ON THE NAMES OF GODhere we must distinguish between two aspects. The first concerns the possibility of a
serious moral engagement withany kindof action (leaving aside for the moment its actual
content). What the critique of essentialism implies is that there is no way of morally
discriminating a priori between particular courses of action—not even in the sense of
establishing a minimal content for a categorical imperative. This, however, does not logi-
cally imply that serious moral commitments could not be attached to engagements taken
by less than courses of action dictated a priori. To conclude the opposite would be the
same as saying that only the particularity of a course of action conceived as particularity
could be the source of a serious moral engagement. But this is exactly what the whole of
mystical experience denies. Let us remember what we said earlier about the dialectics
betweendetachmentandengagementin Eckhart. It is only insofar as I experience my
contact with the divinity as an absolute, beyond all particularized content, that I can give
to my particular courses of action their moral seriousness. And if we generalize in the way
we pointed out earlier: only if I experience the absolute as an utterly empty place can I
project into contingent courses of action a moral depth that they, left to themselves, lack.
As we can see, the ‘‘postmodern’’ experience of the radical contingency of any particular
content claiming to be morally valid is the very condition of the ethical overinvestment
that makes possible a higher moral consciousness. As in the case of ‘‘hegemony,’’ we
have here a certain ‘‘deification’’ of the concrete, whose ground is, paradoxically, its very
contingency. Serious moral engagement requires a radical separation between moral con-
sciousness and its contents, so that no content can have any a priori claim to be the
exclusive beneficiary of the engagement.
Let us now move to our second aspect. Even if we grant that this gap between the
experience of the absolute as an empty place and an engagement with the particular con-
tents that are going to incarnate it becomes permanent, does this not leave us entirely
without guidance about what are therightincarnating contents? It certainly does. This lack
of guidance is what we earlier called facticity, finitude. If there were an a priori logic linking
the experience of the absolute to particular contents, the link between the incarnated abso-
lute and its incarnating content would have become a necessary one, and the absolute
would have lost its dimension of beyond. In that case we would be able to name God in a
direct way, or at least to claim to have a discursive mastery of His essence, as Hegel did in
hisLogic. To claim the opposite does not mean thatanycontent, at any moment, can be
an equal candidate for the incarnation of the absolute. This is only truesub species aeterni-
tatis. But historical life takes place in a terrain that is less than eternity. If the experience of
what we have referred to in terms of the dual movement ‘‘materialization of God’’ and a
‘‘deification of the concrete’’ is to live up to its two sides, neither the absolute nor the
particular can find a final peace with each other. This means that the construction of an
ethical life will depend on keeping open the two sides of this paradox: an absolute that can
only be actualized by being something less than itself, and a particularity whose only destiny
is to be the incarnation of a ‘‘sublimity’’ that transcends its own body.
PAGE 147147.................16224$ $CH5 10-13-06 12:34:48 PS