PREFACE

CHAPTER I: PROLOGUE

    A. Introduction

    B. The Moods of Speaking

        1. Wonder

            a. True Wonder (The hearing of being as speaking)

                (1) Mood

                (2) Desire

                (3) Wonder in Touching and Moving

                (4) Wonder in Hearing and Sounding

                (5) Wonder in Tasting and Smelling

                (6) Wonder in Seeing

                (7) Sensing and Time

                (8) Summary

            b. False Wonder or Dread (Deafness to the call of being, or the hearing of being as dumb)

                (1) Dread as Counterfeit Mood

                (2) The Origin of Dread

                (3) The Stagnated Moments of Dread

        2. Trust, or Reflective Wonder

            a. Trust, or Reflective Wonder (The speaking [or recollection] of being as heard)

                (1) The Origin of Trust

                (2) The Moments of Trust

                    (a) Intentionality

                    (b) Objectivity

                    (c) Subjectivity

                    (d) Intersubjectivity

                (3) Trust, Recollection, and Dialectic

            b. False Trust, or Doubt (Dumbness to [or forgetfulness of] what being has said.)

                (1) The Origin of Doubt as Dialectical Counterposition

                (2) The Stagnated Moments of Doubt

                    (a) Intentionality

                    (b) Objectivity

                    (c) Subjectivity

                    (d) Intersubjectivity

        3. Love

            a. Love as the Recall of the Infinite Call

                (1) The Origin of Love

                (2) The Moments of Love

                    (a) Intentionality

                    (b) Objectivity

                    (c) Subjectivity

                    (d) Intersubjectivity

            b. False Love, or Hatred as the Contradiction of the Infinite Call

                (1) The Origin of Hatred

                (2) The Contradictions of Hatred

                    (a) Intentionality

                    (b) Objectivity

                    (c) Subjectivity

                    (d) Intersubjectivity

    C. Conclusion

CHAPTER II: DIALOGUE--Speaking and Self-Consciousness

    A. Speaking as the Beginning of an Ontology as a Science

    B. Speaking as Saying Something

        1. Idea Formation

            a. Naming

        2. Fundamental or Ontological Ideas

            a. The Naming of the Idea of God

            b. The Naming of the Idea of Self

            c. The Naming of the Idea of World

            d. False Ontological Ideas

                    (1) False World

                    (2) False Self

                    (3) False God

                    (4) Dialectical Counterpositions as Consequences of False Ideas

                        (a) Counterpositions of False Intentionality--Naivete and Skepticism

                        (b) Counterpositions of False World -- Rationalism and Empiricism

                        (c) Counterpositions of False Self -- Mechanism and Pelagianism

                        (d) Counterpositions of False God -- Deism and Atheism

    C. Speaking as Dialogue

        1. Intersubjective Beginnings for an Ontology -- God, Love, and Speaking

            a. Speaking about Speaking

                    (1) Metaphors for Speaking

                        (a) The Metaphor of Friendship as Dialogue

CHAPTER III: SYLLOGUE--Structure of Discourse

    A. The Moments of Discourse

        1. Explanation of Subjectivity

        2. Explanation of Intentionality

        3. Explanation of Reference

        4. Explanation of Intersubjectivity

    B. The Four Types of Language

        1. The Language of Experience, or Myth

        2. The Language of Understanding, or Symbol

        3. The Language of Reference, or Logos

        4. The Language of Intersubjectivity, or Spirit

Chapter IV: SYLLOGUE II--Language and Aisthesis

    A. Metaphor

        1. Theories of Metaphor

        2. Being and Consciousness as Metaphorical

        3. Saying as Metaphorical

            a. The Problem of Difference

                (1) World as the Source of Finite Difference

     B. Aisthesis

        1. Aisthesis as Feeling

        2. Aisthesis as Perception

            a. Symbol

                (1) Symbol and Sign

                    (a) Presence and Place

                    (b) Time and Space

                        i) Time

                        ii) Memory

                        iii) Space

                        iv) Imagination

                        v) Naming

Chapter V: Syllogue III--The Relations of Myth, Symbol, and Logos in Spirit

    A. Introduction

        1. The Generation of the Languages

        2. Symbol, Consciousness, and Logos

        3. Self, World, and God as Objects of Logos

    B. General Description of the Matrix of Hermeneutic Ontology

        1. Symbol

        2. Symbol and Myth

        3. Symbol and Logos

        4. Symbol and Spirit

        5. Spirit and Logos

        6. Spirit and Myth

        7. Myth and Logos

    C. Explication of the Matrix of Hermeneutic Ontology

        1. The Types of Myth

            a. The Myth of Chaos

            b. The Myth of the Exiled Soul

            c. The Tragic Myth

            d. The Adamic Myth

        2. The Types of Symbol

            a. Aesthetic Symbol

            b. Poetic Symbol

            c. Scientific Symbol

            d. Existential-Religious Symbol

        3. Logos

            a. Story

            b. Theory

            c. Critique

            d. Foundations

        4. Spirit

            a. Commitment to Subjectivity

            b. Commitment to Intentionality

            c. Commitment to Reference or Objectivity

            d. Commitment to Intersubjectivity

Chapter VI: ART AND SCIENCE

    A. Introduction

    B. Characteristic Meanings of "Art" and "Science"

    C. The Languages of Art

    D. Classification of the Arts

    E. The Languages of Science

    F. Conclusion

CHAPTER VII: PSYCHOLOGY

    A. Introduction

    B. Person in Family

        1. Subjectivity

        2. Intentionality

        3. Reference

        4. Intersubjectivity

    C. Person in Communities of Free Association

    D. The Person in Political Community

    E. Person in Religious Community

CHAPTER VIII: ETHICS

    A. Ethics as Knowledge

    B. Ethics as Knowledge of Action

        1. Myths and Theories of Action

            a. Action in the Myth of Subjectivity

            b. Action in the Myth of Intentionality

            c. Action in the Myth of Reference

            d. Action in the Myth of Intersubjectivity

    C. Ethics is Knowledge of Right Action

        1. The Principle of Right Action

        2. The Speaking of Right Action

            a. The Right to the Speaking of Feeling

            b. The Right to the Speaking of Perception

                (1) The Right to Physical Life

                (2) The Right to Physical Care

                (3) The Right to Ownership

                    (a) Sexual Ownership

                    (b) Property Ownership

CHAPTER IX: POLITICS

    A. The Four Transcendental Communities

        1. The Four Community Virtues

        2. The Family

            a. Temperance

        3. The Community of Free Association

            a. Courage

        4. The Political Community

            a. Justice

        5. The Religious Community

            a. Wisdom

CHAPTER X: THEOLOGY

    A. Introduction

    B. God, or Intersubjective Intersubjectivity Regarded Objectively as Other Subject

    C. God, or Intersubjective Intersubjectivity Regarded Objectively as Saying Something

    D. God, or Intersubjective Intersubjectivity Regarded Objectively as Speaking about Something

    E. God, or Intersubjective Intersubjectivity Regarded Objectively as Relation between Selves

    F. Theology: God's Word or Word about God

    G. The Two Trinities

    H. The Relation between Ontology and Theology

    I. Logos as Divine Gift

        1. Story and Scripture

        2. Theory and Death

        3. Critique and Ecclesiology

        4. Symbol and Sacraments

    J. Myth and Providence

    K. Mythology and Theology

The following work, Hermeneutic Ontology, is the fruit of many years of reflection and discussion of the authors.  It began in the 70's when we intended to write together an article on the structure of language as symbol.  As this structure unfolded, however, we realized that the elements of our discussion could not be treated adequately within the limitations of what could ordinarily be published as an article.  Thereupon we developed an outline for our work and systematically discussed its various chapters, while recording our discussions.  We used a transcript of these discussions when, in 1981, we put the work into its first written form.  Since that time, we have revised the work as our reflection has matured and developed.  Although our reflection on the topic is not complete and we expect to develop it further, we have found our dialogue so mutually enlightening that we decided to make it public in the hope that others may profit from it as we have.

As a means of publication, the world wide web offers a number of advantages.  As the interested reader will see, our ontology analyzes being as acts of speaking, hearing, and loving rather than as an object.  Being is a thing, but a thing is a gathering of subjects, speakers, rather than a speechless object.  Any true experience of being thus calls for interactive speaking, dialogue.  Although we have not yet examined, or even thought of, all its possibilities of interaction, the web offers opportunities for dialogue that traditional means of publication do not.  Obvious among these opportunities is the reader's ability to use e-mail to dialogue immediately with the authors of the text.  Such a dialogue can then be included in the further development of the text.  As for the text itself, it has a certain circularity because it has the structure of the hermeneutic circle, faith seeking understanding and understanding seeking faith.  The reference ability of HTML, which allows one to go immediately from one part of the text to another, is a significant aid in revealing this structure.  This same reference ability enables the text to be linked to other texts available on the web.  So web publication, through its various connecting potentialities, reveals the gathering nature of being that is revealed in logos.  Such disclosure is not possible in paper and ink publication.  Of course the relative permanence of paper and ink publication, as well as standards of publication not under control of the authors, may force the authors to produce a more perfect work than they might be satisfied with in electronic media.  We think that the advantage of sharing our dialogue on the web outweighs the disadvantage of its incompleteness, for such a disadvantage may have the advantage of bringing others into the dialogue.

Besides the incompleteness of the text with regard to the full development of ideas contained within it, for a while the text will be incomplete in that the chapters will be added successively over time rather than published all at once.  The first chapter to be published on this web page will be Chapter I: Prologue, along with the table of contents of the entire work.  A version of the fifth chapter, however, The Matrix of The Speech of Being: Myth, Symbol, and Word in the Spirit, has already been published for several years on Dr. Piscitelli's home page at http://members.aol.com/drpnvcc/onto1.htm.
 
