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