 166; as reception, 24, 94, 98, 113; religious quality of, 12–14, 208; as spiritual process, 12–13, 25, 98–99; as standards, 18, 69–71, 74, 92, 165–66, 212–13; technical, 65–66; as title, 67–68; as verb, 62, 213; as willto-the-infinite, 66–67. See also Jesus excellentist world, 135–36, 143–48, 150, 152, 158, 170 excellent self, 4, 24–25, 29, 32, 82–85, 93, 149; and Africa, 215; as new being, 89–90, 92, 124; and self-world correlation, 123 ex-cellere, 7, 39, 63 excess of parts, 31–32, 33, 70 excluded possibilities, 18, 164–66, 174, 176–77 excrescence, 30 exemplar, 4, 10, 16, 107–9, 117, 208 exemplification, 107 existing-nothing, 71–72

Index

expectant new being, 123 explicatio, 192 external goods, 166, 172, 174 fabric, 14, 34–35, 63, 93, 107, 207–8 faith, 101, 104, 151–52, 208–9, 211 Faraday, Michael, 186 fari, 86, 95n7, 109. See also Kalabari fear, 122, 144–45, 149, 153, 157, 196 fecundity, 16, 47 Feltham, Oliver, 207 Fenn, Richard, 144, 147, 168–69 fidelity, 32, 44, 90, 208, 215 finitude, 2, 33, 37, 62–63, 65, 74 fire in the bones, 153 fiscal policies, 202 fiyeteboye. See Kalabari force, 4, 15, 35, 48, 67, 85, 117 Ford, Lewis S., 84 form, 3, 7, 9, 26–27, 30, 33, 51 formalism, 203 form-bursting, 203 forms of spiritual energies, 35 framework, 1, 4, 14, 47–48; ethical, 14, 16–17, 69, 71, 128–29, 135–59 Frankena, William, 61 freedom, 12, 15, 18, 27, 183–88, 199 Freud, Sigmund, 200, 201 Friedman, Milton, 199 friendship, 8 fulfillment, 15, 25, 39, 60, 65, 67, 72 futural character. See future future, 7, 11–15, 17–18, 24, 66–69, 93; futural character, 39, 191; motivational, 115, 209; structural character, 115, 209 Gafni, Marc, 1, 82, 157 game-theoretic ethics, 152 Gardner, Howard, 60 Gardner, John W., 60 gboloma. See Kalabari Gentiles, 154

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231

gestalten, 49 givenness, 125, 196 globalizing, 37, 194, 214 God, 13, 25–28, 38, 51–53, 109; Godself, 25, 103; as Father, 33, 89, 97–103, 108, 115, 141; image of, xi, 105–7; promises of, xi, 38. See also Kalabari Godel, Kurt, 33 good, 11, 23, 54, 50–51, 208, 210 Goodchild, Philip, 195, 212 Goodman, Nelson, 41, 107 Gould, Stephen, 55–57 governance, 8, 14, 143, 146–47, 150, 170 governance ethic, 146–50 governors, 48 grace, 105, 115, 133, 148, 153 Grandi Series, 34 gravity, 23, 35 gross national product, 183, 184 happiness. See eudaimonia Hardt, Michael, 69, 71, 193 Hatab, Lawrence J., 53 heart, 154–57 heaven, 73, 85, 115–16, 126, 133, 211 Hegel, 71 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 52–53 helan, 133 hell, 133, 164 Hephaestus, 92 heteronomy, 25, 66, 87 120, 138, 151 historicality, 151, 213 Hollywood, 186 holy, 169, 170, 204 Homer, 49, 50, 92 homohomo, 55, 69 horizon, 33, 39, 124–25, 139, 150, 169–70 Horton, Robin, 84, 85, 171 human: capabilities, 34–35, 48, 181–83, 202; dignity, xi, 106, 215; essential

