Gateways of Shared Incompleteness

Quietism, Relationality, and the Ethics of Shared Incompleteness

(Gateway Essay Announcing The Tao of Ethics)

Abstract

This essay is written in the aftermath of a collapse: the collapse of the belief that reason, doctrine, or system can shelter action from responsibility. Across philosophy, theology, politics, and modern ideology, certainty once promised absolution—an advance justification that could neutralize ethical exposure. That promise no longer holds. What remains is not irrationality, but non-closure.

Gateways of Shared Incompleteness traces how different traditions respond when guarantees fail. It follows a long arc—from Quietism and Eastern practices of non-attachment, through Orthodox participation, Kantian rigor, Goethe’s Faust, and the afterlives of Marxism—to ask a single, persistent question: when knowledge cannot close, where does responsibility go?

This essay argues that ethical failure does not arise from difference, but from asymmetry in how incompleteness is borne. Dialogue collapses when one side seeks closure while the other inhabits exposure. Against both moralism and relativism, it proposes neither synthesis nor reconciliation, but a gateway: a shared space in which incompleteness is acknowledged without being resolved, and responsibility cannot be displaced into fate, system, or necessity.

Through figures who endured this threshold—Trần Đức Thảo, Paul Mus, and others—and through fragile institutional forms that ritualize restraint rather than certainty, the book prepares the ground for what is named, cautiously and without doctrine, the Tao of Ethics: an ethical orientation grounded in proportion, timing, non-excess, and attentiveness to relational consequence rather than final justification.

This is not a conclusion. It is an opening.
A passage without shelter, where ethics begins not with answers, but with endurance.

LIMINAL PREFACE — After the Loss of the Cartesian Shelter
Ethical Exposure, Non-Closure, and the End of Absolution

This text is written after the collapse of a promise.

The promise was that reason, if sufficiently purified, could shelter action from exposure. That method, procedure, system, or doctrine could absorb responsibility by converting it into necessity. That clarity could replace judgment, and that certainty could substitute for ethical risk.

This promise structured the modern world. It informed Cartesian epistemology, Enlightenment moral rationalism, juridical systems, revolutionary ideologies, and geopolitical strategy alike. It offered what may be called a shelter: a space in which action could be justified in advance, insulated from the full weight of its consequences.

That shelter no longer holds.

It did not collapse because reason failed, but because reason discovered its own limits from within. Gödel demonstrated that no formal system can prove its own completeness. Modern physics dissolved absolute frames of reference. Phenomenology revealed that objectivity depends upon lived meaning and historical situatedness. In each case, certainty eroded internally. What disappeared was not rationality, but absolution.

Yet the disappearance of absolution did not dissolve the human longing for it. Absolute frames of reference survived the decline of religious cosmologies by reappearing in secularized form. Doctrines once anchored in transcendence were translated into political, scientific, or ideological certainties. The quest for the Absolute did not vanish; it displaced itself. What persisted was the impulse to compensate for constitutional incompleteness — for finitude, uncertainty, exposure — by erecting systems of exhaustive explanation and final justification.

This impulse extends even into atheism when it claims to know that there are no gods. Such knowledge is not the negation of belief but its inversion: a negative absolute replacing a positive one. In this sense, the pretense of complete knowledge survives belief itself. Only the agnostic gesture — the refusal to know where knowledge cannot be secured — abandons this shelter honestly. The denial of incompleteness does not eliminate it; it represses it (Verdrängung) , and repression reappears as rigidity, dogma, or neurosis.

This essay takes that disappearance seriously.

It adopts a post-Cartesian position in which ethical responsibility begins precisely where guarantees end. Action no longer unfolds against a neutral background governed by stable laws and predictable outcomes, but within relational fields that are historically sedimented, asymmetrical, and non-closed. Subjects — individual, institutional, or geopolitical — are not sovereign observers acting upon an external world. They are exposed participants, within the observed field,  whose actions reverberate beyond calculation.

Ethical exposure is not a deficit. It is a condition.

