Grounding Ethical Vision and Mission Statements

Some of us at the Institute of Lutheran Theology will soon be engaged in consulting work to institutions and businesses to aid them in casting their own ethical mission and vision statements. The increasing use of sophisticated algorithms by companies and institutions have created new situations in which the institution or business ends up treating managers, employees and customers in new ways, yet ways that are not the result of individual people making decisions to treat these managers, employees and customers in new ways. 

People who write computer code construct algorithms that function as decision procedures. For instance, in writing an algorithm for a self-steering car, the coder has to program the car to do certain things given certain inputs. The idea is that the program will give an output as a function of the present state of the machine and relevant inputs it has while in this state. The car would not presumably move to crash into the motorcycle to its left, if it had not already been in states of danger for some time, and if this option had not been coded in as the best response to a certain sequence of danger states given some new driving inputs.   

It is very clear to me that thinking about helping businesses and institutions do ethics on the ground is a different activity than teaching ethics to students at the university. In some ways, it is much more challenging because we deal here not with hypothetical scenarios, but with real flesh and blood human beings. 

When teaching ethics at the university, I always tried to deal with the standard normative ethical theories and the meta-ethical challenges to those theories. This meant that I always dealt with Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory, utilitarianism, Kantian-inspired deontological theory, and divine command or divine will theory.  

Standardly, I treated as well the meta-ethical challenges to normative ethics: ethical subjectivism, ethical emotivism, psychological egoism, and ethical relativism. I introduced ethical intuitionism in light of the Open Question argument proffered by G.E. Moore, and discussed the non-natural intuition of the good in Moore and the non-natural intuition of the right in Ross. There is not much time in one ethics course to do all of this, however, so I made sure to cover the standard four normative ethical approaches.   

Aristotelian-inspired virtue theory is an ethics of self-actualization or realization which attempts to understand the excellence of human beings in terms of human dispositions to behave, that is human habits. In a society like ancient Athens where there was deep agreement on what the good is, there was agreement on what traits or characteristics human beings ought to have to be good. If the telos of human beings is their happiness, that is their "total human flourishing," then one should seek to cultivate those intellectual and moral virtues, that is, those "powers of the soul" whereby human beings together can profoundly flourish. To grow the intellectual and moral virtues is to increase in human excellence and to realize the good.   

Utilitarianism espouses a consequentialism; it claims that the goodness or badness of an act is a function of its likely consequences. There are many kinds of utilitarians. One can be a hedonistic utilitarian who understands the good in terms of crude pleasure, or perhaps a eudaimonian utilitarian identification ing the good with higher human values.  Accordingly, the good is not simply pleasure, but the happiness of human flourishing in general. One can be a global or universal utilitarian claiming that the act should bring about the greatest happiness for everyone in general, or could be a regional or local utilitarian claiming that the utilitarian calculation should privilege some particular group or community. One must also distinguish between an act and a rule utilitarian in that while the first holds that the direct consequences of the particular concrete act are what is ethically relevant, the second argues that it is the rule that the particular act falls under that ultimately determines its goodness or badness.  

The deontological perspective claims that acts or good and bad of themselves apart from their consequences. Kant most famously argued for the categorical imperative, a formal principle by which an act's moral properties obtain apart from any hypothetical antecedents. Kant claimed two subjective maxims of this categorical imperative: 1) so act such that your act could in principle be universalized, and 2) so act such that you always treat the other as an end-in-themselves and not as a means to your end.  

Finally, divine command or divine will ethics claims divine primal intentionality determines the rectitude of an act. It is incumbent on S to do P if and only if God wills P (to be done be S). Divine will ethical theories must then give an account both of the nature of the divine will itself and of our epistemic access to it.  

But none of these normative theories work very well in our present context actually to inform ethical decision-making. The problem is that people disagree rather profoundly on the presuppositions upon which such theories are based. 

For instance, the plausibility of virtue ethics famously depends upon a basic agreement in the community about what the good life is.  Aristotle said that a good person is one that does the good and that the good is that which good people do. This makes sense if there are not competing moral visions within a society. Notice, however, that even if their is near unanimity about what the good is, the theory does seem prone always to the critique launched by Luther and others. Focussing on virtue-building places the action on the self. Cultivating our moral virtues as part of self-realization towards maximal human excellence puts the action on the side of the subject. She or he must train themselves to evince the suitable dispositions to behave, and such training is ultimately the result of what James once called "the dull heave of the will." 