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Index

being, 38, 86–87, 98, 120–21; flourishing, 2, 7, 14–15, 25–28, 33, 35; self, 39–41; spiritual, 12–13 human capital, 58, 194 human context, 4, 21, 35 hymn, 92

interest rate, 196, 198 internal goods, 69, 166, 172–75 intersubjective, 189, 190 intuition, 91 inventors, 191 Israel, 100, 116, 154

identity, 43n8, 102, 124, 171, 175 Ihuoma, Sylvester, 33 Ijo, 82. See also Kalabari image, 1, 7, 10, 23, 90, 93, 106, 127 imagination, 1, 66, 85–86, 93, 107, 145, 164. See also Kalabari imaging, 10, 54 Imago Dei, 105 imitating, 5, 11, 92, 101–6, 109, 124 imitatio creatoris, 105 immeasurability, 70, 71 immortal longing, 2, 177 implicatio, 192 improvisation, 34 impulse, 11, 18, 123, 153, 163, 199 inclusiveness, 82, 109, 141, 144, 149, 202 incompleteness, 34, 67, 106, 122–24, 185, 199–200 incompleteness theorem, 33 indeterminacy, 5, 7, 70, 143, 146 individuation, 61, 104, 119, 192 infinite, 7, 11, 12, 31, 63, 187 infinite longing, 29, 33–36, 57, 68, 207, 210 information, 5–6, 176, 189–91, 193 information flow, 189, 190, 194 information-ing, 191 information theory, 191 inner psyche of society, 149 innovation, 34, 35, 57, 61, 190–91, 194 integration, 48, 99, 189, 191, 198, 201–2 intensification, 28, 158, 190, 194 intentionality, 25, 64 interconnectivity of being, 2, 81, 117, 155, 207

Jesus, 59, 84, 88–89, 108, 110, 115–17; akin to Kalabari community hero, 84–88; imitating, 27–28, 97–109; as model of human nature, 4; as new Adam, 99, 110; as new being, ix, 9– 10, 16, 89–92, 109–10; as paradigm of human excellence, 5, 9–11, 16, 28, 92, 109–10 Jevons, William Stanley, 58 Joyce, James, 99 Jung, Carl, 95 justice, 71, 100, 106, 114–15, 118–23, 145, 209; and prophetic spirit, 151, 153 Kalabari, 20n27, 29, 82, 84–87, 94–95, 120–21; agu nsi, 171, 178n13; amaoru, 83–88; amateme-so, 83, 86, 87; bibi, 83; bibibari, 85, 88, 121; dimensions of God, 82–83; ere, 86; excellent self, 43n8, 84–85, 92; fiyeteboye, 84–85, 86, 88, 95n7, 109; gboloma, 87–88, 96n13; imagination of earthly life, 85–86; owuamapu, 95; So, 82–88, 109, 120–21; so-bio, 85; teme, 87, 94; Teme-órú, 82–83, 84, 85; tombo, 43n8, 120; worship, 170–71 Kaufman, Gordon, 140 Keller, Catherine, 88, 156 Kierkegaard, Søren, 5, 7 kingdom of God, 37, 90, 141 laabo, 43n8. See also excellent self; Kalabari law, 8, 53, 75, 87, 120–21, 153–57

Index

leaders, 17, 61, 133, 135, 148–50, 158, 214 legacy, 36, 124 letting be, 24, 86 leverage, 148 liberatory struggles, 215 libido, 26, 200 life, 3–5, 8, 10, 13–14, 25–26, 190 light, 24, 71, 127, 157 liminal space, 95 lishmah, 129n6 logos, 84, 109 longing. See infinite longing long run, 195, 196 love, 25–26, 54, 114–18, 121–25, 200–201 Luhmann, Niklas, 143, 173 lure, 17, 27–28, 49, 83, 86–88, 135 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 80n86 MacIntyre, Alasdair, x, 17–18, 62, 165–67, 170–75, 177 Maimonides, Moses, 105 Majority World, 199, 200 manifestness, 23, 24 margin, 29, 31, 44n16, 57–59, 93–95, 188; and music, 186; and prophetic spirit, 157–58 marginal: cost, 57; productivity, 57; rate of return, 57; revenue, 57; value, 58 Marginalist Revolution, 58 Marion, Jean Luc, 156 Martin, Mike W., 54 Marx, Karl, 71 mass, 35, 189–90, 194 mass-energy equivalence, 189 Matisse, 99 matrix, 15, 18, 47, 184, 191–92 meaning, 13, 25–26, 61, 64–73, 104, 137, 210–11 meaningfulness, 25, 64 medieval, 23, 53, 61, 192 melody, 186

