I) EXPOSITION: G.E.M. ANSCOMBE & CO.

And it is because “morally wrong” is the heir of this concept [of injustice], but an heir cut off from the family of concepts from which it sprang, that “morally wrong” both goes beyond the mere factual description “unjust” and seems to have no discernible content except a certain compelling force...1

In the conclusion of her prophetic essay, “Modern Moral

Philosophy,” G.E.M. Anscombe exposes several gaps that afflict

the ethical enterprise: (a) morality has long been the highest

(and most abused) appeal, often exercised over its inheritance of

justice; (b) consequently, modern moral philosophy has made it

possible to justify what is unjust so long as it abides by the

‘morally good’; (c) accordingly, her contemporaries do not have

the philosophical equipment to pursue the just apart from the

‘emphatic ought’ of their predecessors; and finally, her main

thesis, (d) moral duty and obligation are residual concepts of

the divine good, rendered useless under secular pursuit of the

good.

She exposes these gaps by first pointing to the fault lines

of prior ethical movements. Kant’s concept of self-legislation

does not hold, nor does a rationality judged by consistency and

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universality. Mill and Bentham, in their respective attempts to

categorize and calculate good (as the greatest happiness for the

greatest number of people) fall short on their qualitative

categories—especially, she criticizes, in the notion of

eudaimonia. Hume’s sophistry concerning the ‘brute facts’ leaves

a noticeable gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, the empirical

and the ethical. These ethical approaches are incomplete, hardly

even accounting for the psychology of the person.2 Not

surprisingly, they are deficient in their definitions of

intention and pleasure.

Anscombe demonstrates that the work of empiricism (which

disregards the ‘inner life’) is not easily translatable into the

categories of what is ‘morally wrong.’ And yet, she sounds

optimistic that if we use the categories “‘untruthful,’

‘unchaste,’ ‘unjust,’” we would have more clarity.3 It would seem

then, a corrective for those who want an ethics of divine-law

without a divine legislator; she is calling for virtue ethics, a

non-emphatic ought, to replace such a legislator. But what is

this non-emphatic ought—this claim which operates from examples

not simply super-imposing itself over some, repressing others?

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Anscombe leaves us with this “huge gap, at present unfillable as

far as we are concerned.”4 However, she does advocate richer

accounts of “human nature, human action, the type of

characteristic a virtue is, and above all ‘human flourishing.’”5

This challenge birthed contemporary virtue ethics.6

While the modern discourse of virtue ethics is indebted to

Anscombe’s leveling—this does not mean that her contribution is

without its own holes. I would argue that her greatest

contribution is this shared reality she exposes in the past and

expresses for the future: ethical theory is deficient. And why?

Because it cannot see all (theoria). There is a chasm between the

empirical and ethical. There is a crevice between the moral and

the just. What eyes could perceive their connection, or rather

1 G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 43.2 Ibid., 30.3 Ibid., 34.4 Ibid., 43.5 Ibid., 44.6 Here I would add the qualifier of Emmanuel Levinas. He seems to say that neither theology nor psychology can get at these complex ethical relations, though they derive meaning from them: “It is our relations with men, which describe a field of research hardly glimpsed at (where more often than not we confine ourselves to a few formal categories whose content would be but “psychology”), that give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of.” He would suggest that only an ethics in relation to the infinite can approach the richness of Anscombe’s concerns. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 79.

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fill in the space in such a way that a non-emphatic ought is

their link? Causality cannot. Duty cannot. Intention cannot

always. And moral luck theorists would rather complicate the gaps

than risk a naïve claim.7

In responding to Anscombe, we must confront this riddle left

in her wake: What can we give to one another than can never be exhausted (that is

necessarily incomplete), and yet, can never be—properly speaking—owed or calculated?