But part of what it is to live morally, it seems, is to be not reflecting upon oneself all of the time.  Yet the ethic of self-realization places the focus of the self on the self as that self endeavors to cultivate the proper dispositions that constitute character,  those general habitualizations that constitute our moral excellence.  

There are deep problems with utilitarianism as well. As it turns out, calculating likely consequences from an act or rule utilitarian perspective makes many positions questionable because we really don't know what the real consequences of our actions are. Claiming that it is probable that act X issues in consequences P is not granular enough it seems.  Would we not need to know precisely what that probability is in order to do the utilitarian calculus rightly?  Moreover, discriminating what the good is, e.g., pleasure, cultivation of virtue, human flourishing, is itself not amenable to utilitarian calculation.

Recall that Bentham claimed that the Principle of Utility need not be argued for because, as it turns out, the principle objectively obtains, and that we humans simply do act in accordance with it. While this is plausible if one is a universal hedonistic act utilitarian perhaps, it is not the case if one is a regional eudaemonistic act or rule utilitarian.  We need some independent philosophical argument, it seems, to say with Mill against Bentham that it is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a sated pig.  Moreover, while the move to rule utilitarianism seems to protect utilitarianism in general from crude counterexamples, it might be asked whether rule utilitarianism does not abandon utilitarianism altogether.  Clearly, the claim that S ought to do act X if and only if X were in accordance with rule R that, if it itself were universally instantiated, would conduce to the maximum distribution of happiness is itself consistent with act X itself causing great pain or unhappiness to S. But this seems like an abandonment of utilitarianism entirely.  

Notice as well that utilitarian calculations place the moral action in our own reasoning. We must calculate the likely consequences of an act or rule, and only after such calculation can we determine how to treat the person standing in front of us. Again, it seems like this kind of moral reflection places the action within the echo chamber of our subjectivity. We do X because we have done the suitable calculus and, on the basis of the kind of utilitarian we are, we can determine that it is rational to do X.  How my doing X impacts Bob who stands before me, is relevant only insofar as I can describe the doing of X in ways that take into consideration the consequences for Bob of my doing of X. 

Our friend Kant gets us to consider the noumenality of duty, and asks us if we can conceive that one ought to do X in the absence of one's freedom to do other than X. We are then told that we should treat others as ends in themselves and not as means because others are denizens of the same kingdom of ends we ourselves occupy. He argues that we must not act in ways that end in moral contradiction. For instance, if I were knowingly to lie, then I must accede that it might be a general moral law that people could lie. But if this were a general moral law, then dissimulation itself could not be specified, because there would be no institution of truth-telling from which lying diverges. This is all pretty heavy stuff, but it is what pure reason does when it is concerned with the practical.  Pure practical reason is human reason set free to investigate what we ought to do mostly unimpeded by historical and cultural conditions.  

Finally, there is divine will theory of either the static or dynamic variety.  Since the latter is demonstrably incoherent, this leaves the former, and clearly it is a matter of reason to discern what the divine command is, and whether we have a duty to do it. One cannot in our post-Christian context simply assume that there is a divine being whose primal intentionality on creation is objectively the case, and whose intentional objectivity is epistemically accessible to human beings.  

In other words, if we want to cast ethical mission and vision statements in the business world by getting people to affirm the objective reality of the ethical and getting them to see that it is rational to accept that they have epistemic access to it, then we shall have a very steep hill to climb in accomplishing our ethical work. 

In Lutheran fashion, one might think that ethical theory provides the light by which the law confronts us as a curb on what we would otherwise want to do, a mirror by which to apprehend our own moral inadequacies, and a guide as to how we should comport ourselves. The light clearly is where the action is. In classical theology it is the primordial divine intentionality manifesting itself in the eternal law, the light of the universe itself. One can connect this light to Wisdom as it was prior to the creation of the world and ultimately to the logos.  

When I was a graduate student, I studied meta-ethics because I already did not believe one could do normative ethics without first getting clear on the sources, grounds, and methods of ethical adjudication.  My meta-ethics class one summer was with an excellent professor whose constructive contribution to the course was to point out that the only motive one could possibly have to do X from a meta-ethical standpoint was that the doing of X was conceptually tied to the desire to do X. From the standpoint of analytical ethics, he might be right. In other words, we are left with a psychological egoism functioning underneath meta-ethical reflection.  