Modern geopolitics often treats scale as exemption. States are presumed to operate beyond morality because necessity governs them. Strategy replaces judgment; inevitability replaces responsibility. This presumption is a residual form of Cartesian shelter: the belief that abstraction can neutralize exposure. Yet the opposite is the case. The greater the capacity to shape relational fields — economic, ecological, technological, military — the greater the ethical weight borne by the actor. Power intensifies responsibility; it does not dissolve it.

This text therefore rejects two symmetrical errors. It rejects moralism, which ignores constraint and complexity. And it rejects relativism, which dissolves judgment into circumstance. A relational ontology does not imply symmetry. It foregrounds asymmetry as a structural fact. Responsibility is not evenly distributed. It is weighted.

Tragedy plays a decisive role in this reorientation. Classical tragedy bound responsibility to cosmic necessity without abolishing accountability. Modern tragedy internalized responsibility as psychological and political opacity. Contemporary geopolitics often invokes tragedy in a third, more dangerous sense: as inevitability. Here tragedy becomes alibi. “There was no alternative” functions as absolution. This essay refuses that move. To act without guarantees is not to act beyond ethics. It is to act under exposure.

At this threshold, a persistent confusion must be addressed. Western encounters with Eastern traditions — Taoism, Buddhism, Quietism — have repeatedly mistaken relational ethics for dissolution, non-attachment for passivity, and non-excess for nihilism. These misreadings arise from a deep anxiety: that abandoning closure entails the loss of form. This anxiety will be examined, not dismissed.

The central claim of this essay is modest but decisive. Dialogue between civilizations fails not because difference is too great, but because incompleteness is not shared. Where one side seeks closure and the other inhabits non-closure, resemblance becomes illusion and similarity blocks understanding.

What is required is neither synthesis nor convergence, but a gateway: a space in which incompleteness is acknowledged, inhabited, and held in common without being resolved. This gateway does not erase difference. It makes dialogue structurally possible.

This essay remains at that threshold.

It does not present a doctrine. It does not complete a system. It prepares an orientation. Its final pages will name, briefly and without development, what will later be elaborated as The Tao of Ethics — an ethical form grounded not in foundation or finality, but in attentiveness to relational flow, proportion, timing, and non-excess. That work lies ahead.

What follows is therefore not a conclusion, but an opening.

INTRODUCTION

Why Similarity Misleads Dialogue

East–West dialogue has repeatedly failed for a paradoxical reason: not because traditions are radically different, but because they often appear deceptively similar. Stillness resembles stillness, non-action resembles non-action, humility resembles humility. From a distance, Quietism, Taoism, Buddhism, and certain strands of Western phenomenology seem to converge on a shared wisdom: withdraw from domination, suspend judgment, quiet the will, let go of mastery. The temptation is immediate — and fatal to dialogue.

Similarity is not equivalence. Phenomenological resemblance does not guarantee structural compatibility, and ethical outcomes cannot be inferred from experiential analogies. What looks like convergence at the level of inner experience may conceal radically different logics of responsibility, agency, and action. Dialogue collapses when resemblance is mistaken for identity.

This essay therefore begins with a methodological refusal. It does not ask whether Western Quietism and Eastern traditions “say the same thing.” It asks what they do — structurally, ethically, historically — when certainty collapses. How do they respond to non-closure? Do they convert it into silence, obedience, harmony, obligation, or withdrawal? Where is responsibility located when justification fails?

The guiding distinction throughout this work is between phenomenological openness and structural openness. Many traditions cultivate inner stillness, suspension of conceptual grasping, or humility before the ineffable. But inner openness does not automatically entail ethical openness. A system may be epistemically humble while remaining ethically closed; it may accept mystery while displacing responsibility.

The contemporary urgency of this distinction is no longer purely philosophical. In a world marked by geopolitical asymmetry, ecological fragility, technological acceleration, and civilizational friction, the ethics of non-closure can no longer remain an interior affair. Withdrawal, abdication, or silence no longer remain neutral gestures; they have consequences within relational fields already weighted by power.