Anscombe settles on the word justice. And certainly, justice is

necessarily incomplete—perfect justice is hardly ever achieved

within the courts. Justice is too often still quantified: the

cost of your loss, the cost of your emotional distress, the

weight of her insanity, the weight of his desperation, the

factors of his needs, the factors of their means. Justice is

after equivalences, symmetry (iustitia, equity). It gets bogged

down in “Exactly who is my neighbor?” “What do I owe them?” “What

they owe me?” Retributive justice seems a complex mathematics,

seeking balance with variables that are not always commensurable.

Justice itself is insufficient, always leaving a remainder

unaccounted, despite its diligent bookkeeping.8 So, it meets the 7 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24-38.

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first part of the riddle; it is never definitively accomplished.

It is always an impossibility, beyond being, but coming toward us

in our striving.9 However, does it fit the second category of the

riddle—never owed nor calculated? In our present legal system it

is certainly calculated, and under Anscombe’s thesis it is owed,

expected. While there is nothing unethical about expecting or

deserving justice—there is little to keep justice from slipping

into the pitfalls of deontology (duty) or utilitarianism

(calculated owing).

Perhaps our answer to the riddle resides in the origin of

justice Anscombe does not mention. Before morality was simply the

offspring of a divine lawgiver and commands, justice was inherent

within the wider concept of love. The origin of moral goodness is

not simply obedience to divine law (contract), but relation to a

divine Lover (covenant). Biblical connotations aside, even

contemporary virtue ethicist, Martha Nussbaum, reminds of love’s 8 In some way, (albeit a reduction--) Godel’s incompleteness theorem seems a fine critique of ethics based on legality. Even Kant is subject to Godel’s thesis that if something claims to be complete and consistent, it falls into the liar’s paradox. There is no way to prove both universality and consistency. 9 I think of Jacques Derrida’s work. “The impossible, which we love and desire, isfor Derrida, a justice, indeed a democracy, to come.” John D. Caputo, “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion,” God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 200.

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priority over justice. In reviewing Bob and Fanny’s interactions

in The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum seems to suggest that love is the link

between ought (“his rules”) and is (“her perceptions”):

The dialogue between his rules and her perceptions is motivated and sustained by a love that is itself in thesphere of perception, that antecedes any moral judgment. James suggests that if, as members of moral communities, we are to achieve shared perceptions of the actual, we had better love one another first, in all out disagreements and our qualitative differences. Like Aristotle, he seems to say that civic love comes before, and nourishes, civic justice.10

Could love respond to the riddle of ethics: (1) can love

ever be definitively accomplished; (2) can love be owed or even

calculated? If one assumes that the answer to both of these

questions is “no”—then it may be that love, after all, lies as

the superlative category, the Good Beyond Being. Love is not

satisfied by checking off ‘justice served’ when an arbitrary

equivalence is reached. Love does not keep records; though it is

not blind to justice. “Ethics is the spiritual optics,” as

Emmanuel Levinas suggests.11 Levinas names Justice as the means

through which we see the Infinite; however, this vision occurs in

10 Martha Nussbaum, “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” Love’s Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 161.11 Totality and Infinity, 78.

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interhuman relations—a sort of justice qua vigilant desire.

Levinas’ infinite desire is made explicit in the just social

relation, activated in how one regards the neighbor, the

stranger, the Transcendent Other.12

Approaching this ethics/optics of love, my paper will

suggest three ‘virtues’ that baffle calculation and resist

termination: humility, community, and desire.13 Humility is the

ongoing departure (the way), community the environs (the world),

and desire the motivating energy (orientation)—in and through

which love provides sight and bodies forth in action.

II) HUMILITY: MARTHA NUSSBAUM, GABRIEL MARCEL, AND SIMONE WEIL

Before a literary work…we are humble, open, active yet porous. Before a philosophical work, in its working through, we are active, controlling, aiming to leave noflank undefended and no mystery undispelled. This is too simple and schematic, clearly; but it says something. It’s not just emotion that’s lacking…. It’s also passivity; it’s trust, the acceptance of incompleteness.14

In a collection of philosophical essays, Love’s Knowledge,

Martha Nussbaum pushes ethicists into a discernment process that

12 NRSV, Matthew 22:36-40.13 These virtues not only exist in the Judeo-Christian tradition that Anscombesuspects dead, but also in contemporary virtue ethics. I will therefore remainvoices in philosophical ethics, as opposed to theologians.14 “Love’s Knowledge,” Love’s Knowledge, 282.