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233

Menger, Carl, 58 Messiah, 89, 98. See also Jesus metalogical, 203 methodology, ix, 4, 140, 195 model, 17, 69, 88, 109, 135–36, 143; of human nature, ix; Jesus as model of human nature, ix, 9, 117. See also Jesus Moltmann, Jürgen, 11, 37–38, 98; on hope, 17, 125, 128–29, 196 money, 126, 175, 194–202; central bank, 199–200, 201; eros of money, 198, 199, 201, 202; mutuality, 198, 202; policy, 197–98; promotion of sociality, 198; as social relation, 201; stimulating, 198; transformative, 198; and work, 194, 197–98 moral imperative, 43n8, 120 morality, 173, 208 Moses, Law of, 154 Mother Teresa, 67 Mozart, 119 multiplicity, 28, 33, 70, 90, 193 music, 66–67, 119, 122, 185, 217 mutuality, 4, 198, 201–2 nation-state, 145 navel-gazing, 127, 154, 155, 156 Nazareth. See Jesus Negri, Antonio, 69, 71, 193 neoclassical economics, 59, 186, 194– 95, 196, 199 neshamah, 155 net present value. See present value network, 68, 70, 128, 212 neutrons, 191 new creation, 18, 125–26, 210–12 new earth, 73, 141, 211 new growth theory, 191 new heaven, 73, 141, 211 New Jerusalem, 211, 212 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 37 Niebuhr, Richard, 152

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Index

Nietzsche, 53, 80n86 Niger Delta, 29, 82, 120, 170 Nigeria, 29, 82, 120, 170 nonbeing, 5, 13, 42, 63, 71–72, 200 non-place, 28, 58 non-zero sum, 191 no-thing, 29, 72, 94 nothingness, 5, 7, 24, 62, 71–72, 94 not-yet, 2, 7–8, 15–16, 28–29, 35, 56–57 not-yet-become, 127 novum, 24, 30, 40, 49, 138, 143, 177 numen, 164, 170–72, 174, Nussbaum, Martha C., 10, 12, 21, 35 objectively possible, 125, 128, 194, 196 object of the ethicist, 8 oil. See virgins (ten) ontology, 70 opening. See clearing openness, 5, 12, 25, 52, 125, 147–58 order, 16 orientatio, 128 orientation to the divine, 2, 5, 8, 139–43 overhead, 147, 190 overman, 82 overplus, 28, 117, 164 ownmost, 2, 8, 53, 75, 99, 155 pain-pleasure principle, 201 Pareto Efficiency, 58 Pareto Optimality, 58 parousia, 128, 132n51 participative possibility frontier, 59 particular and universal, 108 Paul, Saint, 117, 153–57 perfect being, 51, 52 perfection, 4, 10, 72, 92, 103, 167–69, 173 perichoretic, 118 personhood, 43n8, 87, 171, 187 person-in-communion, 15, 81, 123, 141