This essay is written after the collapse of the Cartesian shelter — after the failure of the hope that method, system, or doctrine could absolve the subject. It is not a synthesis, nor a reconciliation, nor a comparative catalogue. It is a gateway text: a threshold inquiry into how different traditions metabolize uncertainty, and what kinds of ethical life they make possible when certainty is unavailable.

The question that animates everything that follows is deceptively simple:

When knowledge cannot close, what becomes of responsibility?

PART ONE

Quietism and Eastern Thinking

(The Seduction of Resemblance)

Stillness, Non-Attachment, and Inner Suspension

Across civilizations, the cultivation of inner stillness appears as a shared spiritual achievement. Western Quietism speaks of interior quiet, the annihilation of the will, and the suspension of personal initiative before divine action. Buddhist traditions seek equanimity through non-attachment, loosening the grip of craving and aversion that bind beings to suffering. Hindu traditions articulate karma-phala-tyāga: the renunciation of the fruits of action without necessarily renouncing action itself. Taoism speaks of wu wei, often translated as non-action, but more precisely naming non-coercive responsiveness to the flow of reality.

At the level of lived experience, these traditions undeniably resonate. Each distrusts domination. Each critiques egoic striving. Each understands that excessive assertion fractures harmony — whether cosmic, spiritual, or communal. Each recognizes that thought itself can become an obstacle, and that interior suspension may open a deeper register of attunement.

Phenomenology, too, enters this constellation. Husserl’s epoché brackets the natural attitude; Heidegger suspends metaphysical closure; Trần Đức Thảo radicalizes lived experience against abstraction. The gesture is familiar: suspend, step back, let phenomena show themselves.

And yet — this is precisely where resemblance becomes dangerous.

Inner stillness is cross-civilizational. Ethical consequences are not.

What matters is not the experience of suspension, but what follows from it. Is stillness a preparation for action, or a replacement for it? Does humility intensify responsibility, or dissolve it? Does non-attachment free action from ego — or exempt it altogether?

The same phenomenological posture can generate radically different ethical architectures.

Zen Kōans, Paradox, and the Exhaustion of Reason

Zen Buddhism offers a particularly instructive case. Kōans are often misunderstood in the West as clever paradoxes or riddles meant to be solved. They are neither. A kōan does not invite interpretation; it resists it. It does not ask for an answer; it exhausts the very machinery that demands one.

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” — Mu.
“Before your parents were born, what was your original face?”

These formulations are not epistemic puzzles but existential confrontations. They address the practitioner, not theory. They offer no meta-language, no higher resolution, no conceptual repair. Their function is to bring discursive reason to a halt — not in despair, but in exposure.

Western paradox typically irritates reason while remaining within its horizon. Zen kōans terminate the demand for conceptual mastery. They force an encounter with the limits of thought that is lived, not explained.

This matters ethically. The exhaustion of reason here does not result in abdication or silence in the world. Zen practice is embedded in rigorous forms of discipline, attention, and responsiveness. The collapse of conceptual closure intensifies presence rather than suspending engagement.

Paradox irritates reason.
Kōans exhaust it.
And exhaustion, here, is not withdrawal.

Gödel, Epistemic Non-Closure, and Ethical Exposure

The modern West encountered its own kōan in formal dress through Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Any sufficiently powerful formal system cannot prove its own consistency from within. Closure fails not accidentally, but necessarily. Limits are not external defects; they are constitutive of human thinking and languages.

Gödel’s result shattered the hope that completeness and certainty could be secured through formal rigor alone. Yet the ethical implications of this discovery were largely misread. Non-closure was treated as a technical inconvenience rather than a structural condition of judgment.

In many Western responses, limits become excuses: if certainty is impossible, action is either postponed, delegated to systems, or justified by necessity. Non-closure becomes a reason to suspend responsibility.

Zen draws the opposite conclusion. Limits do not suspend action; they expose it. The impossibility of total justification does not excuse judgment; it makes judgment unavoidable.

This distinction will prove decisive throughout the essay:

Non-closure is not a license for silence.
It is the condition under which responsibility appears.

Open and Closed Systems: The Structural Core

At this point, the central distinction must be stated clearly.