 

    A. Introduction

"Hermeneutic Ontology" is a name whose philosophical history is connected with the thought of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.¹  Like Heidegger we wish to begin our understanding of the term with the etymology of the words themselves. For the etymology reveals a history more primordial than the philosophical, it presents the symbol, which, as Ricoeur so aptly states, gives rise to thought.²  The primary symbol of ontology, the logos ³  about onta, the word about what exists, is logos. For logos is derived from the Greek verb legein, which has the meaning to lay in order, arrange, and so to gather or pick up, to collect, and finally to count, tell, or say. In our discussion of hermeneutic ontology we wish to investigate the basic order of logos itself and in so doing see how it arranges being and consequently human consciousness. Such an investigation is an hermeneutic enterprise, not only because in analyzing logos we are analyzing speaking, and "hermeneutic" is derived from "Hermes," the name of the Greek god through whom the gods speak to men. For "hermeneutics" has come to mean "the study of the methodological principles of interpretation." "Interpret," in turn, is derived from the Latin inter, between, and a root corresponding to the Sanskrit prath, to spread abroad. A spreading out of the order implicit in speaking must discover the principles of any spreading out or ordering process, and so be hermeneutic in the ordinary sense of the word. Finally, we will use the term "hermeneutic" in the fundamental context of the "hermeneutic circle" of "faith seeking understanding." Our investigation of hermeneutic ontology will make explicit such a circle. For it begins in the faith or trust that speaking gathers up what exists, and understands what exists by that trust in, by being true to, the structure of that gathering. This enterprise is circular, for in hermeneutic ontology, speaking lays out and gathers its own gathering.

In its function of gathering up being as the logos about onta, ontology is like other sciences. For in the most advanced sciences, as in the most primitive speech, one gathers up the particulars of experience by expressing the logoi, the principles or laws that which they have in common. However, ontology differs from other sciences in that it must present the principles that are in common to all beings, not just to some narrower class of beings, for example living beings, of which the science of biology expresses the principles.⁴

The object of ontology sets it apart from the other sciences by immediately involving the one who speaks about this object in a circular, reflective process. For since the speaking in which he presents the principles of being is itself being, in speaking about being the speaker is trying to present the ultimate principles of speaking.⁵  Since speaking defines the speaker, a speaker cannot say something about speaking without saying something about himself. The human beings who speak about being involve themselves in a communication, a building of community with another. For the speaker must hear that which is, being, speak or he would not have anything to say; and he must say that which is to another or he would have no reason to say it. A reflective knowledge of being, then, requires both a reflective appropriation of speaking and, insofar as to be a thing is to be sayable, the structure of being itself. .

Is there a simple identity between being and speaking? Does the speaker, in speaking about speaking, speak about all being? Can the principles of speaking be identified with the principles of being? Or is being somehow a larger category than speaking, that which includes it yet extends beyond it, so that speaking about speaking encounters being that it cannot include in its gathering? If this latter is the case, then the ultimate contradiction has occurred. For speaking cannot, without contradiction, say that anything exists beyond it. When it speaks of the beyond, it has either gathered this beyond within its own horizon, or it has said nothing. And if there is being beyond speaking, how could a speaker know that, in presenting the principles of the being that lies within the horizon of speaking, he was presenting the heuristic principles of all being? When speaking reflects upon itself,⁶  either it presents being or there can be no ontology at all, and one must keep silent about being.

Since the realm of being and the realm of speaking are the same, the being which is the object of an ontology, the fundamental datum which ontology explicates and organizes, must be a primordial speaking. What is that speaking, and where is it encountered? Although the human subject's fundamental awareness is an awareness of being as speaking, the human subject it is not aware of itself as being the speaker or source of a primordial speaking. Rather the human subject must hear before it can speak. What it hears is being's speaking.

Our Prologue is concerned with the primordial hearing of being speaking. Therefore it is obvious that our Prologue is a pro, before, logos, speaking, only in a relative sense. For we hear and speak in this Prologue, and unfold in our speaking in this book, the logos that before the logos nothing exists, there was no time when it was not: "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God."⁷  Before the human logosthere is already a divine logos which is the condition for the possibility of human speaking. Further, we shall develop the argument that there is no human consciousness without human speaking, human participation in the divine logos, so there is no time for human consciousness when human logos was not. Even though we might naively imagine a human consciousness without language, such a consciousness would be pre-human, merely animal. Yet our Prologue is not an introduction in a disjointed, prefatory sense but in the true sense of leading into. Our Prologue is intended to be an Archelogue, the beginning word that is a word about the beginning, by considering human speaking in its most primordial expressions and repressions. These primordial expressions and repressions are called moods.

    B. The Moods of Speaking

        1. Wonder

            a. True Wonder (The hearing of being as speaking)

The consciousness of the human is an awareness that being is speaking. What being is speaking about is itself, since there is nothing else to speak about. The one to whom being is speaking, with whom it is communicating, must be the human being, since otherwise the human being would not be aware of being's speech. Although one can "listen in" on the speaking of a finite being that is not addressed to him, the very fact of hearing the speaking of being implies that one is addressed by being. The effect that this speaking of being has on the hearer is to overwhelm him, roll him over, spin him into the circle of speaking or being. So he begins to speak. This turning of human consciousness into the circle of speaking has been called wonder, and is the traditional starting point for ontology, for wonder is the first mood of human being.

                (1) Mood

By "mood" here we recollect the root Old English meaning of mind, thought or intention.⁸  For our hermeneutic ontology will examine first the primordial ways in which the human is mindful of, thinks, or intends being. And although a somewhat fruitful ambiguity has occurred through the word "mood" taking on the meaning of the Latin derived "mode," that means measure, manner, or way,⁹  we wish to emphasize here the dynamic sense of a mood being an intending, or a stretching towards being, rather than the static, quantitative, secondary sense of mood as a mode or measure of being. This dynamic sense of mood as intention is even more clearly seen in the Greek cognate of mood, mateuein, to seek or search. A mood of being is then a seeking of being.

                (2) Desire

When we identify mood with the seeking of being, our investigation seems to reverse directions. For at first wonder would seem to be a passive hearing of being rather than an active seeking of it. Is there a more primordial mood of experiencing being than wonder? Does not desire, a primitive seeking of being, precede a wonder that implies a certain attainment of it? The etymology of "desire" is enlightening. For "desire" is derived from the Latin de, from, and a root that it has been suggested comes from the Latin sidus, star or constellation.¹⁰  The symbol of desire as an activity that comes from starlight expresses the attitude that the seeking of desire is not primordial but derivative. It is derivative of a primordial speaking that may well be symbolized by the stars, a multiplicity of lights which, according to modern theory, proceed from one central light. Starlight may seem to be distant, and one may desire the stars to be nearer for greater clarity, but one can only desire them if one has already seen them. Likewise desire is not the first action that the human is aware of, but the first reaction to the speaking of being. Desire is a seeking or longing to understand, to speak in response to the speaking that has been heard. Rather than being a separate mood of human being, desire is intention, a dimension of every mood of human being that radically defines that mood. The baby's cry is an expression of desire, but it only cries if it can hear, and if it will be heard. If no one responds to the baby's cry, it stops crying. If there is a response, its crying becomes differentiated, inflected, for all human speaking is an inflection of crying and specifies its need.

In the most primitive register of being, the mood of wonder, the desire of speaking and the speaking of desire (the latter is reflective wonder), the hermeneutic circle is apparent. For one does not seek to speak unless one has already heard a speaking that one seeks to respond to by emulating it. Thus we have Socrates' paradox in the Meno:

But how will you look for something when you don't in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something if you don't know the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you have found is the thing you didn't know?¹¹

In wonder, then, we know that we are being addressed by the speaking of being. Wonder, however, has a consecrated history in western thought, and it is difficult to avoid associating with it the metaphor of light so familiar to our tradition.¹⁴  One might then symbolize being as light, and wonder, or the quest for being, as a search for the light. Speaking is then seen as a sharing of light that is somehow outside and within oneself.¹⁵  But seeing is not the best metaphor to symbolize the primordial quest of wonder. A quest is a demand rather than a speculation. The human hears before it sees, and cries out before it addresses others, dresses itself to appear to them.¹⁶  Human speaking, therefore, is best expressed as a re-quest, eventually a re-call, a calling back in response to the call that brings it into being. For response, from the Latin respondere, means to promise oneself in return. The fact that our language favors the metaphor of sound to express not only the invitation which being gives, but also the response to the invitation, may tempt us to consider wonder only in terms of literal sounding and hearing and resounding. But since wonder is the spontaneous seeking of the unity and difference of infinite and finite,¹⁷  and that seeking first occurs in sensations, there are as many initial moods of wonder as there are sensations, finite hearings of the infinite call. Our interest is to examine in outline the ways that the types of sensation: touch, hearing, taste, smell and vision, express wonder.¹⁸

                (3) Wonder in Touching and Moving

The person hears the call and reacts to it, re-quests, even while it is in the womb. "Hearing," however, is not restricted here to literal hearing but signifies any kind of sensation. Nevertheless, we use hearing as the symbol of all sensations because it is the ordinary mode of differentiation and communication in the present. Hearing already occurs in the womb; indeed, pre-natal sounds that frighten the fetus can cause a mood of dread which persists in later life.¹⁹  The first sensation in the womb is touch, which functions as a kind of hearing. The mood of wonder begins at the most immediate level of hearing. For wonder is the mood in which the human person becomes conscious of intending or seeking the unity in difference of the finite and the infinite.²⁰  Touch is the beginning of this consciousness in that it is limited: one does not experience the same touch all the time. Moreover, some touches are experienced as pleasure and some as pain. And both limitations indicate the subliminal hearing of an unlimited call. When the subliminal hearing is overheard by listening, it is experienced as a re-quest of the Unlimited Who calls. When touch functions as a kind of hearing, however, the request for the infinite can take the form of a search for an infinite series of touches. Such an infinite series is a restless, false infinite and really finite because the unlimited is in an abstract future with no presence.²¹  The seeking for this sort of infinite deforms desire into an insatiable concupiscence. For there is no moment at which the one who calls will be experienced merely as a physical touch. In physical touch pleasure and pain are bound together inextricably,²²  and human consciousness does not experience itself as called to pain but forewarned by it. We do indeed speak of being "touched" by some expression of love that takes form in finite sensation, but the explicit awareness of touching implies a highly differentiated consciousness. The first wonder of the human person is the fact that the very experience of the unlimited call in touch is limited by the means of experiencing it. The experience must be differentiated, or consciousness will end up confusing a pursuit of the true Infinite with a flight from the false infinite. Experienced as an unlimited call that never touches the person, because it is devoid of presence, the false infinite must be fled. .