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requires humility before a complex reality. For Nussbaum, reality

is permeated by ambiguities; it has an unwieldy character that

can break our systems if we are not willing to bend our schemas.

Virtue ethics, therefore, must take into account a reason that

requires both logic and emotion. She argues that discernment is

not scientific: it cannot be quantitative when values are

incommensurable. Additionally, ethical discernment requires that

particularities hold priority over the universal.15 The ability

to value the particular often borrows from imaginative capacities

pursuing a “perceptive equilibrium.”16

This does not mean, however, that between perception and

ethical response there can be only this mysterious gap, a tangle

of incommensurability. It does mean that the interior life of

ethical agents is not always “reducible to that of the overt acts

they engender.”17 Literature reveals this gap, not in a

vagueness, but in a richness of manifold variables: intentions,

motivations, interpersonal histories, cultural influences, even

15 “Introduction: Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” Love’s Knowledge,55.16 “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,” Love’s Knowledge,168-194.17 “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” 153.

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describing so much as the settings of conversations and revealing

precipitating events. In literature, we can become more “finely

aware”—which provides a richness to the way in which an

individual is responsible within the whole of an ethical

dilemma.18 This ethical approach, ready to “surrender

invulnerability, to take up a posture of agency that is porous

and susceptible to influence, is of the highest importance in

getting an accurate perception of particular things in the

world.”19 And remember that for Nussbaum, perception is

implicated in love. Love, as the willingness to surrender one’s

systematic walls, is a way of combating misperception.

Key then to Nussbaum’s virtue of humility is the phrase

“active yet porous.” It seems a sort of reaching receptivity.

This resembles a phrase in Gabriel Marcel’s works as well,

summarized by his concept of “creative fidelity.” Marcel explores

the difficulty of remaining constant in fidelity to someone or

some belief, while realizing that presence is an assertion that

also requires receptivity. His concept of love in terms of

18 “’Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” Love’s Knowledge, 148-167.19 “Perceptive Equilibrium,” 180.

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creativity, then, is a willingness to remain open to the other,

at his or her disposal—while respecting the other’s permeability

and my own. Creative fidelity as love, or as ethical commitment,

occurs when the self is created (in a constant state of creation)

to meet the demands of fidelity. This often occurs in the

artist’s relationship with her vision, as Gabriel notes in

Rodin’s advice to Rilke. The virtue of creative fidelity is,

“Patience, humility in the presence of the object, of the two-

fold act by which the artist opens up to it and by which it opens

up to the artist.”20 This gracious openness is not a virtue that

one possesses (avoir), but is a way of being (être).21 The artist

and the person in love thus share an ethic of the creative vow,

which “implies the combination of a deep personal humility and an

unshaken confidence in life.”22 However, even Rilke, whom Marcel

20 Gabriel Marcel, “Rilke: A Witness to the Spiritual,” Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 243. See also, “What Rilke teaches us better than anyone, and what I think such writers as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have generally either never known or in the end forgotten, is thatthere exists receptivity which is really creation itself under another name. The most genuinely receptive being is at the same time the most essentially creative” (264).21 “This, however, only remains true on condition that the grace should inhabit him, not only as radiance, but as humility. From the moment that he begins to be proud of it as a possession it changes it nature, and I should betempted to say it becomes a malediction.” “Dangerous Situation of Ethical Values,” Homo Viator, 159.

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holds up in his humility as a creative prophet, had a humility

that led him away from community. A humility before objects of

beauty does not ensure an openness to community, or even a sense

of self-worth.

