Being Brought to Light

Extract

There is a certain urgency about the ethical today. Amid reports of the misery and injustice that seem to accompany all our human undertakings, and with increasing demand that it prove itself useful to an expanding range of unprecedented crises, the ethical is found to occupy a crucial place in contemporary thought. It stands at the point of a change, as our desire for a better world seeks the transformation of the one in which we find ourselves, and so it is to become the means by which we may be carried over from one situation to another, by which we are to make a difference. The ethical is to save us, and so the urgency of our salvation comes to rest in a particular and intense way on the salvation of ethics itself, saved and preserved for our sake, so that we might also be rescued and kept in safety and brought into the fulness of life that is to be ours. The enormity of this expectation of the ethical has become a kind of running theme through all sorts of contemporary discourses, assuming in many cases a force that would compel agreement without question, and at times erupting in expressions of disgust or even censure at those who would defy this logic. What else are we to do or think?

There is a sense in which this ethical has become the last sounding of the thinking of being in the western tradition, taking on the now empty form of its hegemony, while that thinking of being itself is already known to be fraught with difficulty, and so pronouncing itself as the final grand narrative by which nonetheless our redemption is to be secured.