The very immediacy of touch, while it expresses an undifferentiated unity, lends itself to the confusion of the one who calls with the touch by which it is experienced. Unlike the other senses, touch is always active and reactive. To touch and to be touched function as an undifferentiated unity for consciousness. Consciousness first becomes differentiated from its touching environment by local motion; its first action in the subject is a movement towards a more pleasurable or away from a more painful touching.The first metaphors, then, for the reaction of human consciousness to the call are pursuit or flight. If he had no control over his movement in his environment, the human person would not be self-conscious, since he would not be able to distinguish himself as touching from what was touching him. Since his control over his relation to his environment is limited, he experiences himself as subject, jectum, thrown, sub, under, a reality which is object, thrown, ob, against it. Using the metaphor of touch, the limited subject cannot identify the infinite call with itself, for in his first moment (which is literally a movement) of differentiation of himself from the unlimited call, he experiences himself as limited. But he also experiences anything that is objective to him as being limited by himself. His movements have boundaries, but those boundaries are the limits of the object as well as of himself. Interpreted as literal local movement and touch, the subjectivity of human consciousness is a desperate pursuit of an infinitely pleasurable touch that it can never obtain, because the true infinite cannot be comprehended by a physical touch alone.²³  At the same time, human subjectivity is in desperate flight from an infinitely painful touch that it can never avoid, (in the sense that touch is in time and therefore in an unending series. (It is the fact that touch is in time and therefore in an infinite or unending series that creates the illusion that there can be an infinitely painful or pleasurable touch.) Touch and movement can easily be misinterpreted if one reduces subjectivity to them, but the misinterpretation is not unavoidable. The first specifically human activity is wonder, but without the recognition that the other of one's experience is a another self that calls, wonder will collapse into either pursuit or flight. Perhaps the experience of Helen Keller illustrates what happens when someone at first misinterprets her experience of touch and movement; it is reduced to false subjectivity. It was only through the loving request of an other person, her teacher, Miss Sullivan, that she could recognize that touch could have an infinite significance. She did once she began to wonder.²⁴

The experience of Helen Keller, as well as the more dramatic evidence of feral children,²⁵  illustrates the crucial principle that governs moods. The request for unlimited being that constitutes human intentionality or mood does not exist without the request of another human being. The infinite quest of another in response to the call leads one to reflect upon one's own quest and realize that behind every quest is a re-quest of the infinite. Human moods are therefore at root fundamentally intersubjective.²⁶  The infinite speaker who calls the human into consciousness cannot be heard without that call being shared by another human person. One does not wonder alone at the presence of the infinite in the finite. Nor is one ever by oneself. Even in the womb, the movement of the fetus in quest of pleasurable touch will be met by corresponding movement and touch of its mother. Thus there is a reaction to the immediate subjectivity of the fetus. Or it would perhaps be more accurate to say that the movement of the fetus is a reaction to the motion of its environment, which is subjective, because the environment itself is a person. If the priority of the action that constitutes subjectivity is somewhat ambiguous with regard to touch, it is not so with hearing and speaking. The fetus hears the sounds made by other subjects before it initiates its own cries and others can hear them. This fact in the physical dimension of the world makes the reproduction of heard sounds the most appropriate metaphor for what it is to be a subject, a speaker, for original sounding is a response to a finite subject who is himself re-sounding [to] an infinite call.

                (4) Wonder in Hearing and Sounding

The fact that the seemingly most immediate mood, wonder, is already a form of human intersubjectivity suggests that an investigation of moods is an investigation of the stages of development of the most basic intersubjective mood, love. Wonder, then, is the most immediate phase of the mood of being in love. The way that this mood first appears in the community in the normal human is in sounding. The human person in community sounds his wonder most immediately in crying and laughing.Since wonder is the immediate request of the unity in difference of the infinite and finite, crying expresses wonder in expressing the discrepancy between the infinite call that the person hears and the inadequate response that he experiences. Laughing, on the other hand, sounds the harmony between the infinite call and the finite response. And because every finite reality is a unity and difference with the infinite call, crying and laughing are mood expressions that are never totally differentiated from each other. A peak experience of wonder like a clear expression of love, consequently, leaves us confused as to whether to laugh or to cry. Likewise, we might laugh (off) at a very painful experience. Mood is synonymous with humor, and one has "a sense of humor" and laughs at jokes that express the incongruity of infinite and finite, not out of sadistic pleasure at the pain of difference, but because of the unity of infinite and finite that even the incongruity implies.

Although we referred to laughing and crying as "expressions" of the mood of wonder, they clearly reveal the intersubjective nature of mood in that the mood exists in its expression. Crying and laughing exist for another. If they cannot be shared, they cease. One has a need, evident in the more mediated forms of expression such as comedy and tragedy, as well as in spontaneous laughing and crying, to draw the other into humor, which is a function of wonder. Humor is infectious precisely because it exists only in community, and laughing or crying can create the community of wonder. People can be caught up in the mood of laughing or crying in a group even if they do not know what specifically the group is laughing or crying about. For people know that the deep source of the laughter is both a re-sounding and a re-questing. Hearing laughter involves us in the laughter.

The different aspects of wonder presented in crying and laughing are united in singing. Perhaps crying becomes wonder fully only in singing.For crying in its most immediate form can be a wonderless expression of pain or need in which the subject is paradoxically directed beyond itself to the object of its need but is not yet self-conscious. Singing, by contrast, is a self-conscious end in itself. It is self-conscious to the extent that the subject becomes conscious of itself as a subject when it expresses the wonder of the infinite call in the finite.It is an end in itself because wonder is the first intention of the human end, and in the wonder expressed in singing, the subject becomes aware of itself as an end in itself. One can even hear the shift from crying to singing at times in infants when they listen to themselves becoming preoccupied more with their own voice than with what they are crying for. They change their inflection, their tone, and their crying becomes articulate and begins to be speaking. For singing is the first differentiated form of speaking, as well as an expression of its final fulfillment.²⁷  Becoming conscious of itself, the subject becomes aware of the difference between self and other and thereby intends the unity of the infinite call with the finite human other. Because singing is wonder-full, singing with an enemy makes him one's friend. Or if one is caught singing in the presence of one's enemy, it exposes one's vulnerability. The fulfilling sounding that singing creates is a mood that overcomes alienation.

We say, of course, that we "laugh at" an enemy, but laughing, as a sounding of wonder, is a form of singing. Doesn't such singing create a mood of alienation rather than overcome it? "Laughing at," however is the laughter of mockery, and the laughter of mockery is really a mockery of laughter. Mockery is expressed immediately in the tonal quality of the "laughter". It does not have the melodious sound of genuine laughter that "laughs with". The "at" expresses the failure of wonder since it signifies the attitude that there is a reality set over against the subject in a way that alienates that other reality. Genuine wonder, and therefore genuine laughter, overcomes alienation.

Alienation is not the only reason why a primal speaking in singing might lose its harmony with being. The "spoken" as contrasted with the "sung" word tends to disguise mood. The very tonal continuity of singing that creates mood makes the articulation of reference to distinct objects difficult. It is possible to make discrete references to distinct objects by using different tones or changes in tone: Chinese is an example of a language that does this, and there is evidence that Indo-European languages in an earlier form were more "sing-song" than monotonal.²⁸  Even though spoken Chinese is multitonal, it does not have the fuller tonal variety of any language that is sung. Greater reference capability demands con-sonants, soundings with, that seem ill-named because they stop the sounding. The stops of the consonants correspond to differentiation of the objects referred to by words. Consonantal stops make words possible and reveal the limitation of human sounding as speaking. Increased ability to show difference achieved by monotone, and the interjection of consonants, concomitantly imply a loss of the primordial unity of subject and object in mood.One may speak monotonally to disguise one's mood from one's enemies or sings with or for one's friends.²⁹  The difference is discerned in the melodious quality of one's voice and by one's desire to emphasize the unity induced by wonder expressed in singing. Therefore since monotonal speaking is also necessary to indicate reference to different objects, however, the "spoken" word is not a simple indication of a flight from being or a deformation of wonder.

                (5) Wonder in Tasting and Smelling

The first reality that an infant cries for is its nurturing mother. Having been separated from its mother by birth and no longer embraced and surrounded by touch in the womb, its sense of difference from the mother is increased, for it has literally been carried away [dif-ferred] from her. Its cry, it believes, has the effect of returning it to a situation in which it has the pleasure of the warm surrounding touch but also of taste and smell. It has moved from its first, undifferentiated union with another to its first communion, communication with one from whom one has been separated. The infant's sucking to achieve its own pleasure of taste and smell gives pleasure to its mother, so implicit intersubjectivity becomes more explicit. Taste and smell become full of wonder, an impetus to wonder. The kiss expresses and symbolizes the mood as the infant is weaned from the mother's breast. Freed from its limitation of physical exclusiveness, (one can only kiss one person at a time), the kiss and its wonder become distinct from the phenomenon of eating together. (Although later eating together will symbolize this first kiss.) With taste and smell, as with any expression of wonder, for every gain there is a loss. Taste and smell do not have the immediacy and temporal continuity of touch; there is less unity and more distinctness. We do not have the control³⁰  over taste and smell that we do over sound. We do not produce from ourselves at will a variety of tastes and smells as we do with sounds. More differentiated than touch, less differentiated than hearing, taste and smell become the most common expressions of wonder in the child. Eating together is the most fundamental expression of community. We may talk to an enemy because we can disguise our moods (and the written word is even more of a disguise), but we will not eat with an enemy, because the mood of wonder that is expressed by eating with, the same mood that is expressed by singing with, overcomes alienation.

                (6) Wonder in Seeing

The last sensation full of wonder is seeing. It is the most object-oriented and differentiated sensation. By the time we see clearly, we are developing as subjects and as persons with others (intersubjectively) through the other sensations.The visual world presents itself as a set of discrete objects really distinct from one another. This visual world of immediacy can be shut out by closing one's eyes, and frequently is when the subject wants to recall the more primitive wonder of touching, crying, laughing, singing, praying, kissing or eating.³¹  What is seen is experienced as beyond, not only oneself, but also one's other self, the other person in responding to whom one comes to know oneself. In contrast to seeing, in touching, hearing, and sounding with we more immediately wonder at ourselves in relation to others. For we never see our relations to other selves because we do not look at our own looks except when we pose and look at ourselves in the mirror. Mirror posing is the beginning of self-understanding as self-construction. We hear our own sounding as does the other with whom we are re-sounding. But in the strict sense we do not see our own seeing. Like touching and hearing, seeing does have an immediate unity with its object. Unlike touching, seeing an other is not also seeing oneself. In the mirror I see myself as other and appropriate the image. Seeing is unlike hearing, moreover, in that we cannot make ourselves be seen in the differentiated way in which we can make ourselves heard. The very objectivity of the visual world, however, heightens subjectivity which, in experiencing what is beyond it, becomes one with it. So vision, in presenting a greater differentiation between the self and being, presents the possibility of a greater unity and thus an even greater wonder.