Unworthiness can serve as alibi against affiliation or

strict fidelity. Even Simone Weil referred to her unworthiness as

a reason why could not join any community—not any religious

community on earth,23 nor any community of saints beyond.24 She

claimed it was not humility but her own humanness. As opposed to

unworthiness that keeps one from strict communal fidelity,

humility gave Simone a flexible fidelity to the self. She

explains, “Humility consists in knowing that in this world the

whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but

also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in

it, is subject to time and the vicissitudes of change.”25 This is

22 “Creative Vow as Essence of Fatherhood,” Homo Viator, 121.

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not to say that Simone did not join group causes, of course. It

is because she was so “finely aware and richly responsible” that

she envisioned herself as part of the changes taking place.

Perhaps another definition of community needs to be offered: one

that welcomes a vulnerable self, and an openness to others.

III) COMMUNITY: ARISTOTLE, ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, & HENRI BERGSON

It is conceivable that it will be the task of small communities coming together like swarms one after the other to form what we might call centres of example, this is to say nuclei of life around which the lacerated tissues of true moral experience can be reconstituted.26

If it is so that humility leads to a rich inter-dependence

and intersubjectivity (regarding the other as other, or as a

fluid self instead of an object), a necessary correlate to

humility is community. Before what or whom am I humbled, de-

centered? What or whom affects me in my ethical discernment? And

23 In explaining why she could not join the church or partake in sacraments, she said it was not out of humility which she considered to be “the most beautiful of all the virtues perhaps,” Simone Weil, “Hesitations Concerning Baptism,” Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 5. Elsewhere, she calls “the virtue of humility…a far more precious treasure than all academic progress.” “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Waiting for God, 60.24 According to some, the virtue of humility that prevented her from being a saint in her own mind, inevitably made her a saint. Leslie A. Fielder, “Introduction,” Waiting for God, xi.25 Simone Weil, “Concerning the Our Father,” Waiting for God, 150.26 “Dangerous Situation of Ethical Values,” Homo Viator, 164.

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more so, what sort of ‘openness’ is required such that one is not

merely subject to the ‘herd’ (Nietzsche) or inauthentically

submitting to ‘the They’ (Heidegger)? These are complex questions

that find some solution in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.27

Let us say that ethics has two poles: Nietzsche’s self-

created values, or Aristotle’s rationality behind morality. The

former manifests in individual choosing and then dictating to the

community, the latter manifests in the individual receiving the

populace’s accepted virtues. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for

example, the self habituates virtues that are agreed upon and

modeled by a wise community.28 This can foster a conservatism,

not without its survival value—‘keep what you know to happen or

work on the ground.’ However, virtue then relies on a sort of

fortunate inheritance. It is for the land-owning men,

philosophers especially.

MacIntyre mitigates this polarity by the concept of co-

authorship. The self certainly has some personal quest in which

inherited virtues are tested and reformed en route to the good.

27 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).28 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Penguin Books, 1953), 7.

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However this quest never occurs in isolation; the self within a

society shapes practices.29 If practices or enacted virtues are

said to be social, how then is the self conceived? MacIntyre

suggests that there is a unity of self, but multiply affected—a

story with constraints that are in turn shaped internally by

infinite possibilities.30 In this way, a life is like an ongoing

conversation. But if a conversation is to take place not only

within a self, but among community members, there must be some

intelligibility. This intelligibility serves as the “conceptual

connecting link between the notion of action and that of

narrative.”31 It allows one’s action to be read as contrary to or

coherent within the arch of virtue.

As co-authors of individual and communal narrative, persons

in a community are therefore accountable to one another.32 But

the shared goal of virtue is only “partially teleological”33 29 “By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean 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 thosestandards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definite 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.” Ibid., 187.30 Ibid., 211-212.31 Ibid., 214.32 Ibid., 213, 219.33 Ibid., 216

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Partial in that virtue does aspire to a “possible shared future,

a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and

others repel us.” 34 However, this is always a partial goal

because it is in part created, in part discovered along the way.