I think I was a pretty good ethics teacher for undergraduate students because I could generate scenarios quite easily on the spot and I was able to keep their attention. The problem, of course, was that normative ethics is unfortunately today in many respects a fool's game. I don't mean that the theories are necessarily wrong, but rather they are all inadequate either when confronting complicated ethical situations we presently face or when they are placed against our moral intuitions. The longer I taught ethics, I found myself actually asking students to consult their moral intuitions as a way to test the normative theories we introduced. I straightforwardly suggested to them that their moral intuitions should function as data for ethical theory-making.  

But I knew that this gets it all wrong. Isn't normative ethics supposed to tell us what is the case? Ought it not trump moral intuitions altogether? Should it not function pedagogically to teach us what moral intuitions are worth having?  We don't form ethical theories in order to be applicable and adequate to ethical data, but rather to give us the principles by which we might act and value.  

Towards the end of my teaching of ethics I developed a rather elaborate way to think about normative ethics, replete with suitable defeaters. Additionally, I would argue that when there was a conflict between utilitarian and deontological perspectives, one had to go outside theory and evaluate the situation from a standpoint external to either theory.  Of course, here one could not help but privilege one's own moral intuitions again. If such a view from above the normative ethical conflicts is not to be a view from nowhere, then that view must be informed by something concrete.  But what could this be if not our moral intuitions? 

Often in teaching ethics, I would discuss G.E. Moore's famous Open Question argument that purports to show that any analysis of the good in terms of natural properties -- actually any properties -- leaves us in the situation of asking with sense if it is good that the good is so analyzed.  G. E. Moore was an ethical intuitionist because of this argument, and I do confess to believing that his comparing the instrinsicality of yellow with the the intrinsicality of the good a first-rate philosophical move. Just as we can identify yellow without conceptually stating its necessary and sufficient conditions, so we might identify the good without being able to give an analysis of it in terms of something more basic.  

It strikes me today that a new approach is needed if we are ever going to get outside of the philosophy classroom when contemplating the ultimate grounds for corporate ethical vision and mission statements. Emmanuel Levinas' notion of the immediacy (and transcendence) of the Other, despite its philosophical complexity, might actually be able to be explained simply to people today-- people within institutions and corporations alike -- who have lost their way among the endeavor to justify what it is that is good and right.  Most of the people we shall speak with in framing corporate ethical vision and mission statements will not seriously ask for the philosophical grounds why the torturing of children is wrong. They will already know it wrong.

Levinas' notion of the exteriority of the ethical, the demand of the Other upon us through the immediacy of the face can provide a way to adjudicate simple ethical questions like the torture of innocent children. Looking into the face of a child and torturing him or her is for most people simply unthinkable. One does not need to plunge into one's own subjectivity -- Levinas called the self and its ontology the realm of the same, the realm of totality -- to ground a demand not to torture. The demand needs no grounding in ethical principles that themselves presuppose ontology, rather the demand is simply given in the face and eyes of the Other.  

Maybe the light we seek in the doing of ethics can be found in the face of the Other, the face which places a demand upon all of us, including managers of algorithms and writers of code. Maybe we don't have to get much deeper than that with people with whom we work. If pushed we can say we are committed to the view that the social situation with its concomitant primacy of ethical demand needs no further justification.  Wittgenstein said, of course, that the spade must stop somewhere.

We can use Levinas' starting point and build defendable, albeit somewhat superficial, but ultimately communicable ethical positions for institutions and businesses. In certain contexts we can do what Levinas does: connect the face of the Other with God through the notion of a trace.  We can always say we could go deeper if we have to. By emphasizing the exteriority of ethics we guard ourselves from falling into some totalizing project of justifying the very nature of ethics to ourselves or whoever might listen before we can deal with the concrete person standing before us. This will get us to the practical much more quickly, and give our audiences a sense that we know what we are doing as consultants without taking them through a 300 level class in philosophical ethics.  