Secondly, the visual world allows more differentiation than the worlds of the other sensations. The more differentiated objects of the visual world allow us to control it and to recall the wonders of the other senses by contextualizing them in the visual. The visual world presents itself as external to the subject. It is able to present the otherness of things in relation to one another and therefore to present externalities within itself. We feel many touches, hear many sounds, smell many smells all at once, but the discriminations possible among the multiplicity of these sensations is minuscule compared to the discriminations possible within the sensation of seeing. Because of the differentiations possible within the visual world, seeing can express not only unlimited being's transcendence, but also the possibility for infinite distinctions and discriminations within the visual field, thus enabling the sense of seeing to present the internal infinity of unlimited being.³²  Unlimited being is beyond the boundaries of the finite, and it has no boundaries within itself. It is paradoxical that seeing expresses the lack of boundaries in unlimited being by its ability to create an unlimited number of discriminations [boundaries] within the visual field.

The capacity of sight to present an objectively stable world of virtually unlimited differentiation is the first condition for the possibility of the written word. The wonder of the other senses can be recalled, and so re-marked, by sight in writing. Writing is thus a third order of recall in marking meaning, since the wonder that is expressed in the senses is the first re-calling or marking of an infinite calling. Sounding, which before seeing was the most differentiated wonder, in speaking is used most frequently of all the senses to recall their wonders; this is second order recall. Sounding is the first re-call of the wonder in the senses of touch, taste, and smell. Seeing, however, capable of more present differentiation than sounding, in the written word recalls sounding's recall of the wonders of all senses. Through writing, seeing not only can recall sounding's re-call of the wonder of the senses, but also go beyond that re-call by capturing meaning for others not yet present. The objectifying and mediating function of writing results in gains and losses for wonder. There is a gain in subjectivity and intersubjectivity in that in the written word the person speaks to and hears a potentially unlimited number of others, calling them into one's own recall and being called into theirs.³³  A gain in wonder results as our mood of seeking the unity in difference of infinite and finite develops. The disadvantage, however, as well as the advantage of the objectivity of seeing is enhanced by the written word. When the mood of wonder, the intention to say completely, results in writing, the presence of sense is lost but the presence of meaning is gained because in writing meaning depends upon understanding as distinct from just looking. The ability to manipulate saying as an object in writing may lead us wrongly to think that saying is no more than an object, and thus lose consciousness of the wonder of saying, along with its dimensions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The naive mistake that reality can be encountered by "taking a look" at it diminishes subjectivity and leads to a skepticism that doubts any reality beyond the subject. A diremption, a falling away of subject, object, and other subject, is evident in the etymology of the word "skepticism" itself. For "skepticism" is derived from the Greek skeptesthai which meant to look at carefully, then examine, but which comes to mean unthinking doubt. It is the visual objectivity of the written word that allows it to be examined carefully that also allows it to be doubted as inauthentic recall. Those who wish to call others into their wonder may consequently hesitate to use the written word. This is an error, for the written word is not flawed so much as the interpreters who misuse it. If the written word is not to lose its meaning, it must be interpreted as an invitation to wonder.

                (7) Sensing and Time

Because sensations change and exist in changing, they are intrinsically limited. Our sense of time comes from our experience of the senses as lacking the ability to present the call of the infinite unequivocally. In sensation the mood of wonder is an experience of the infinite call in parts: part of the experience is no longer present and part is yet to come. In wonder, however, because the subject has the awareness of being as revealing itself as a call, it also recognizes that this being is beyond the limitation of time. Because the subject who wonders is aware of being as self-disclosing, he also recognizes that being somehow stands beyond and beneath the limitation of time. With regard to the past, the subject experiences this self-revealing, self-transcending, and thus infinite being as being at the beginning of things, the ultimate principle of all. For the subject who has made such a discovery of the past, there is a past that is always repeated,³⁴  the same and always different, that is ever ancient and yet ever new. Being is regarded as past and ancient because being is the arche, the principle of things; and yet it is ever new, because the principle is the principle of speaking, and speaking is always present, always presents itself by gathering up the moments of time. With regard to the future, the mood of wonder will change to trust, for the one who wonders projects into the future his recall of the past as the call of being. The hermeneutics of wonder is therefore a hermeneutics of recollection. In speaking, being gathers itself up, collects itself, gives the logos as principle. In wonder consciousness recollects, speaks again the principle of all being: that being reveals itself by its calling.

The fact that being speaks means that it must speak, that it is the nature of being to reveal itself. The subject who wonders does not experience the speaking of being as something imposed upon him from without, as a necessity or an oppressive obligation. The call of being appears to the wondering subject as a free, as loving, as gift. The subject's awareness of being's freedom in calling leads the subject who responds to ask why there is being is rather than nothing or why being speaks rather than remaining silent. Wonder can initiate the question "Why me?" of the person who is amazed to find himself loved, or the question, "Who me?" of the person amazed to find himself spoken to, or called. He is amazed, because it does not seem that love or communication has to be. What being reveals is that it is self-revealing.  Even though the gratuity of self-revealing being is amazing to the subject, the act of being freely giving itself is necessary because it derives from the loving nature of being. For in speaking, being speaks about itself for there is nothing beyond itself. For it to speak at all means that it must speak.

                (8) Summary

In the experience of wonder through sensation the human subject becomes conscious by experiencing itself as called into being, a being experienced as a quest for unity in difference with an infinite call. In the quest limited by sensation, the human subject has an incipient awareness that the call that it experiences as unlimited is the foundation, origin, source, and end of its quest. Though foundational, the awareness of the infinite in wonder is incipient because it has not yet been established fully in the community's speaking. The subject could misunderstand its wonder as originating with itself and identify itself as the unlimited.. Then it would see as limited the being that founds its consciousness by calling it. The identification of self-consciousness experienced in sensation with unlimited being is a misinterpretation of wonder, and it becomes evident because the false self-consciousness must abandon its project of speaking. A human self who confuses the unlimited with itself reduces the unlimited speaker to itself, the limited being that is spoken With the reduction of the Unlimited to the self there is neither the need nor the possibility of saying anything, for there is nothing more to say; everything has been said in the Self as the Unlimited. This interpretation of being shows itself to be manifestly mistaken because it puts an end to interpretation and understanding. Human consciousness, however is aware that everything has not been said in it and cannot be said in it; this fact gives the lie to its reduction of infinite being to the finite self.

The continual interpretation and reinterpretation of the genuine listener contrasts with the reductive misinterpretation of wonder in the experience of sensation. Although the original attitude of consciousness in wonder is one of listening, it cannot listen without itself becoming a speaker in response. It experiences itself as spoken to, yet by the very fact that it hears, that it can communicate with being, it is caught up in speaking. And one cannot be a hearer without being a speaker. For consciousness to hear what being is saying, it must identify somehow with what is being heard. But what is being heard is the self-revelation of being, the call of being, the vocation to be. If the wonder of consciousness is genuine, then consciousness must not only hear but speak, communicate, reveal itself. Because wonder in sensing is subject to the misinterpretation of the relation of infinite to finite, it must become a more mediated form of speaking to clarify the relation. A wonder that does not try to express the being that it wonders at becomes a false wonder about being; it ceases to be wonder, and falls into dread.

            b. False Wonder or Dread (Deafness to the call of being, or the hearing of being as dumb)

                (1) Dread as Counterfeit Mood

Since mood is the seeking of being, and wonder is the primordial expression of seeking being, false wonder or dread is a bad or defective mood. For dread, or anxiety as it is sometimes called, is not the seeking of being but a fear of and drawing away from nothing. Because it confuses nothing with being, dread is a corruption of the mood of wonder.For all mood must begin in the first moment of consciousness, which is the primordial re-call of the infinite call of being. The subject who fears nothing consequently would not be conscious to fear if he did not react to some extent to the infinite call. The primordial experience of being in wonder precedes the experience of nothing in dread. Dread, however, is a state of confusion (from the Latin con, together, and fundere, pour): it pours together the infinite and finite that the mood of wonder sought to differentiate. Although the subject experiences the call as the necessary condition for being conscious, in dread he hears that call as alien to himself and therefore as not calling, as no thing. (The original meaning of "thing" is a calling or assembly.³⁵ ) If infinite being beyond the self is not a calling, it must be fled rather than sought, for as not speaking the infinite would be alien to the speaking nature of the self. The flight of the conscious subject, however, has no positive content because it is derivative of wonder. In dread, therefore, the subject confuses his own being with the nothingness that he flees.³⁶  And so, instead of being a recall full of wonder that any true mood is, dread is the confusion of an intention that intends nothing, a saying that says nothing.

                (2) The Origin of Dread

Strictly speaking, as a fear of nothingness dread has no origin, beginning, or cause. For nothing cannot call anything into being.³⁷  The awareness that there is nothing, no recall, where there should be something, implies an awareness of the call of being. Fear of the lack of recall, however, must be a lack of awareness of being, a failure to respond to the infinite call.³⁸  This failure to respond confuses nothing, a lack of call, with being, the infinite call, and flees from it as though it were something. Since the awareness of a lack of being can only come into being with an awareness of being, dread can be a concomitant of any experience of being, the infinite call, to which consciousness does not respond. Thus dread is a shadow of wonder until the person in wonder finds his the unity with infinite being that he seeks. At each stage of wonder there is the possibility of dread.

Without naming it, we have seen the possibility of dread concomitant with wonder in each type of sensation. If we respond to a touch with the recognition that it is a limited expression of an infinite call, then we are in wonder. If we are preoccupied with the limitation or nothingness of the touch, and confuse that nothingness with the totality of reality, then we are deaf to the infinite call and react by a flight from nothingness, a flight that becomes a pursuit of an infinite series of touches. An infinite series of touches, however, is a deformed finite because it is an attempt to control and circumscribe the infinite by the finite. Such an attempt is a refusal to listen to the infinite call, so dread is the blind pursuit of the nothingness from which it flees.³⁹  Besides confusing the limited touch with the infinite that touches, the person in dread confuses his local movement with commitment in action, which is supposed to be the recall of the infinite call. In his confusion, the finite person who touches experiences himself as moved by, subject to, thrown under reality, but he also experiences reality as blindly thrown, and intrinsically defective. In dread, the subject confuses himself with objective reality by throwing back whatever he experiences, for reality is repulsive and must be repelled. In dread the subject is a rejection of, a throwback to the reality that blindly threw it out, rather than a recall of the infinite call in wonder. Finally, the subject in dread confuses pleasure and pain. The limits of the senses subject them to pain as well as pleasure. The person who is in dread focuses on the fact that limits involve nothingness and cannot tell the difference between pleasure and pain because what he sees in them both is their nothingness.⁴⁰  In dread the subject reduces limits to nothing. For the subject in dread, reality is essentially violent. Having forgotten the call, he cannot differentiate between moving toward pleasure and moving away from pain.