Peters, Thomas, 61 phase space, 143–44, 145, 148 philia, 26, 200–201, 202 phonein, 155 phronesis, 47, 55, 72 physics, 189 piety, 17, 110 placeness, 2 Plato, 34, 50, 91, 94, 120, 199; ideal/ standards, 26, 27, 54, 56; justice, 119 plenora, 93 pneuma, 155 poiesis, 47, 55, 64 polis, x, 16, 25, 127, 167 politics, x, 8, 16, 36, 117, 209–10 pollution, 59, 147 possibilities, 4–5, 7–15, 84, 121–23, 208, 214; excluded, 163–66, 174, 176; included, 163, 166, 169 postmodern, 212 poverty, 34, 59, 91–92, 116, 194, 200, 214–15 power three, 190 pragmatists, 164, 165 praxis, 15, 49, 68, 115, 200, 209 prayer, 115–16, 153 presence, 95, 139, 155–57, 168, 172, 190, 213; as absence, 49, 70; complete, 52–53; as form, 51 presentized, 196 present value, 195–96, 205n32 primitive man, 176 principle, 13, 26–27, 71, 100, 133, 167 principle of form, 211 processing system, 190 processive openness, 125, 196, 197 production possibility frontier, 57–58 progress, 14–15, 55–57, 61–62, 73, 151, 186–87, 203 property, 10, 107, 109, 166 prophet, 100, 113, 116–17, 157 prophetic spirit, x, 17–18, 136, 143–46, 150–57, 159, 170

Index

Protestant principle, 90 Ratzinger, Joseph, 101 real, 209 real possible, 125, 127–28, 194, 196, 197 reason, 25–26, 37–38, 92, 211 redemption, 211–12 redemptive, 195, 196 Reflection Principle, 208, 34 regime, 183, 197, 202 relationality, 2–3, 59, 118, 150, 190–94, 207 religion, 14, 36, 88, 137–38, 169, 208 res, 156 resemblance 9–10, 54, 84, 109–10 resistance, x, 3, 16, 41–42, 72–73, 91; and becoming, 1, 117, 151; and creativity, 112, 126; and hope, 127–28 response patterns to uncertainty, 147 responsible self, 4, 152 restlessness, 7, 42n2, 123 revelation, 13, 24, 26, 40, 207–8 Ricoeur, Paul, 47 risk, 13, 93, 101, 125, 173–74, 196–97 sacred, 93, 139, 169–71, 174 sacred canopy, 148 sacrifice, 52, 66, 89, 91, 138, 147 scholastics, 23 Schumpeter, Joseph, 177 science, 8, 55 science of culture, 136 science of ethos, 136–37, 139–40 Scott, James, 126 seeing and doing, 28, 99–101, 103, 108, 124 seeing and hearing, 102 self-affirmation, 13, 24, 66–68, 71, 73, 104; as an encounter with God, 5, 124; as fundamental character of human life, 85, 187 self-referentiality, 211, 212

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235

self transcendence, 4, 7, 63, 94, 175, 182–83, 187–88 self-world correlation, 31–32, 39–42, 48, 62, 122 Sen, Amartya, x, 12, 14–15, 18, 181–84 Sennett, Richard, 92 separateness, 94, 118, 199 serendipitous creativity, 137, 139 silence, 94, 95 simplicity, 51 Sinai, 154 singularity, 90 sites,12, 150, 193, 215 situation, 28–29, 30, 31, 32 Smith, Steven G., 119 so-bio. See Kalabari social bond, 171, 174 social capital, 194 social energy, 189, 190 sociality, 2, 25, 29–31, 49, 66, 192–93 social practice, x, 18, 163–72; as design mechanism, 175–76 societal, 14, 17–18, 57, 203 society, 8–9, 14, 35–37; management of, 146–50; managers of, 17, 146, 150, 195 sound, 86, 102, 109, 119, 122, 217 source, 12, 13, 117, 120–21, 124, 189 space, 62, 94–95, 103, 146, 150, 168 speculators, 173 speed of information, 189, 190, 191, 194 speed of light, 189, 194 Spinoza, Benedict, 6, 182 spirit, 12, 13, 37, 85, 152–55, 192–93 spiritual presence, 28, 157 spiritual quest of human beings, 12 Stackhouse, Max, 35–36 state, x–xi statue, 36, 184 Steiner, George, 98 stimulation. See money Stoics, 53