An open system is not one that lacks answers, but one that structurally accommodates incompleteness without displacing responsibility. It remains corrigible, responsive, and exposed. Action proceeds without final justification, but not without accountability.

A closed system is one that relocates responsibility onto doctrine, transcendence, law, history, or necessity. Closure may appear metaphysical, theological, or ideological — but its ethical function is always the same: to provide an alibi.

This distinction cuts across traditions. It does not map neatly onto East versus West, religion versus philosophy, or mysticism versus rationalism. It names an ethical architecture, not a worldview.

Why Quietism Looks Open — and Is Not

Quietism appears, at first glance, to embody radical openness. It rejects mastery, distrusts reason, dissolves the will, and affirms mystery. It refuses doctrinal overreach and accepts the impossibility of securing salvation through action.

Phenomenologically, this looks like humility.

Structurally, it is something else.

Quietism converts non-closure into exemption. Responsibility is relocated upward — to divine will, grace, or inscrutable transcendence. Human action is reframed as contamination. Ethical judgment is silenced not out of attentiveness, but out of obedience.

This is epistemic humility paired with ethical withdrawal.

Why Quietism Is Structurally Closed

The decisive move of Quietism is not mystical union, but ethical closure. By treating the impossibility of justification as grounds for inaction, it transforms non-closure into abdication.

Indeterminacy becomes obedience.
Mystery becomes command.
Silence becomes purity.

Here the Gödelian insight is inverted. Logical incompleteness marks the impossibility of total justification within a system. Quietism mistakes this limit for exemption rather than recognizing it as the condition of judgment.

This is why Quietism, despite its surface resemblance to Eastern traditions, cannot serve as a bridge. It accepts epistemic openness while foreclosing ethical agency.

And it is precisely here — at the point where resemblance breaks — that dialogue can begin.

“When certainty collapses, responsibility does not disappear. It changes place. What modernity repeatedly mistakes is the belief that the loss of foundations licenses withdrawal, neutrality, or exemption. In reality, it exposes the subject — individual or collective — more directly to the consequences of action.”

(O. Lichtenberg, Fall or Rebirth of the West)

PART TWO  

Orthodox Salvation and Its Limits

(Participation without Ethical Closure)

Salvation Without Acquittal

Eastern Orthodox Christianity offers a striking contrast to Quietism precisely because it refuses both juridical closure and ethical withdrawal. Salvation (sōtēria) is not conceived as legal acquittal, nor as a single decisive moment in which guilt is erased. It is understood as theosis: participation in divine life through gradual transformation.

Sin, in this framework, is not primarily a violation of law but a distortion of being — an illness rather than a crime. Salvation is therefore not a verdict but a process of healing, restoration, and reorientation toward communion. What matters is not satisfaction of a demand, but alignment with life.

This immediately alters the ethical landscape. There is no point at which responsibility is “resolved.” No final moment at which the subject can claim exemption. Salvation unfolds as a lived, communal, and open-ended process.

Synergeia: Grace and Human Freedom

The central concept governing Orthodox soteriology is synergeia: cooperation between divine grace and human freedom. Grace does not replace action; it enables it. Human agency is neither sovereign nor suspended. It is engaged — without guarantees.

This is crucial. Unlike Quietism, Orthodoxy does not treat divine action as a reason for human passivity. Nor does it treat human action as contaminating divine purity. The relation is neither competitive nor substitutive.

Responsibility is sustained, not outsourced.

Ascetic practice, liturgy, prayer, and communal life are not techniques for earning salvation, nor mechanisms for securing certainty. They are modes of participation — ways of inhabiting an unfinished transformation.

In structural terms, Orthodoxy preserves epistemic non-closure while refusing ethical suspension.

Mystery Preserved Without Abdication

Orthodox theology is famously apophatic. God’s essence remains unknowable; doctrinal precision is carefully limited. Mystery is not a residual problem to be solved, but a constitutive feature of faith.

Yet — and this is decisive — mystery does not silence ethics.

The unknowability of God does not absolve the believer from judgment or action. On the contrary, it deepens attentiveness, humility, and responsibility. The absence of metaphysical transparency intensifies ethical vigilance rather than neutralizing it.