The unending temporal series of sensations, each of which recalled the infinite call in wonder, in dread becomes an unending repetition of the selfsame boring nothingness. Furthermore, instead of the finite and infinite becoming further differentiated in the wonder of the various senses, in dread the multiplication of senses and sensations leads to confusion. In wonder, one touch is enough to touch the infinite; in dread, an infinite series of touches is not enough. Likewise, in dread the subject hears nothing, sounds nothing, tastes nothing, smells nothing, sees nothing.⁴¹  The restless pursuit of sensation that occurred in touch will occur in the other senses, and the itching of ears for new sounds will not be satisfied because, based on the confusion of limits with nothingness, the new sounds will be defined by their limits and not by their relation to the infinite. New smells and tastes, likewise, will cause a nausea that results from the same mistake of limits being defined by nothing. Though avidly sought, what is produced by the smells and tastes is what must be thrown up and spit out.⁴²

                (3) The Stagnated Moments of Dread

A failure to listen to being leads to the counterfeit state of the consciousness of dread. The person in dread is not aware that being is speaking to him, and so he falls into a false division of being and speaking. Like the one who truly wonders, he is preoccupied with undetermined being as a source and a totality. Because he has not come to the realization that being reveals itself, the one who dreads regards the differentiations and determinations of being as unreal. For him being does not speak, it just remains in itself. And so in order to be, he must abandon his own speaking and differentiation and immerse himself in the immediacy of being. Since dread confuses being with nothing, however, in order to be in dread consciousness must become less and less conscious. For the person in dread, the beginning question: "why is there being rather than nothing?" will not become the question: "why is being speaking to me?" For such a question looks for a continuation of the dialogue by consciousness. For the person in dread, the questioning of being presupposes a negative attitude and expects the answer that the movement of being out of itself is unnatural and illusory. For the person who dreads, there really is not being rather than nothing. With regard to speaking, for him being is nothing because it is silent.

For the person who dreads, everything is pseudo-objectivity. His consciousness is bound in the implausible self-alienating position that there is something to talk about, being, but that being is the same as nothing. Further, there is no one, no subject, to talk about it, and no one to talk to. In wonder, consciousness did not move to full awareness of itself because it had not yet fully identified with being as self-expressive. In dread, however, the self-negating attitude of consciousness eliminates the possibility of self-expression.

There is the further difficulty that in dread there is no possibility that anything will be expressed. Being must be completely undetermined, for any determination implies the existence of beings distinct from one another, and that would imply self-disclosure, the speaking of being. Furthermore, recognition of distinct beings would lead consciousness to the acceptance of its own self-worth, its own existence as speaker. To be aware of speaking, one must speak and listen.

Because being does not express itself for the person in dread, he is limited to himself, unfree, and bound. By identifying itself with false being, consciousness feels itself to be bound. This binding of consciousness is a self-confusion, and consciousness feels frustrated by the arbitrary limitation of its natural movement towards self-expression. Instead of the liberating "why me?" which begins in wonder, the beginning question now beginning is "why me, why is my subjectivity annihilated by reality, bound to be nothing by being?" The person in dread does not realize that he is being drawn into a false quest, because he is not listening to being. Consequently, dread is also the source of the question "who me?" of the one who is not listening, who does not believe that he can be drawn into dialogue.

The person in wonder understands being as a past that continues to express itself in the present and promises to be present in the future. For the person in dread, however, being is a past that has ended; there is neither a present nor promise of presence in the future. For presence implies a reality that stands before itself, expresses itself, and dread suppresses awareness of expressions and determinations. Everything is ancient; nothing is ever new, and it never was new. What it is, is that it is past as over and done with, it was without ever being. For the person in dread, wesen ist was gewesen ist, "essence is what was," means "being is always and forever over and done with." The past must be conserved, because it is all there is, but the conservation conserves nothing, because the past contains no presence and has no being to call for a response. Dread is not just the source of conservatism, however, for it confuses what it thinks is the nothingness of the past with the nothingness of the present. For dread, the present is the exclusive moment of liberalism.⁴³  Being is neither the past nor the future, and consequently being is mere negation or nothing. The past's being nothing in dread does not make its negation something. Rather the present repeats the nothingness of the past. The future does not solve the confusion, for the future can only repeat the other moments of time. Thus the confusion of dread leads to radicalism as well as conservatism and liberalism. Since for the person in dread being simply is, which means it simply was, there is nothing left to say. Being "appears" as the "I have spoken" of the false absolute of dogmatic authority; but it really has not spoken at all, for if it had it would call its hearers into dialogue, it would reveal itself as communication. Since the person in dread does not hear being's address which calls community to be together, he falls into the confusion of accepting being as a speaker who does not speak, a subject who is no subject at all. Nor is being a true object for the one in dread, because a true object is a thing, an assembly, and with no calling there is no assembly, no community. In dread, there exists only a pseudo-speaking without communication, and so there is no dialogue, no dialectic, no conversation. (False authority attempts to reify speaking, to use speaking as an object, and brings dialogue to an end.) But the consciousness of the one who wonders is grasped by the being that reveals itself in its call. Consequently wonder leads to trust. The listener becomes a speaker.

        2. Trust, or Reflective Wonder

            a. Trust, or Reflective Wonder (The speaking [or recollection] of being as heard)

                (1) The Origin of Trust

Trust is a development of the seeking that wonder is. It may be said to be reflective wonder, not in that it is reflection in the sense of abstract thought, but in the sense that in trust the mood of wonder is bent back upon itself. For in wonder consciousness comes to be in being called. That consciousness also needs to recall the original call for its very constitution, but in spontaneous wonder the recall was not yet explicit because wonder is only the beginning of the differentiation of the moments of communication between the finite and infinite. In trust, however, consciousness is sufficiently differentiated from the infinite call that its activity is fidelity to that call. Trust is the source of truth because it is true to the infinite who calls. In trust, then, the relationship between the infinite and finite is stabilized. This stabilization of the call and response is suggested by the etymology of the word trust. Probably of Scandinavian origin, "trust" is akin to the Old English treowe, meaning faithful. The corresponding Sanskrit roots are daruna, meaning hard, and daru, meaning wood. Also related is the symbol of faithfulness, tree, from the Old English treow. A tree, like faithfulness or trust, is perennially stable and durable in its life. Although it may appear to die, a tree grows yearly stronger and brings new life through its differentiation. So also with trust, the differentiation of consciousness from the infinite call is hardened in recollecting that it is called into being.

                (2) The Moments of Trust

                    (a) Intentionality

What is there left to say in trust? Has not being already revealed itself as revealing? What is there left to reveal? These are false questions coming out of dread. If being reveals that it is revealing, it reveals that it presents itself, not that it is totally uncovered, demystified, or past. Therefore being reveals itself in a human speaking that is infinite in the sense that there is no first or last word, there is no beginning or end to the possibilities of human speaking. This human infinite, however, is not the empty infinite of an undetermined being. To interpret being as indeterminate is to be lost in dread because being without determinations is nothing.⁴⁴  In wonder consciousness is aware of being as infinite speaking, an infinite self-determination. In trust consciousness, through its own speaking, is in the mood of being true to that infinite self-determination.

Although trust brings the mood of wonder to fulfillment, it is more differentiated than wonder because in it the subject becomes explicitly conscious of the relation of finite to infinite. In wonder the mood or quest might be expressed partially by the question "what is being?," or "what is this?," with the "this" referring to that most immediate state of consciousness in which the subject is not differentiated from the object, nor finite from infinite. Differentiation of the moments of the mood of wonder begins in the answer that also partially expresses the mood. This partial answer to the question "What is being" is that to be a human being is to be called. In trust, however, the more differentiated mood is expressed by another set of questions and answers. Here the expressive question becomes "Is this what being is," where the "this" refers to a finite being, and "being" refers to the infinite call that brings it into being. The faithful, true, or trusting answer that the mood implies is: "yes, the infinite call is revealed in its limited expression." Furthermore, by being in the mood to give this answer to the question in trust, the conscious subject becomes aware of his own mediating role as speaker. Subject and object, as well as finite and infinite, become more differentiated.

                    (b) Objectivity

In trust the object of consciousness unfolds itself. The quest or mood in which the question about being arises: "what is this being?" enables the investigation of the nature of particular beings. If the trusting person remains true to his source, he will continually express the same answer, but he will express it in an infinite variety of ways. For if being for the human being reveals itself as an infinite call, everything that is must disclose that call. In speaking of the infinite variety of things, the speaker must always discover the speaking of being itself. By speaking, the speaker discovers the nature of speaking or communication. Moreover, the question about the nature of speaking raises further questions about the moments of speaking: who is it who speaks, what is he saying, what is he speaking about, and who is speaking to whom.

How does the finite speaker express infinite self-expression and in so doing discover the nature of the infinite? For the finite speaker, speaking is a predication that involves categorization and definition. Categorization expresses the distinction between the category and the instance that is called by its name. Combining categories defines individuals, but the categories remain universal.⁴⁵  Their universality connects them with the infinite that is all-embracing. But how does one define the infinite? The goal seems to be self-contradictory if definition is regarded as a combination of categories, since categorization limits and the infinite cannot be limited. Definition of the infinite is self-contradictory, however, only if one's idea of the infinite is the false infinite of dread, an infinite that does not call. The true infinite is self-defining. This is the true infinite that wonder hears, the infinite self-expression in an infinite call, that leads the subject to be involved in its self-expression. The subject defines the infinite by allowing the infinite to define itself. In the trust that is true to wonder, each predication expresses the infinite because as speaking it recalls the infinite.

In enabling the presentation of the nature of things through the definition of what they are, trust makes the discovery of their essence possible. What they are cannot be known apart from a reflection upon them, their definition in speaking.. And since speaking, discourse, is in the present, the one who trusts recalls being as something that is, that exists in its expression, not as something that was. In recalling the infinite call that it heard in wonder, the trusting speaker creates meaning by making present an essence, what something is, by calling it by name. In the naming, the one who trusts recognizes the absence and otherness that presents itself in the definition of what a being is, yet he does not let this nothingness that is involved in the differentiation lead him to think that being is nothing.

The function of speaking for the trusting person is to say what is, to make being present. In so doing he is not cut off from what was, but truly expresses it, for what was was the beginning of expression. Nor is he cut off from what will be, for there can be nothing in the future except being as speaking and listening, communication.