236

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Index

stone, tablets of. See law Stout, Jeffrey, 126 strands of excellence, 3, 4, 207 strategy, 128, 147, 149 stretch of resources. See strategy subject, 4–5, 28–32, 43n8, 90, 209 subject-matter, 137, 139 substance,110, 137, 138, 141 super-mench, 67, 73 surplus, 15, 68, 70, 143, 146, 172; of possibility, 13, 105, 116–17 swarm intelligence, 69 symbols, 41, 66, 68, 84, 106, 123–24 synthesis, 3, 15, 104, 202–3, 204 tactics. See strategy task of ethics, ix, 142, 146 Taylor, Charles, 4 Taylor, Mark C., 42n2 Taylor, Mark Lewis, x, 17, 139–40, 150–53 technocratic management, 59, 209 telic centering, 102 telos, 15, 50, 53, 73–74, 123, 168, 192; of economic development, 15, 200 teme. See Kalabari tempering, x, 119, 121. See also justice temporal mode, 212 terror, 144, 146, 147 theonomy, 90, 138–40, 142 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 45n49, 52 threats, 136, 147, 149, 159, 164 Tillich, Paul, ix, 33, 89–91, 100, 136– 39, 192 time, 2, 94, 95, 115–17, 122, 196; first and second tomorrows, 215; running out, 144, 146, 147, 148–49; segments, 94, 215. See also future tone, 185–86 totality, 25, 84, 98, 122, 211 tradition, 24, 62, 69 transcendence, 69 transcendere, 144

transformatio mundi, 126, 211 transparent to the divine depth, 91, 177, 203 trend, 55, 123, 127, 196 trend-mentality, 197 typos, 23, 48 Ulanowicz, Robert E., 190, 191 uncertainty, 143, 145–48, 151, 152–53, 158 unconcealment, 11–13, 23–24, 29, 73, 117, 212 unconditional, 17, 136, 139–40, 142, 203 underivable, 13, 138, 215 unfinishedness, 34, 144, 187, 210 unfolding of being, 1, 42, 72, 73, 102, 109 unfreedoms, 12, 14–15, 18, 181, 183– 85, 199. See also freedom urban-rural, 194 urge of excellence, 72, 117, 183, 210 ultimate concern, 100, 139, 140 utopia, 144 utopological, 49, 100, 144 valuation, 195–96, 205n32 van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel, 143 variation, 35, 55–57, 158 verbal script, 86 virgins (ten), 148 virtue ethicists, 15–16, 47, 69, 165–66, 173–74, 177, 213 vocational consciousness, 127, 133 void, 28–31, 58, 59, 93, 157, 213; as crack for possibilities, 32; as margin, 29, 31, 44n16, 94–95; as not-yet, 93, 207; as part of every situation, 28–30, 32. See also Badiou, Alain; situation Volf, Miroslav, 126 Wall, John, 55, 105–6, 109

Index

walls, 11, 56–57. See also variation Wall Street, 173, 197 Ward, Keith, 208 Wariboko, Nimi, 87, 192 way of being, 4, 103, 150, 158, 164; for excellence, 15, 74–75, 91, 114–15 web, 125, 168, 194–95 Whitehead, Alfred North, 14 Williams, Ted, 55

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237

will-to-the-infinite, 65–67, 97 work, 197, 202; and money, 197–98, 202 worship, 36. See also Kalabari Wright, Robert, 191 writing, 154–55, 217; in ink, 154; in spirit, 154 Zeus, 34 Zuckerkandl, Victor, 66, 102, 185, 186

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About the Author

Nimi Wariboko is the Katherine B. Stuart Professor of Christian Ethics at Andover Newton Theological School, Newton Center, Massachusetts. His other books include God and Money: A Theology of Money in a Globalizing World and The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation.

239