Therefore, MacIntyre employs the image of “quest” in which a

community is unified toward a telos of conceiving the good and

ordering departures accordingly. And yet, on this quest, the end

is unactualized—the quest itself realizing the goal as an

internal good.

This unity is not homogeneity. The multiplicity within self

and diversity among selves is accounted for in the richness that

“story” and “questing” allow. Simone Weil’s self of vicissitude

is permitted. And even inherited traditions of virtue prove

layered. As MacIntyre observes:

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities and conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead….Within a tradition the pursuitof goods extends through generations….the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible interms of the larger and longer history…35

34 Ibid., 215.35 After Virtue, 222.

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Because the self is inextricably linked to this longer

history, humility and community operate together toward

intelligibility. How does my story fit within the wider story—

nuancing it such that my past is respected, my present created,

and my future full of possibilities?

It is kind of like ethical life as a well-written Wikipedia

article on the good—or if you like, open source software

constantly under revision. There is a respect for the past and

what has been regarded as objectively true or functional

(practicable), while also open to new information. In his final

book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Henri Bergson seeks this open

community.36 His search is an outright critique of closed

communities, namely those adhering to Kant's categorical

imperative (or even Aristotelian societies where particular

virtues may be dismissed in light of ‘granted’ claims). Bergson

does not dispose of the communal ideal with its abuses. Multiple

perspectives and resources are essential to life. But when Kant

suggests that there are universals, the marginal perspectives

become illicit. The individual is called to do what it best for 36 Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1977).

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the community—as if this 'what is best' can be an objective,

rational truth that ignores particular stories.

The problem, Bergson observes, is that the ‘closed

community’ practices a sort of closed morality (or exclusivist

evaluation, i.e.: majority rules). They do this in order to

preserve identity—what will make my community survive. And this

possessiveness, this lack of humility or vulnerability, makes the

community rigid. Kant's model is useful in this community because

he suggests avowal to universals in order to resist the

resistors. Closed communities construe stasis as stability.37 The

‘open community’ however knows that stability and survival is in

flexibility, dynamism. Bergson highlights that this community

does not have the fabulation function.38 Unlike the closed

community, they do not invent gods or authorities in order to

insure social cohesion. This does not mean that they are not

inventive. The two virtues of an open community are progress and

creativity—respectively, the desire to strive forward, and the

flexibility to build from the past and present toward desires. It

37 Ironically, they are more likely to engage in territorial/ideological battles in order to preserve their stability.38 Ibid., 194.

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is unsurprising that Bergson claims love as the most creative

energy.39 It might be said that the core distinction between a

closed and open community is whether their desires are

satisfiable---or whether they are ever-creating and recreating in

the community’s pursuit of the good.

IV) DESIRE: IRIS MURDOCH, SIMONE WEIL, AND EMMANUEL LEVINAS

Plato envisages erotic love as an education, because ofits intensity as a source of energy, and because it wrenches our interest out of ourselves….We may perhapsthus learn that other worlds and other centres really exist and have rights. But love can be a form of insanity whereby we lose the ‘open scene’: lose our ability to scatter our loving interest throughout the world, to draw good energy from many sources, to have alarge and versatile consciousness, to possess many concepts. There is often (as I suggested earlier) a duty to fall our of love...40

The imperative to fall out of love would seem contrary to

previous claims. However, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Iris

Murdoch is after a new vision of love, and consequently of the

Good Beyond Being. This is not a superficial erotic love that can

be satisfied by a few select centers of other worlds. It is an

erotic love that strives to know but never ceases to learn, a

39 Ibid., 96.40 Iris Murdoch, “Imagination,” Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 345.

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combination of Plato’s Poros (plenty) and Penia (poverty).41