                    (c) Subjectivity

Trust has all of reality within its horizon insofar as its other subject, the one with whom the trusting person communicates, is being, the one from whom it hears the infinite call. The trusting person does not understand that subject as something that is alienated from itself. Since what is spoken derives its reality from the speaker, in trust the speaker realizes that everything within its speaking horizon is an expression of being, mediated through its own finite process of articulation and definition. The more the conscious subject speaks about the other subject, being, the more it becomes aware of its own being as a subject. So the trust that enables the self-disclosure of being in the differentiation of its speaking also develops self-confidence. Trust in the call that brings one into being is at the same time trust in oneself, because one cannot trust in that call without speaking it and so being true to oneself.

The intention of trust is to say what is, to speak the truth, to speak being as it is spoken. But being is spoken as speaking and as calling. In order to be a genuine speaker, it is not adequate to be a traditionalist, to intend to speak what was spoken, for this would be to regard being as the over and done with past, and to fall into dread. This fall destroys genuine subjectivity because to eliminate being as speaking eliminates the speaker. No gap exists between the present as the presenting of reality, and what is, and no gap exists between truth and what is. Saying the truth adds nothing to being, because no being exists without being in the truth that speaking is. For truth is something that is active or doing; being reveals itself as identical with that doing, and the subject is self-conscious and self-confident by his participation in that doing the truth.

                (d) Intersubjectivity

Doing the truth reveals the community that communication is. Truth cannot be done outside of community. Being reveals itself in the immediacy of wonder as self-revealing, and the trusting person recognizes that revelation without intersubjectivity, a communion of subjects who share the revelation, is impossible. In immediate wonder, however, the focus of attention is on being as speaking to us in calling. The trusting person is aware of himself speaking with being in re-calling the one who calls him. Yet even in trust, intersubjectivity is not fully explicit. Just as it is implied in the immediacy of wonder that being is speaking to us, the ones who hear, so it is implied in trust that man is speaking to being through beings. In each case the emphasis is on the speaker, not on the one being spoken to. The full explication of intersubjectivity is the final moment of the dialectic of wonder.

                (3) Trust, Recollection, and Dialectic

As the unfolding of wonder, trust makes its hermeneutics of recollection explicit. The gathering of oneself back into the call of being is necessary even for the wondering person's awareness of self and others in being. Trust develops wonder, however, by emphasizing recollection rather than differentiation. Differentiations would of course exist occur for infinite being even without the trust of the finite person. Without trust, however, the conscious subject is confused and full of dread--unable to differentiate the infinite from itself. Consequently the subject could not be open to the recollection of itself with the infinite. The spreading out and gathering up of the interpretation that recollection is occur contemporaneously in the dialectic that flows from the mood of trust.

Dialectic is the activity of dialogue considered in its objective, structural moment. Dialogue, however, implies intersubjectivity, which wonder demands for its full unfolding, and the nature of dialectic is fully manifested only when intersubjectivity becomes a full fledged theme of reflection. Nevertheless, dialectic does appear in the mood of trust in that trust must go through (dia) the differentiations of being in order to gather (legein) them together by re-calling them as expressions of the primordial call. By contrast, a dread that forgets being crumbles into a false negative dialectic in which every moment of consciousness is irreconcilably opposed to itself and to every other moment because in no moment can the person in dread re-call the source that calls him into being. The counterfeit mood of trust that exhibits the false negative dialectic is called doubt, or distrust.

            b. False Trust, or Doubt (Dumbness to [or forgetfulness of] what being says.)

                (1) The Origin of Doubt as Dialectical Counterposition

The root of the word "doubt" is the Latin verb dubitare, which means to hesitate or waver in belief or opinion. Such hesitation to trust is ambiguous without further interpretation. A hesitation to trust could be identified with the mood of trust itself if the hesitation arises from an awareness of the infinite call and an unwillingness to let a finite reality be identified with it. On the other hand, hesitation to trust could arise from dread, the subject's failure to recall its constitution by the infinite call of being. Distrust has this negative meaning of "doubt,"and it is this sort of hesitation or distrust that we here refer to when we use the word "doubt."

The mutual hearing and speaking of finite speakers with each other in the speaking of infinite being, though an implication of being, is not automatically achieved. How far one can wander from the movement to community which develops from trust is made evident in doubt, the counterfeit of trust and the dialectical counterposition of dread. Dialectical counterpositions are not truly dialectical as productive tensions but are rather destructive oppositions, false imitations of dialectic. We have seen a true example of the productive tensions of dialectic in the unfolding of trust from wonder. Negative doubt, by contrast, is the counterfeit of trust that is not in productive tension with dread but is rather its counterposition. The meaning of "dialectic," like the Greek verb legein from which it is derived, is speaking, but the prefix dia, which can have the sense of with as well as through makes explicit the mediation that must be present in any speaking. In order for speaking to be a gathering up, a legein, it must be a gathering up with, a dia-legein. The togatherness (sic) is present in the movement from infinite being as speaker in the immediacy of wonder to the human as speaker in trust. In trust the infinite is gathered together with the finite in the truth that recalls the infinite call. In the movement from dread to doubt, however, there is no continuity, nothing in common, nothing to gather together. A sophistic, negative dialectic exists in the nothingness between dread and doubt because both of them are constituted by the illusion that there is no original speaking. The movement of false dialectic is a movement to a counterposition and is essentially reactionary. An examination of doubt will show this empty reaction.

In dread the conscious subject felt itself controlled by the opaque, speechless, objectivity of being; in doubt the conscious subject tries to control being by making it into that same speechless object. In dread the conscious subject failed to listen to being and to recall its originary speaking; in doubt it fails to speak because its failure to listen and recall gives it nothing to say. Yet just as in dread there was a pseudo-listening, a listening to nothing, so in doubt there is a pseudo-saying, a saying of nothing. And so the dialectic of counterpositions, which has its source in the mood of dread, is the evolution of a confusion of being with nothing. Dread confuses finite and infinite, subject and object, seeking and flight. Doubt, in being itself a counterposition of dread, develops the confusions of dread by opposing them. Just as the confusions of dread were not true unity, however, the counterpositions of doubt are not true differentiation. In fact, counterpositions are not so much positions but failures of positions, and the emphasis in the word is on counter, for the function of a counterposition is to be against something without actually saying anything.

The counterposition of doubt is in between the confusion of dread and the self-contradiction of hate. Having misinterpreted being as non-speaking in dread, in doubt the speaking subject poses itself against that being. By so doing the speaking subject does not actually express himself, but in a sense identifies himself with the non-speaking nothingness that he rejects. The only way to overcome the nothingness of dread is by recalling the infinite call of being in trust. In the unity of wonder and trust, finite and infinite are united in their difference by speaking inasmuch as the finite speaker speaks in the infinite saying. In the counterfeit moods of dread and doubt, by contrast, there is nothing in common to the two positions except that they are opposed to each other, and consequently there is no unity between finite and infinite. For the subject in dread regards being as an objective, non-speaking infinite, and the subject in doubt regards himself as a subjective, non-speaking finite. These counterpositions are hidden self-contradictions, for a non-speaking infinite is an oxymoron, as is a non-speaking subject. "Contradiction," however, has the sense of speaking against another speaking, and we reserve the term for the conflict of selves in hatred. (We predict that "contradiction" is an oxymoron since true speaking can never be against anything, especially another true speaking. A false speaking, on the other hand, is nothing, and one cannot speak against nothing.)⁴⁶  Dialectical counterpositions ultimately say nothing. In saying nothing themselves, dialectical counterpositions seem to oppose each other. In reality, however, dialectical counterpositions share an empty sameness in that they are the same confusion or hidden self-contradiction looked at from opposite sides. Dread is the consciousness of the hidden self-contradiction of a being that does not speak and thus reveals itself as non-revealing. Doubt is the hidden self-contradiction of a conscious subject who does not speak, who says he says nothing because he hears being's nothingness.

The re-action of doubt to dread is nothing new. It is again, re, the same action (really the same failure to act) that dread was. The conscious subject was led into to doubt, its failure to speak, by regarding being as non-speaking in dread. The subject dreadfully thought being was non-speaking. In dread, the conscious subject is obsessed with being as an objective incommunicable totality. He felt dominated, oppressed, unjustified by a speechless thing. In dread, the conscious subject cannot escape his own non-identification, lack of unity with being. If being does not speak, and is a mute object rather than a subject, then consciousness is not a revelation or speaking of being, and must be nothing. For doubt, being is not something that communicates itself in consciousness, but stifles consciousness with its oppressive nauseating fullness that is alien to consciousness.⁴⁷  Consciousness cannot communicate with this kind of being, it cannot swallow it; therefore it vomits it out in reaction. Doubt is a sickness of consciousness with being that heightens in its self-opposing alienation till consciousness retches. The movement in consciousness from doubt to dread is from a not-saying, which is nauseating and boring, to saying nothing, which is the communication equivalent of retching.

The unfolding of wonder into trust shows the object of consciousness shifting from the white light of being to the rainbow of its determinations. The trusting person delights in investigating the nature of each color, of the relation of each to its source, and to the other colors, for every color was a revelation of its self-revealing source. The person in doubt, which is the failure to trust or wonder reflectively, cannot have an attitude towards the determinations of being that is more positive than the one he has towards being itself. The doubter cannot even admit that the determinations of being exist; for if he did, he would have to accept being as self-revealing or self-determining. So for the person in doubt, the variety of beings repeats and heightens its sense of the alienating, nauseating, self-same mute fullness of being. Instead of the intelligent, investigative action of the one who trusts, an action that shares in the determination of being through definition, the counterfeit reaction of curiosity occupies the skeptical doubter. In curiosity, the one who doubts moves through the bad infinite of endless repetitions of the self-same. He looks for something new, something creative, something that will speak to him, but he discovers what he always suspected, the underlying indigestibility of nauseating being. When the digestion fails, no food is more nourishing than another. Everything is thrown up.

As dialectic for trust is a hermeneutic of recollection, a re-gathering in infinite variety of the communication that was present in true immediate wonder, dialectic doubt is a hermeneutic of suspicion. Under every supposed appearance of being the doubter sees the disappearance of being, its non-communicating, non-revelatory nature, that it says nothing. Both trusting and doubting persons question existence, the standing of being outside of itself. But the one who trusts questions finite being in the confidence that he will discover in it the same communication that is in its infinite source. The one who doubts questions in the fear that existence will prove itself to be the same nothingness, a lack of communication, that essence was. Both questioners get the answer they expected, the one hopeful and the other doubtful.