Here Orthodoxy unexpectedly converges with Taoism and, at its best, with Pietism: mystery becomes a condition of responsiveness, not an alibi for withdrawal.

Structural Alignment and Divergence

This is why Orthodox soteriology occupies a unique position in the architecture of this essay.

• Against Roman Catholic juridical closure, it resists system completion.
  
• Against Quietist abdication, it refuses ethical silence.
  
• Against modern moralism, it avoids purity and self-justification.
  

Orthodoxy demonstrates that participation without closure is possible — but also fragile. The same openness that preserves responsibility can degenerate into antinomian shortcuts when vigilance collapses.

That degeneration will be examined next.

Rasputin as a Degenerate Limit-Case

Rasputin: Charisma Without Form

Grigori Rasputin emerges in late imperial Russia at a moment of profound spiritual and political fragility. The Orthodox Church, deeply intertwined with state power, had lost much of its moral authority, while popular religiosity oscillated between rigid ritualism and hunger for immediacy. Rasputin entered this space not as a theologian, nor as a reformer, but as a figure of lived intensity — illiterate, itinerant, ascetic in appearance, yet radically transgressive in practice.

His influence at court rested less on doctrine than on presence. He embodied suffering, penitence, and ecstatic prayer, and was widely perceived as possessing healing powers — most famously in relation to the Tsarevich’s hemophilia. This apparent efficacy granted him exceptional symbolic immunity. What mattered was not what he taught, but what he seemed to mediate.

Rasputin’s way of life, however, steadily dissolved any boundary between participation and exemption. He cultivated a theology of immediacy in which sin and grace were no longer distinguishable by form or consequence. Transgression — especially sexual excess and drunkenness — was reinterpreted as a passage through which divine mercy could manifest more fully. Repentance followed indulgence, not as transformation, but as rhythm.

This was not libertinism in the modern sense. It was a deformation of apophatic logic: since God is beyond moral comprehension, moral boundaries themselves were treated as provisional, even illusory. The unknowability of divine judgment was quietly converted into personal exception.

What collapses here is not belief, but discernment. Mystery ceases to demand vigilance and instead licenses immediacy. Charisma replaces accountability. Participation detaches from form.

Rasputin thus exemplifies a specific failure mode inherent in non-juridical spiritual systems: when ethical structure is weakened without being replaced by relational responsibility, openness curdles into immunity. The refusal of closure mutates into refusal of limits.

Crucially, this degeneration is not caused by excess faith, but by faith without mediation. Not mystery itself, but mystery severed from communal judgment and ethical rhythm. Rasputin’s scandal lies less in his debauchery than in the logic that rendered it irrelevant.

In this sense, he functions as a negative mirror of Orthodox soteriology. Where theosis presupposes gradual transformation through shared practices, Rasputin substitutes episodic intensity. Where synergeia sustains tension between grace and effort, he collapses it into charismatic immediacy.

He is therefore not an argument against non-closure, but a warning: when openness loses ethical contour, responsibility does not deepen — it evaporates.

In this sense, Rasputin prefigures a distinctly modern phenomenon: systems of conviction in which proclaimed openness to transcendence or emancipation functions not as a demand for responsibility, but as a shield against accountability itself.

Roman Catholic Soteriology: Systemic Mediation

Roman Catholicism responds to the dangers of antinomianism by reinforcing mediation: sacraments, juridical categories, hierarchical administration. Guilt is named, processed, absolved. Responsibility is organized — but also, at times, displaced.

Where Orthodoxy risks excess openness, Catholicism risks excessive closure.

This contrast will later mirror other structural tensions we encounter:

• ideology versus relation,
  
• doctrine versus exposure,
  
• system versus responsibility.
  

Why Orthodoxy Matters for the Gateway

Orthodox soteriology does not yet provide the Gateway. But it shows that the opposition between mystery and responsibility is false.

It demonstrates that:

• non-closure need not entail silence,
  
• participation need not dissolve agency,
  
• humility need not exempt action.
  

This makes Orthodoxy a crucial transitional figure — a hinge between Eastern traditions, Pietism, and what will later be named, cautiously and without triumph, as a Tao of ethics.