At the end of the day in phenomenology generally one either sees the phenomena described or one does not. If the face of the child before us does not move us out of our own freedom to a position of responsibility for that child, then it is doubtful that an appeal to normative ethical theory will do so. At the end of the day, it seems, the demand of the Other upon us cannot be given an analysis in terms of some set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  While the word 'Infinite' would not have been used by Moore to characterize this non-natural intuition of the good, his claim of the irreducibility of the Good is of the same spirit as Levinas.  Both were, after all, inspired by Plato, whose Good was the presupposition both of the forms and our access to them.  

Plato's Good constitutes, with Levinas, the priority of metaphysics over ontology. The latter is ultimately an affair of the self, but the former points away from the self and towards the divine.  Levinas and Plato document that "invisible desire" towards that which is other than the self, a desire not born of a need or lack within the self, but an ecstatic desire to transcend entirely the self and its machinations. Ultimately, both knew that salvation consists not in a being otherwise, but rather in that which is otherwise than being. 

Transcendental Reflection and the Divine Other

I

Transcendental reflection investigates those conditions necessary for there to be the kind of experience that we have. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) famously inquired into the "transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such," finding that pure priori forms of sensibility and pure a priori concepts of the understanding are both necessary to deliver the world as it is: one filled with objects having properties causally related to one another. Without these, the universality and necessity of Newtonian physics could not obtain.  

Kant inaugurated a type of thinking that has in many respects dominated theology for the last couple of hundred years.  Kant argued that in order to have a unity to experience there must be a transcendental unity of apperception, a unifying activity that is itself possible to reflect upon. In writing the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was thinking about his own thinking, about the way that thinking grants unity to experience.  His thinking about thinking was neither an empirical thinking, a thinking of mathematics or geometry, nor a thinking about the ultimate nature of things as Leibniz and Wolff would have thought.  It was a reflective thinking that offered insight into how the unity of experience is possible, a thinking that sought the truth of this unity of experience.  It was not a metaphysical thinking of the transcendent, but a transcendental thinking that brought into the light of day those structures employed but not noticed, a thinking that sought a hermeneutical retrieval of that which is closest to us but remains unnoticed. 

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were convinced of the profundity of Kant's project which reflected upon, and ultimately coaxed into the open, those transcendental structures making experience possible. A transcendental unity of apperception did not commit one to Descartes' "thinking substance'; such a unity of thinking that did not entail old school metaphysics. Fichte and followers followed Kant's lead after pointing out that the good philosopher could not sustain his famous distinction between things as they are in themselves and things as they appear for us. 

If thinking is that which unites our experience, then why must such thinking be turned back by a putative thing-in-itself? This too could be thought, and thinking this actually dissolves problematic dualisms. Of course, there is something one bumps up against in experience (Anstoss), but such a bumping does not entail that that what is bumped is of a wholly disparate ontological lineage.  Perhaps nature which, as Kant pointed out, is already the result of the synthesizing activity of the transcendental unity of apperception, is not a joint product of something out there and our synthesis.  Perhaps it simply is the result of our synthesis, a synthesis that does not have to hook to the disparate, but can simply connect to itself in appropriate ways.  And so it is that the I posits the very world with which it must deal, the world that it can know, the world that serves as the backdrop to the moral life and all the loftiest of the human heart.  

Transcendental reflection is born in the security of the transcendental unity of apperception, a security that finally cannot admit the Other, for to admit that is to destroy the very grounds upon which transcendental reflection is based.  To posit the Other is to return to the problematic between things as they appear and things in themselves; it is to bark up the Kantian tree and return to an aporia once thought solved and vanquished.  Thinkers in the Kantian tradition knew that this could not be progress.  After the Kantian critique of old-style metaphysics, the security of the transcendental provided a felicitous place for the narrative of God and His incursion into history to took place.  

II

At the risk of oversimplification, I claim that in the days prior to Kant, the days running from the Old Testament prophets through Plato and Aristotle to the steppes of the Enlightenment, the alterity or otherness of God was simply taken for granted by the Church and society generally. Although one could not know the nature of God, the regnant assumption was that God did have a nature that was not dependent upon human awareness, perception, conception or language.  God's being did not depend upon human being, particularly not upon human thinking.  