Ethics as Love must check itself against exclusive ‘loves,’ blind

‘loves’ that would seem to satisfy.42 Love as the “Good beyond

Being” is never complete, never full—partly because it is always

giving, maintaining an inner space or “open scene.” To be so

singularly devoted to a love, in ethics, would be the equivalent

of ignoring several courses of virtuous action; it would be an

ignorance of love’s wide perception. Therefore, Murdoch upholds

the example of Christ’s selfless love, which seems a kind of

desire to give while yet having a certain fullness of

interiority, “Here Christ is an icon of the irreducible

individual endowed with human privacy and inwardness, exhibiting

personal yet selfless love and proving that it is possible.”43

She advocates both a “private and personal space-time” from which

we can let things be, while also freed to pursue the good.44

Murdoch’s ethical approach does not aim to possess the good;

it is a love that regards its beloved in many “centres,” without

41 Plato, “Symposium,” Symposium and Phaedrus (New York: Cosimo Books, Inc., 2010), 27.42 Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” The Sovereignty of the Good (New York: Routledge Classics, 1971), 54.43 “Imagination,” 346.44 Ibid., 347.

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desiring to consume any one of them. In this way she borrows from

Simone Weil’s concept of vice as wrong desire:

We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface.It is like a mirror that sends back to us our own desire for goodness….We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only …in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.45

For Murdoch as for Weil, the beautiful instantiates the good

beyond being, if even inchoately. Erotic love that accompanies

our desire for the beautiful, if applied unselfishly, motivates

us to learn and habituate the beauty of the good. However, this

goodness, like our encounters with beauty are nor reducible, not

entirely digestible.46 The good is “transcendent” and mysterious

like beauty, and yet, “necessarily [a] real object of

attention.”47 As a united network of virtues, the good involves

our regard, our attention. Even though Murdoch believes that the

good is “un-representable,” it is available in the spiritual 45 Waiting for God, 105.46 “What is truly beautiful is ‘inaccessible’ and cannot be possessed our destroyed.” Sovereignty of the Good, 58.47 Ibid., 54.

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exercise of “appreciat[ing] beauty in art of nature.” Just as we

are humbled before the beautiful and desirous of it, so we should

be, before the good, “checking [our] selfishness in the interest

of seeing the real.”48 Simone Weil would add that even though we

cannot see the Good Beyond Being, or God, desire is what calls

God near to us. Desire “raises the soul” in its devotions (be

they math calculations or meditations on the virtues), and God

descends to possess the soul in its desire.49

The debates surrounding how desire can be pure, if it is

met, also surface in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Like

Murdoch, he would claim that goodness—in his rhetoric—the

Infinite, is invisible and unimaginable. And yet, the

Transcendent Other (God, the Infinite, Perfect Justice)—can be

accessed in unselfish relations. He deals less explicitly with

the Beautiful in nature and art, but rather the relationship

48 Ibid., 63.49 “Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work….It is the par played by joy in our studies that makes of them preparation for spiritual life, for desire directed toward God is the only power capable of raising the soul. Or rather, it is God alone who comes down and possesses the soul, but desire alone draws God down.” Waiting for God, 61.

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between my self and an other whose face calls me toward ethical

action. This face cannot be the object marking satisfaction.

Ethics is like unsatisfied love, Eros, or even insomniac

attention: “Love is the incessant watching over the other; it can

never be satisfied or contented with the bourgeois ideal of love

as domestic comfort or the mutual possession of two people living

out an egoisme-a-deux”50 This seems an ethic only a god could

fulfill—this wakefulness; its “perpetual duty” seems an

impossibility on behalf of finite beings. However, it is

precisely this insomniac ethic—which can never be definitively

renounced or neglected—that asks an ongoing reach toward love.

Like Murdoch, Levinas is not after easy love or superficial Eros;

he is speaking of metaphysical desire, an openness to the Other

that can never be exhausted:

[The metaphysical desire] can not be satisfied. For we speak lightly of desires satisfied, or of sexual needs,or even of moral and religious needs. Love itself is thus taken to be the satisfaction of a sublime hunger. If this language is possible it is because most of our desire and love too are not pure….The metaphysical desire has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like

50 “Ethics of the Infinite,” Debates in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 81.