Kant After Salvation

With Kant, the Western trajectory executes a sharp and deliberate turn. Where charismatic authority, mystical immediacy, or salvational exemption had repeatedly dissolved the burden of moral agency, Kant restores it in its most austere form: duty without promise, obligation without reward, law without consolation. Nothing in Kant redeems the world; nothing reconciles history; nothing guarantees salvation. What remains is the bare demand that the subject act as though their maxim could be willed universally, even in the absence of hope, success, or recognition.

This move is not spiritual but architectural. Kant does not seek transcendence through revelation or fusion, but through constraint. Freedom is no longer the expansion of inner intensity, nor participation in a higher order, but obedience to a law one gives oneself precisely because no external authority can be trusted. In this sense, Kant represents the West’s most radical refusal of exemption: the insistence that moral responsibility cannot be delegated—to God, to history, to charisma, or to collective destiny.

Yet this rigor comes at a cost. By isolating duty within the sovereign subject, Kant stabilizes responsibility but severs it from relational thickness. Moral action becomes formally universal yet existentially solitary. The subject stands upright, but alone. This is the price the West pays to immunize itself against the Rasputin logic: immunity through form, through abstraction, through the refusal of lived mediation.

Kant’s greatness lies precisely here. He halts dissolution. But he does not yet reopen relation.

Quietist Non-Action and Kantian Non-Action

Same silence, opposite ethical consequences

At first glance, Quietist non-action and Kantian restraint appear uncannily similar. Both interrupt impulse. Both suspend immediacy. Both distrust spontaneity. In both cases, something like silence enters ethical life: a refusal to act from inclination, passion, or unexamined desire. This resemblance has misled generations of readers into assuming a shared ethical posture. It is a serious mistake.

The similarity is phenomenological. The difference is structural.

Quietist non-action emerges from withdrawal. It is rooted in the conviction that action itself contaminates purity, that will introduces distortion, and that ethical correctness lies in abstention. The subject suspends itself not to act more justly, but to avoid acting at all. Responsibility is not intensified but displaced—relocated into divine providence, cosmic order, or inner illumination. What matters is not what one does, but what one refrains from doing. Silence becomes exemption.

Historically, Quietism arose not as laziness but as fatigue. It appeared in contexts of overwhelming moral demand—confessional rigor, sacramental anxiety, impossible standards of purity. Withdrawal promised relief. Stillness became shelter. But that shelter had a cost: the ethical field thinned. Once action is structurally suspect, injustice can persist without resistance, suffering without response. Quietist silence does not confront the world; it recedes from it.

Kantian non-action could not be more different, despite the surface resemblance. Kant also demands restraint. He too insists that inclination be silenced. But this silence is not withdrawal; it is preparation. Inclination is suspended not to escape responsibility, but to make responsibility possible. The will does not disappear—it binds itself.

When Kant refuses action from desire, he does so to clear a space where obligation can appear without alibi. Duty, in Kant, is not softened by grace, harmony, or inward peace. It is cold, exposed, and often unbearable. The subject acts without consolation. No cosmic order absorbs the cost. No transcendence redeems the failure. If one does not act, one is responsible for that non-action.

This is the decisive asymmetry:
Quietist non-action removes the subject from the ethical field.
Kantian non-action sharpens the subject’s exposure within it.

In Quietism, silence protects the self from contamination. In Kant, silence strips the self of excuse.

The historical consequences are stark. Quietist non-action can coexist with domination, hierarchy, and suffering precisely because it treats the world as spiritually secondary. Kantian restraint cannot. It generates a harsh modern ethic in which even refusal implicates the agent. To refrain from acting when duty calls is not purity—it is guilt.

This is why Kant marks a hard Western pivot. He inherits the exhaustion of salvation and the collapse of metaphysical shelter, yet refuses both exemption and dissolution. He does not resolve tragedy; he internalizes it. Action must occur without guarantee, without redemption, without assurance of success. Silence no longer absolves—it accuses.

Here, for the first time, non-action becomes ethically dangerous rather than spiritually safe.