At every moment, then, doubt shows itself to be the wavering between counterpositions which determine its being, or to be more accurate, are its failure to be a good mood. In its origin doubt is the dialectical counterposition of dread, but in its restless, curious search it is a wavering between presumption and skepticism. The doubting skeptic hesitates to recognize any speaking outside his own, yet presumes that his own speaking is constituted independently of another speaker.⁴⁸  This presumption and the failure to recall that the speaker who calls him into being and consciousness is infinite, leads the presumptuous skeptic into a series of counterpositions, such as incredulity and superstition, pride and cowardice.⁴⁹  We are not concerned to show the evolution of the vices⁵⁰  from dread and doubt, but rather to show doubt's lack of foundation in its wavering in the moments of speaking.

                (2) The Stagnated Moments of Doubt

                    (a) Intentionality

For the skeptical doubter, to question being in its determinations is to oppose it. The very determinations of being are seen as oppositions of it, and the person in doubt, who sees himself as a determination or negation of being, and therefore nothing, consciously acts out what he sees himself to be. In this way, he thinks he will gain power and control over being. Etymologically, "control" means a copy of an account, and trust is a true control for it is the finite speaker's copy of the account which being gave of itself in speaking. For doubt, to be is to control falsely. In dread, consciousness felt controlled falsely; its own capacity to speak was negated because being was not a speaker but a speechless object. In doubt, it now moves from the masochistic identification with being as a speechless object to the sadistic attempt to make being as subject into an object by opposing it. In the opposition, however, consciousness only makes being into the non-communicating object that it already was, and so accomplishes nothing. The attempt to control being falsely by holding on to it so that it will not be lost only preserves its lostness.

The attempt of the person in doubt to control falsely contrasts with the intention of the one who trusts. Having recognized, in wonder, that it is the nature of being to express itself, the trusting person views his own determination, as well as that of all determinate being, as the expression of being itself. The questioning of being by one who trusts creates no counterposition of the subject to being, but becomes a communication, a rediscovery of being's self-disclosure. The trusting person therefore has no need to control being. He can let being be, or truly control itself. Just as being empties itself, gives itself in its own speaking, the one who trusts can let this revelation of being continue in himself instead of silencing it with false control as the doubter would.

False control seeks to force presence. The one who controls falsely does not recognize what real presence is: it is not something that can be forced. For the false control of doubt, being, what is, is past. Wesen ist was gewesen ist. The present must therefore be the negation, the nothingness of the past. In the state of doubt, consciousness finds itself in the present by a continual negation of what was. It has nothing to project into the future, it has no goal, because its experience of the present is a negation empty of content. While doubt seems to be oriented to the future, insofar as it is a fear that nothing will be, in reality it exists in an empty present, a present that does not go beyond the repetition of nothingness, of the non-communication of the past.

For wonder, the nature of being is communication, and it is the function of trust to express this, to say what is by communicating. Since for dread, however, being is a speechless object, the function of speaking for doubt is to say that what is, is not, to communicate non-communication. How does one express that what is, is not? The doubter attempts to do this by opposing the being of which he is conscious. He expresses non-communication by opposing non-communication. This negation of negation seems to lead to something positive. Can doubt lead to communication, to true being, by negating nothingness? Perhaps it could if consciousness could stand apart from the being that it is negating. In dread, however, consciousness misinterpreted being as nothing, as non-communication. Now, in expressing that nothingness of being in itself, it does not go beyond non-being to being, but expresses the nothingness of dread by its own nothingness.

                    (b) Objectivity

The dialectical counterpositions of doubt reveal what the doubter is speaking about: his reference, and his intention to speak. He is speaking about the pseudo-being, non-communication or nothingness, of which he became aware in dread. The moment of speaking that doubt emphasizes in a caricature of trust, however, is the intention of speaking. The intention of the doubter is to say nothing, not to say, to fail to communicate. He achieves his intention by continually counterposing doubt to his object, nothingness. Since the counterposition of doubt fails to produce a movement from nothingness, however, the intention and objectivity of doubt collapse into each other. Nothing is said about nothing.

                    (c) Subjectivity

One who is in doubt lives in the illusion that his being is established by his intentionality of rejection of being that does not communicate, a being that does not speak. The nothingness of non-communication has no limits, however, and consequently cannot determine consciousness. When non-communication is revealed for the nothingness that it is, the subject who does not recall that he has been called falls into the attitude that everything is meaningless. For now not only is nothing said about nothing, but consciousness that knows itself in calling on being sees its own call as empty and thinks itself to be as empty as its call. If all that is said is nothing, then no one speaks. Dread's confusion of the subject with a totally absent infinite unfolds into the nothingness that amounts to an absent infinite.

                    (d) Intersubjectivity

In its turn to a false subjectivity from a false objectivity, doubt is the source of a sophistry that allows no communication. Communication implies a true objectivity, as well as true subjectivity. By negatively reacting to false objectivity, the skeptical doubter is bound to it by repeating the nothingness of non-communication. Doubt must therefore be relativistic. Having rejected being as communication, it has rejected the only real absolute and is restricted to the self-contradictory absolutes of private opinion. For the relativism of doubt is no less dogmatic than the absolutism of dread. In dread the absolute is a non-speaking being and doubt reflects this absolute by speaking non-being. "There are no absolutes," it absolutely asserts. This self-contradiction of doubt is the essence of nihilism that searches about in the hermeneutics of suspicion to cast every determinate being into the abyss of non-communication which it sees as the being's source.

The non-communication of being is likewise the determinant of the doubter's relationship to other subjects. Isolated in his own contrary nothingness, he speaks to no one. He cannot speak to being, for in dread being was not revealed as a subject, and thus cannot listen. (To be a subject is to listen as well as speak.) He cannot speak to other subjects, for inasmuch as they are beings, they are objects to the doubter and are non-communicating. He cannot speak to himself, for he sees himself as the negation of the non-communication of being, not as communication. So the failure of intersubjectivity in the doubter can be seen in every aspect of his failed communication. There is no other subject to whom to talk; there is nothing in being about which to talk; and there is nothing to say for the evaporating self.

        3. Love

            a. Love as the Recall of the Infinite Call

               (1) The Origin of Love

Love is the moment in the unfolding of wonder in which being's nature becomes fully disclosed. In love the focus of consciousness is not on objectivity, the other, as it was in wonder, or on subjectivity, the self, as it was in trust, but on intersubjectivity, the relation between the self and the other self. The fact that reality is communication is fully unfolded. In wonder being speaks to man, and in trust man responds to being, but in love being and man are in dialogue. In wonder the conscious subject finds himself involved in the truth; in trust it does the truth, and in love it finds itself in the community that is the truth, or the truly good.

The question asked in love discloses the intersubjectivity of being. It is directed in dialogue to the relation between being and its determinate expression. "Who are we," lovers ask in awe and care. Or they ask "What is this thing called love," for they have realized the true nature of thinghood, of being: that it is an assembly or calling together. The speaking, best expressed in singing, is the speaking of lovers listening to each other, but not as other objects but as other selves. They are caught up in the mystery of unity in difference.

Love as a mood is involved in the paradox of mystery. For a mood is a primordial seeking that is a saying, and once what is sought is found there seems to be no more saying but the silence of ineffable mystery. The cessation of saying would qualify love as mystery, for "mystery," assumed to be derived from the Greek mustos, keeping silence, and muein, to close the eyes or lips, suggests the end of speaking. The paradox of the mystery of love, however, is that its silence, apparent closure, is not a lack of speaking but the fullness of speaking, disclosure. The fulfilled speaking of wonder in love puts an end to change by creating presence, but does not put an end to the seeking or saying of desire, for seeking does not necessarily imply change. When the lover finds his fulfillment in the beloved, he ceases to be restless while his activities intensify. There is an ineffable dimension to the mystery of human love because it involves difference, the absence of self from the other and the infinite from the finite. The absence is marked by the silence of ineffability. But this is not a speechless silence any more than rhythmic silences between sounds destroy music. In the mystery of love absence or difference is not alienating, and the self and other self are united in communication.

                (2) The Moments of Love

                    (a) Intentionality

The mystery of love, the fully unfolded intention of wonder, differentiates itself in awe and care. Because love integrates the objective and subjective dimensions of reality, wonder and trust are preserved in it. In wonder, although it was a seeking of the unity in difference of finite and infinite, the emphasis of consciousness was on the revelation of the infinite as speaker. In trust, consciousness became self-conscious by discovering the infinite call in its finite manifestations. In love, these moments of infinite and finite speaking are fully unfolded in their mutuality. They are experienced as awe and care. Awe is the first moment of love, the first full awareness of the unity of the infinite and the finite, of infinite being and its expression.. The emphasis in awe is on the infinite as transcendent. For this reason awe has been regarded as the natural attitude of man in the face of holiness. In awe, consciousness experiences the holy, the as transcendent, as fascinating, and tremendous. The holy is fascinating or attractive because, as in its experience of being in wonder, consciousness cannot envision itself outside of the totality of the holy. The conscious subject must find himself in union with the holy.

In love, in the holy, however, the full poesis or creativity of being is unfolded in a way that it was not in wonder. For consciousness to be aware of the holy it must recognize that infinite being is revealing itself in the finite, that the transcendent is immanent, that transcendence is presence and vice versa. The holy is powerful and active, it reveals itself not only in heaven but on earth. For this reason, the conscious subject experiences the holy not only as fascinans, as all-absorbing, but also as tremendum,⁵¹  literally as shaking. The holy does not allow consciousness to be caught in dread, it shakes it loose to experience being in all its determinations, including the determinations of consciousness itself.

The subject is held by the creativity of the holy in awe and becomes active; the subject listens to respond. Because awe is derivative of love, a completely unfolded experience of being, to experience the holy the subject must understand creativity. He must experience the infinite as active in him; the subject must experience himself as a speaker, a lover, and as holy. He experiences himself as holy when he calls upon the holy in an embracing recall. Holy, holy, holy, he says to the one who calls, heaven and earth are full of your glory.⁵²

A true experience of awe at the holy cannot be separated from care. Care means a diligent and effective concern for the limited. Care is the subject's realization with the holy that he must be poetic or creative. The careful person, with the holy, must discover himself in self-determination. The awareness of the subject in care is not what is referred to by the Germanic root of the English word care: trouble, grief, or sickness. Such consciousness comes from misunderstanding determination as alienation. The care that is consonant with awe has the sense of the Latin cura (which is in no way related to the Germanic root of care) which means care, heed, or concern, and shows up in such English derivatives as cure, curator, and curate. Such care cures because it removes alienation;, it shows the harmony of the finite and the infinite. Determinations are taken by care not as an alienation of being and consciousness but rather as an expression of them.