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goodness—the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it.51

The social, ethical revealing of God as Other (neighbor,

stranger) occurs because, like a human being, God is

immeasurable. In this way (and more so, because God is ‘absent’),

God is “a desire that cannot be fulfilled or satisfied—in the

etymological sense of satis, measure. I can never have enough in

my relation to God for He always exceeds my measure, remains

forever incommensurate with my desire.”52 The Desired, therefore,

is what evokes desire. As Simone Weil says, “If there is a real

desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for

light produces it.”53 Put in Levinas’ terms, if desire is truly

insatiable, and if the thing desired (God) is truly light

(Justice), the desire for Justice produces God. God as

unattainable, but nevertheless perceived in the relation of

beings as they enact justice, or put otherwise—the virtuous.54

51 Totality and Infinity, 34.52 “Ethics of the Infinite,” 82.53 Waiting for God, 59.54 “A God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible injustice. Ethics is the spiritual optics….The work of justice—the uprightness of the face to face—is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God beproduced—and “vision” here coincides with this work of justice.” Totality and Infinity, 78.

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V) [BACK] TO THE BEGINNING:

Why is justice the access to what cannot be measured?

Justice seems something entirely measured, calculating the terms

of retribution. However, Levinas knows how even justice—measured

and tried by courts—is never fully satisfactory. The ethical

pursuit of justice is never over because of this imperfection. And

perhaps this is because, at root, justice is too fundamentally

tied to erotic love, ever unsatisfied, ever longing and

striving.55 Justice may be access to the Infinite, but the

Infinite—like Levinas’ conception of God—is Eros. This requires a

welcoming of ‘incompleteness’—which is after all, the Infinite

viewed from the horizon of the finite. It is like MacIntyre’s

quest—where the process of discovering goodness is as significant

as its motivated departure. It is Murdoch’s process of attending

the beautiful; Levinas’ call to the priority of the Other;

Marcel’s creative fidelity; Nussbaum’s porous perception. It is

55 Even in justice, the victim may be awarded money for her losses; but this money is not always equivalent to the injustice suffered. In justice, the perpetrator may never be treated as an individual capable of change, may neverbe tried in light of contributive societal factors; and this too is a type of injustice. As Lisa Tessman points out in “Burdened Virtues of Political Resistance,” there is often an unquantifiable loss both in those who enact injustice and those who resist or suffer from it. Feminist Interventions in Ethics and Politics (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 77-96.

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the search of an otherwise world, communal flourishing to come,

the Good Beyond Being—Love perpetually coming toward the soul

raised by desire.

We can ignore our “metaphysical desire”; or we can see,

“unselfing” from its “inner space.” 56 As if in bas relief, made

possible by desire-deepened love, we recognize that ethics is

always en route to its arrival. Yes, incompleteness shatters the

illusions of autonomy, satisfaction, and self-preservation.

However, an ethics of love is not imposed from without to break,

strip, or confine the self, as in duty or utilitarian appeals. It

is beautiful: compelling not compulsory. It is involving:

collaborative not consuming. Virtue ethics rooted in love boasts

necessary incompleteness: so that no one person can achieve the

good alone; so that no one community can totalize the good and

lord over others; so that no one relation can claim normativity.

If there exists any ‘norm’ in virtue ethics, it is not a static

measurement, but rather a dynamism. Virtue is a dance of taking

space, risking a stance in ethical action, and making room in

perception. As in Richard Kearney’s comparison with the trinity: 56 Elaine Scarry summarizes Murdoch’s concepts in relation to justice in On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 111-113.

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“…what you’ve got here in the Three Persons is a love, a desire,

a loving desire that cedes the place (cedere), that gives room.

But it is also a movement of attraction towards the other (sedere),

a movement of immanence.”57 Analogically, these three virtues of

humility, communion, and desire bespeak this dance—an often

halted, but ever enduring Love, capable of moving at the core of

human goodness.

57 Richard Kearney, “The Hermeneutics of Revelation,” Debates in Continental Philosophy, 26.

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