This distinction prepares the ground for what follows. Quietism mistakes stillness for ethical completion. Kant reveals stillness as a test: either it opens onto obligation, or it collapses into abdication. Modern ethical form begins not when action is sanctified, but when silence itself becomes accountable.

From this point forward, action can no longer hide behind purity, nor withdrawal behind wisdom. The modern problem is no longer how to avoid error, but how to act without guarantees. That problem will find its most dramatic expression in Faust.

But that belongs to the next part.

PART THREE

FAUST AND MODERN ACTION

Tragedy, Responsibility, and the Refusal of Alibi

Tragedy plays a decisive role in the reorientation proposed here because it stages responsibility at the limit of human control. But tragedy does not speak with one voice. Its ethical structure changes across historical forms, and with it, the way responsibility is borne—or displaced.

In classical Greek tragedy, responsibility is inseparable from cosmic order. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the catastrophe unfolds under the sign of necessity: prophecy precedes action; fate encloses the agent before intention arises. Oedipus does not choose to kill his father or marry his mother. He acts in ignorance, within a world already ordered by divine law and ancestral curse. Yet this does not absolve him. Responsibility is not grounded in intention but in participation. To act is to become bound to consequences, regardless of knowledge or will. Oedipus blinds himself not because he is morally guilty in the modern sense, but because he recognizes that action itself carries weight in a world governed by necessity. Tragedy here teaches humility before an order that exceeds the human, but it never permits innocence. Fate explains the disaster; it does not excuse the actor.

In Shakespearean tragedy, this cosmic framework recedes. The gods fall silent. Responsibility migrates inward. The tragic burden is no longer primarily fate but opacity: the opacity of motives, desires, fears, and ambitions within the self. In Macbeth, there is prophecy, but it does not compel action. The witches do not command; they suggest. The crime unfolds through hesitation, temptation, ambition, and moral blindness. Macbeth cannot appeal to fate without lying to himself. His tragedy lies precisely in this: he knows enough to resist, yet acts anyway, and then compounds action with evasion. Responsibility here is intensified, not diminished. The absence of cosmic necessity leaves no external authority to absorb guilt.

King Lear radicalizes this further. Lear’s catastrophe is not driven by ambition but by misrecognition—of love, of language, of relational obligation. His error is not criminal but interpretive. He mistakes flattery for loyalty, authority for affection, sovereignty for care. The tragedy unfolds not because the world is fated, but because relational bonds are mishandled and power is exercised without attentiveness. Lear’s suffering educates him, but too late. Responsibility here is inseparable from relational blindness. No fate can be blamed; no prophecy can be invoked. The tragedy exposes how power magnifies the consequences of misjudgment.

What unites Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, despite their differences, is that neither allows tragedy to function as absolution. In Sophocles, necessity limits freedom but does not erase accountability. In Shakespeare, freedom expands responsibility to unbearable levels. In both, tragedy deepens ethical weight.

The danger arises in contemporary invocations of tragedy, particularly in geopolitics. Here tragedy often appears in a third, degraded form: as inevitability. Structural constraints, historical forces, systemic pressures, or strategic necessities are invoked to neutralize judgment. “There was no alternative” replaces fate. But unlike Sophoclean necessity, this necessity is not cosmic; it is administrative. Unlike Shakespearean opacity, it does not expose inner conflict; it suppresses it. Tragedy is no longer a teacher of responsibility but a rhetorical shield.

This is the decisive ethical distortion. When tragedy becomes alibi, responsibility is not borne—it is displaced. Action is framed as compelled, outcomes as unavoidable, and harm as tragic but morally neutral. The language of tragedy remains, but its ethical function is inverted. Where tragedy once intensified responsibility, it now anesthetizes it.

This essay refuses that move. To act without guarantees is not to act beyond ethics. It is to act under exposure. Tragedy, properly understood, does not excuse action; it reveals its weight. The absence of certainty does not absolve the actor; it binds them more tightly to the consequences of what they do, and how they do it.

In this sense, tragedy becomes not a shelter from judgment, but a reminder that judgment cannot be delegated—neither to fate, nor to system, nor to history. Responsibility persists precisely where closure fails.