The story of how Neoplatonic thought forms gradually gave way to Aristotelian categories is important to tell, however, for our present purposes, I will just remark that both types of thinking generally assumed that the Being of God is externally related to human being.  Whether God is regarded as being itself or as the highest being, the tradition acknowledged that God is causally related to the universe.  God's creation of the universe is a causing of the universe to be. Without God's act of creation, the universe would not have being.  Divine power is needed to bring being out of non-being.  Accordingly, the theological tradition was generally committed to the reality of God apart from human being -- the thesis of theological realism -- and the possibility of causal connections between God and the universe -- the thesis of theophysical causation.  

At the dawn of the Reformation, there were a number of differing theological schools that read Augustine, Plato and especially Aristotle in different ways, ways that reflected differing philosophical positions on the ontology of universals and the relationship of these universals to particulars.  While it is an oversimplification to say that Aristotle had become the philosopher of the Christian tradition, many theological traditions assumed with him that there were basic things in the world (substances) and that these substances had properties, some of which were necessary for the substance itself, and some which were accidental to the substance, that is, some of which could either be had by the substance or not possessed by it  without changing the being of the substance. God's creation was a creation of substances with properties.  These substances were the effects of God's creativity activity.  Adam and Eve were individual substances bearing the kind-identifying properties of being both rational and animal. The contour of Adam and Eve's particularity was due to the contingent properties each possessed.  

All of this is important for Christology. That God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself meant that the particular entity Christ had both divine and human properties and that Christ had causal power.  The miracle stories suggest all of this, of course.  The being (or substance) Jesus caused it to be the case that 5,000 men (plus women and children) were fed with two fish and five loaves of bread. This being caused it to be true that the man Lazereth was no longer dead.  

Christ was the God-man, He is the second person of the Trinity that had assumed human flesh.  The Second Person eternally existed; there was never a time when Christ was not.  This means inter alia that Christ is simply other than any human who might think, love or trust in Him.  Christ is not a category of human thinking, but a name for a being that exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception or language.  To say that Christ is externally related to anybody ether accepting or rejecting him is to assume that Christ is other that anybody either accepting or rejecting Him.  

When it came time for Enlightenment rationalists to do theology, it was very natural to do it in a metaphysical key. God who is other than worldly being or human thinking must ultimately be seen as the sine qua non of the created order. The principle of sufficient reason claiming that for anything that is there must be some reason why it is, when applied to the universe seemed to point univocally to God.  

One might claim that the time before Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was a "pre-critical" time where the primary objects of religious thought and experience were not yet dissolved into the fog of rational doubt.  Reason, properly applied in discovering many truths fully consonant with the Bible, attested to the same reality as the Holy Scriptures themselves.  

While Kant himself seemed to leave room for there to be a God that is other than human thinking, this God could not be known, and accordingly, the enterprise of rational theology had to be profoundly rethought. The idealist tradition following Kant wished to think God within the security of transcendental subjectivity. Reason had found a place for God that could protect God from the contingencies of the other.  When one thinks about it, the post-Kantian theological tradition can be read in part as an attempt to rescue theology from Lessing's "broad ugly ditch."  Clearly, this theological tradition could insulate the "necessary truths of reason" from the "accidental truths of history."  

III

Martin Heidegger knew the tradition well, understood Kant, and had read Martin Luther.  In the Freiburg lectures from 1919-23, Heidegger shows himself increasingly dissatisfied with a thinking in theology that leaves out the life of the one thinking.  Heidegger's early attraction to Martin Luther (and fueled by Kierkegaard) was his attempt to find a way out from the security of the transcendental project.  For Luther, death was part of the very life of the theologian, an experienced life.  Luther famously uttered "experiential macht die Theologum".  There is nothing secure about finitude, about the life of the believer beset with "sin, death and the power of the devil."  The reality of all three is part of the experience out of which and in which theology is done.  Theological thinking must always be tied to the Otherness of God and the divine project of the salvation of the sinner.  It is a bold thinking of infinite things done by flesh-and-blood finite human beings whose thinking always happens under the Cross.  