                    (b) Objectivity

The ultimate care or concern of consciousness, in which awe and care are united, is the thing or assembly in which selves are called together to re-call the infinite call. The root meaning of the word "thing," an assembly for judgment or deliberation,⁵³  suggests that reality or the real thing for consciousness is the community. The community first appears as objective as the political community, which meets to deliberate about its care of the finite and judges or decides who is with and who against it in caring. Such action and decision make the political community a community of mediation between the family and the religious community. Neither of these communities can exclude a member in the objective way that the political community does. For the family community does not appear as objective for the self, and cannot ever exclude its members, for it is genetically bound to them.⁵⁴  The religious community does not appear as objective to the self because it can never decide to exclude the self; its judgment is that only in recalling the infinite call does the self fully exist in communion with it. This judgment is not exclusive but inclusive in that it states that the self has no real existence if it is outside the assembly of explicit recall.⁵⁵  Contrary to popular post-enlightenment opinion, calling on the infinite is not something a private person does. Speaking to and calling upon the holy is essentially a community activity. Without the thing or assembly the infinite call that constitutes subject and meaning is forgotten, and experience falls into the void of dread with its attendant counterfeit dialectic and false oppositions. The self who lives in the real thing is in constant movement from the relatively undifferentiated awe and care of the family thing, through the differentiation of the educational thing, to the political thing that moves from care to awe and the religious thing that moves from awe to care.

The inseparability of awe and care can be recognized in the thing's (community's) attitude towards time. For the thing, time is included in love's presence.⁵⁶  In its being gathered it recognizes that the past is a speaking that is a beginning but that had no beginning. It cannot think a time when communication did not exist. Hence the encounter of a new friend is experienced as a relationship that seems to have always existed. The attitude of love towards the future is trusting and confident. It is so caught up in awe and care that it cannot think that communication would cease to be. Since being and communication are recognized as identical, the imagined nothingness of the future is not a threat; nothingness cannot cause communication not to be; even less than it can cause any being not to be.

                    (c) Subjectivity

A subject is established dialectically in relation to an object. Since in the mood of love, however, the object is a real thing--the community that constitutes the subject's consciousness, the self in love realizes its existence as a communion with an other self. The mood may be one of generation in the family, investigation in the academy, constitution in the polis, or worship in the church, but common to all of these moods is the recognition that one's activity of seeking is a received activity of building a thing with another self. The recognition of this makes possible the paradoxical sacrifice of the self for the community. Seeming to lose itself, the self makes the thing holy and gains itself by recalling that it has its being only in the thing and cannot be lost as long as the thing exists. The thing made holy is the thing made eternal.

                    (d) Intersubjectivity

The holy, eternal thing is love, or intersubjectivity. This is the moment that fulfills all the other moments, the mood that gathers all the other moods into itself. Intersubjectivity is concrete in the different things or communities that constitute the self. The awareness of love in consciousness is not static; it must continue to speak and to produce subsequent moods in the communities. So the moods that are the fruits of love are manifold. Three are of special significance in our discussion. The first is the experience of love or communication as charity or free gift. The sense that love is a favor, or grace, or free, shows up not only in the Greek carin, but in the English word, "free," derived from the Old English freon, to love,⁵⁷  and in the Latin derived "liberty"⁵⁸  which itself has its roots in a Sanskrit word for desire. Since being comes to fulfillment as free or self-giving in love, there is no hidden need in consciousness to control it as an object. Consciousness experiences being as gift and makes that gift its own. The only way one can appropriate giving, however, is by giving oneself, and so a person shares in the freedom of being by his own creative self-communication. This means that in love consciousness realizes that it has been given its own speaking in dialogue with being. It is responsible, (from the Latin spondere, to promise, and re, back ) able to promise itself in return. The lover is responsible not because his freedom is mere self-determination, for that would imply a limitation of love, which requires a mutual self-other determination. Rather the lover is responsible because he is given his ability to commit himself by virtue of his experience of being called into being by love. Since commitment is gift, the free commitment of consciousness in love precedes its awareness of its ability to commit itself. To the person in love, everything is gift, even its own giving.⁵⁹

The second mood that flows from love is joy, which is the ecstasy of the finite self in realizing its unity with the infinite. The key word here that specifies the mood is ecstasy, which has the root meaning in Greek of standing outside of. In joy, the finite self stands outside of itself, is taken beyond its limitations in the self-forgetfulness of responding to the infinite call of being. As ecstasy, joy is beyond pleasure and pain, both of which turn one's attention towards the finite self. The mood of joy thus explicates the mood of freedom, for only by gift can one be taken beyond oneself. A "freedom" which was mere self-determination would lead only to the dejection of being returned to one's finite self with all of its limitations.

The third mood that is expressive of love, peace, is closely related to freedom and joy. For peace is a fruit of harmony, a tranquillity of order.⁶⁰  In the joyful recognition that its existence is safe as the gift of one who loves it infinitely, consciousness is in the mood of everything being in order. Because it is now fully aware that in speaking itself in love it is speaking being, there can be no suspicion of alienation between consciousness and being. The mood of consciousness is restful, but it is not the static restfulness of the pax romana, the peace of death that was achieved by creating a desert. The peace of love is like the peace exemplified in the play of a great athlete who expresses himself without effort in activities that would be impossible for those with less prowess. The lover is expert in discovering himself in his other, and love is a peace in this fullness of activity.

            b. False Love, or Hatred as the Contradiction of the Infinite Call

                (1) The Origin of Hatred

Because dread and doubt are united only in their nothingness, there can be no position that unites them in being as love unites wonder and trust. There is, however, a moment in which the empty confusion of dread and doubt are apparent. It is called false love, or hatred. In contrast to love, which unified awe and care as the fullness of wonder and trust, hatred finalizes the confusion of disrespect and carelessness as the emptiness of dread and doubt. Unlike love, which expressed the unity of awe and care in freedom, joy, and peace, hatred falls further into the confusion of disrespect and carelessness in bondage, dejection, and hostility. The non-communication of hatred apes genuine communication. In dread being is experienced as not speaking to man; in doubt man did not speak to being but negated it, and false love substitutes a master-slave sado-masochism for genuine communication. Consciousness repeats endlessly the counterpositions of false control, first being made into a mere object and then reducing the reality of the other to an ineffable object. In dread consciousness experiences being as false, in doubt it speaks falsehood, and in hatred loses itself in a tangle of its own lies.

A lie is a self-contradiction of one's own consciousness. In a lie the liar speaks against what he knows. While a lie may be possible with regard to one's consciousness of objects, a lie about consciousness itself presents a paradox. One might say "The book is red" when one is conscious of it being white, and lie. But how can one lie about the nature of consciousness? For human consciousness is consciousness of love, a calling in response to an infinite call. Thus any statement about consciousness that consciously denies the expression of the infinite's call, that consciously denies love, is a lie. The paradox is that if one were fully conscious of the infinite call, one could not deny its existence. One can deny it only if he has not heard it or has forgotten it. On the other hand, since all speaking, as saying something, recalls the infinite by responding to its call, if we say anything we must be conscious of the infinite because the infinite is communication or love. So if one denies love, he contradicts himself since his expression affirms the infinite call as a response to it and at the same time denies what it must affirm as a presupposition. Thus the statement "I hate you" denies by its performance what it states. The paradox of hatred is that it mimics love by speaking, but its speaking says nothing. It attempts to end the quest of wonder by asserting the absolute difference of the infinite and finite, but its assertion gives the lie to that sort of difference.

In hatred there is no question asked that corresponds to the "who are we?" of community, for there is no "we". There is no questioning at all, for consciousness knows the answer to which its counterpositions lead: nothing. Every attempt at communication is abandoned, for there can be no unity. Nevertheless, the conscious subject cannot reduce all being to itself; that would be a false unity. Nor can he find unity in himself. He is lost in his negation of being that he perceives as totally other, and he is also lost in his alienation from himself, for he too is being.

                (2) The Contradictions of Hatred

                    (a) Intentionality

In the first contradiction of hatred, which mocks awe, the subject worships the unholy. In dread, consciousness had not come to a realization of the otherness of infinite being. But having negated being in doubt by regarding it as nothing, the subject now perceives it as totally alien. This nothingness is also experienced as infinite, as all-powerful. Because it is totally alien it is repulsive, and because it is infinitely powerful it is terrifying. For the infinite being of false awe is uncreative and uncommunicative. Its power is violent, objectifying, terrifying and controlling. The worship of the unholy or diabolical is therefore not an attempt to communicate with it, but to beat it at its own game, falsely to control it, to objectify it, and to reduce it to the finite by negating it.

The worship of the unholy or awful passes into its contradiction of false care: anxiety. As wonder became fully differentiated in awe and care, dread becomes fully contradictory in the unholy or diabolical and anxiety. Whereas dread was the undifferentiated fear that being was nothing, anxiety is the more explicit contradiction that fears that finite beings are nothing. The anxious subject is not careful, but tries to become secure carelessly, because he tries to place everything under his false control. In the first moment of the unholy he has attempted to eliminate the infinite by reducing it to the finite, collapsing transcendence into immanence. He now pretends that he has nothing to be terrified of. Any suggestion that there is something beyond the finite is regarded as a hysterical loss of control, a relapse into the consciousness of primitives, children, and women.⁶¹  The care operative here is the patronizing control of the slave by the master. The anxious person cannot even recognize the true nature of the finite. The finite, the limited, apart from the infinite of which it is a reflection, is nothing at all. The anxious person must eventually treat the finite as an empty infinite, as nothing, and become careless. Having confused infinite and finite by the reduction of the former to the latter, in false security the anxious person treats the infinite as the finite; he also treats the finite as the infinite because nothing limits the finite except the endless externality of one finite being against another.

                    (b) Objectivity

Having contradicted the infinity of love, the anxious person pretends to speak of reality objectively. He regards every reality as finite and therefore radically thrown over against every other reality. The limits of a finitude that does not present the infinite as love make every thing alien to every other thing. The thing ceases to be a gathering of consciousnesses and becomes the name for what is not conscious. The only thing the anxious person can talk about is no-thing, an non-assembly. Having rejected the infinite by reducing it to the finite, the anxious person has nothing that could re-assemble the finite, and no care for it is possible. The reality objectified by anxiety to control it gets out of control.⁶²  The anxious person contradicts himself by trying to control other subjects by turning them into objects. In so doing he turns himself in