Human thinking can never be wholly secure, because the otherness of sin, death and devil is always already besetting it. Such thinking is ecstatic, it is a thinking that is "outside oneself" because it is a thinking in the light of the Cross, a thinking that is a trusting in a Savior that is not a projection of one's own being, not an aspect of the nobility of human being with its cultivated intellectual and moral virtues, not a thinking that is grounded in reason.  Luther, who lived 250 years prior to the heyday of transcendental reflection, already knew that such reflection, if possible, could not end in human salvation.  To be saved is to be saved by that which is other than oneself.  Salvation happens in a world of flesh-and-blood believers dying and sinning.  Thirty-year old Martin Heidegger understood that if theology is to be a serious discourse, this discourse must not hide what is basic to the theologian: The theologian in her now is always already running ahead of herself in encountering that possibility of their being no more possibilities.  The theologian in her now is always already living death, sin and the power of the devil.  This triumvirate does not allow for calm, calculating thinking on the wonders of the grace-filled life.  Life is filled with death.  Our lives, like Christ's life, are lived in the shadow of our crucifixion.  We are now the not that we shall once be when we are no longer being the one for whom the not of the future is no longer.  

Heidegger wanted to bring reflection upon ultimate things back to the phenomenological-ontological-existential ground from which all metaphysical reflection arises. He wanted to call us back from the forgetfulness of this ground, a forgetfulness of being which gives rise both to our absorption in the world and our flights into metaphysical abstraction.  Heidegger's reading of Luther buttressed his conviction that it was time for philosophy to rediscover again the one for whom philosophy means, the one who in its being, has be-ing at issue for it.  With Heidegger, the spector of the Other comes into sight.  We are in our be-ing, beings for whom and by whom the question of being and meaning arise.  This questioning of be-ing by that being who cares about be-ing, is a questioning that opens to the Other of being, a questioning done over the pit of non-being, a questioning that itself is the conduit of the presencing of the absence of being.  Death, after all, cannot be taken up into the life of being; it is the boundary of being that establishes the conditions of being itself.  

IV

But the early Heidegger did not get to the Other.  His project remained curiously within the province of transcendental thinking and subjectivity.  Laying out (interpreting) the existential-phenomenological-ontological roots of our reflection upon being is at some level a continuation of transcendental subjectivity. In our thinking, we think Dasein which is open to its Other, but we can only think this alterity as part of the transcendental existential-ontological conditions for the possibility of ontic engagement with an Other, an Other that may for Dasein have profound existentiell significance.  No longer does the transcendental thinker lay out the unity of the categories of human thinking by which the world is known, now this thinker is engaged in highlighting the unity of the existential structures themselves by which and through which the unity of care is possible, a caring that grounds any thinking in the first place.  

The problem is clearly seen in Heidegger's treatment of other Daseins.  They are Mitsein for Dasein who can have Fuersorge for them, but they themselves in their otherness from Dasein cannot be be in themselves other.  The early Heidegger is simply unable to bring the world into focus.  He can and does get to the world from a certain position in the world, but cannot get to the world itself.  Being cannot ultimately be refracted by considering profoundly being as it is da (there).  What gets thought when considering Da-sein is Dasein, not Sein.  Ironically, Heidegger finds himself in the position of Leibniz.  One has a take on the world within any monad, but monads are windowless, and the world itself can only be reconstructed as describable above the fray of the monadic descriptions themselves.  To get to that world, one needs theological commitments not presenting themselves within the metaphysics of the monad.  

So wither comes the Other?  Can it be brought into focus beyond the security of the transcendental project?  Did Levinas accomplish its encounter with the face? Can phenomenological encounter ground the Other?  Can it give a basis for a radical theological of the Cross where one finds oneself living without metaphysical and ontological nets, as it were?  Can alterity be thought of ontically in the way of those of the Reformation, as an otherness of being toward being?  Must we finally admit that it can only be shown and never said, but that in its showing that we discern the real ontological position of human beings eviscerated by sin, death and the power of the devil as they live their lives in the shadows of the hidden divine.  The Theology of the Cross is about showing, but not about a metaphysics of presence.  Showing here cannot be said without the said Showing turning into such a presence. Wittgenstein knew that showing happens in words, but not in truth-claims. To say what can only be shown is to turn preaching into a dogmatics that must always miss the glimpse of Divine alterity.  

Bringing this Other into the open will demand an overturning of the very identity that has grounded the security of our theology of glory project of transcendental reflection.  At the end of the day, human beings cannot save themselves.  Salvation demands an overturning of the ontological of identity, an identity that has closed the clearing of the divine other, a clearing that finds in God's traces its own footsteps. At stake is the fundamental question: Can otherness show itself as what it is, or must if always show itself as what it is for us.  At stake is the fundamental question of the Garden: Did God really say?