If classical and early modern tragedy bind responsibility either to fate or to interior conflict, Faust marks a decisive mutation. Here responsibility is no longer anchored in cosmic necessity nor fully contained within moral psychology. Action itself becomes the site of exposure. Faust does not act because he must, nor because he is deceived, but because he refuses stasis. Error is no longer tragic residue; it is the condition of movement. With Goethe, modernity enters an ethic where responsibility persists without alibi, without guarantee, and without redemption—an anti-Quietist drama in which striving replaces fate as the burden that must be borne.

Goethe’s Faust

Striving without guarantee. Error without exemption. Anti-Quietist modern ethic.

Faust does not enter modernity by rejecting morality. He enters it by refusing exemption.

Goethe’s Faust is often misread as a drama of excess—of ambition, knowledge, desire. Structurally, it is something else: a decisive break with ethical withdrawal. Faust does not seek purity, stillness, or salvation through restraint. He seeks exposure. He binds himself to action under conditions where certainty, redemption, and final justification have all collapsed.

What Faust rejects at the outset is not God, but closure. The scholastic world he inhabits promises knowledge without risk and virtue without cost. Its learned stillness resembles ethical completion. Faust experiences it as suffocation. Not because it is false, but because it is finished. Nothing more can be demanded of him there.

The pact with Mephistopheles is therefore not a celebration of evil, but a wager against exemption. Faust accepts that action will involve error, damage, and irreversibility. Crucially, he does not receive moral immunity for striving. Each act binds him further. Gretchen is not a symbol; she is a consequence. Faust’s tragedy is not that he falls, but that he cannot pretend not to have acted.

This is the anti-Quietist turn made flesh.

Quietism suspends action to preserve purity. Faust abandons purity to remain answerable to the world. He does not claim that striving is good. He claims only that refusing to strive is no longer possible once the shelter of salvation has dissolved. Meaning must now be risked.

Goethe stages a new ethical grammar:
– action without metaphysical guarantee;
– striving without promised reconciliation;
– error without absolution in advance.

Faust is not redeemed because he strives; he is judged through his striving. Even divine intervention, at the end, does not erase the damage done. It merely affirms that ethical life now unfolds under non-closure: no final accounting, no purified ledger, no completed justification.

In this sense, Faust radicalizes what Kant had formalized. Kant binds the subject to duty without consolation. Goethe binds the subject to history without excuse. Action is no longer measured against purity or intention alone, but against its worldly entanglements. One cannot step outside the consequences of one’s acts by invoking inward sincerity or transcendent order.

This is why Faust becomes the archetype of modern action. Not heroic, not innocent, not reconciled—but committed. He does not seek stillness; he endures motion. He does not escape error; he carries it.

Modern ethics begins here: not with correct action guaranteed by doctrine, nor with silence mistaken for wisdom, but with the acceptance that responsibility persists under uncertainty. Faust does not solve the problem of action. He inhabits it.

The modern subject is no longer asked to be pure, but to remain answerable.

From this point on, ethical life will not revolve around salvation or exemption, but around endurance—how to act, again and again, in a world that offers no final assurance that action will be justified.

PART FOUR

MARXISM, RELATIONALITY, AND FAILURE

Marxism’s Internal Contradictions

Rosa Luxemburg’s critique. Eschatological residues. The engine paradox of class struggle.

Marxism presents itself as a theory of historical motion, yet it repeatedly reintroduces an endpoint. Class struggle is defined as an engine, but one programmed to stop. The contradiction is not accidental; it is structural.

Rosa Luxemburg saw this early. Against both reformist gradualism and deterministic orthodoxy, she insisted that class struggle could not be treated as a mechanism guaranteeing its own resolution. Once revolution is imagined as historically necessary, political responsibility quietly dissolves. Action becomes execution. Failure becomes deviation. Violence becomes transit.

The eschatological residue persists even in Marx’s most materialist moments: history tends toward completion, antagonism toward resolution, contradiction toward synthesis. This logic grants Marxism immense mobilizing power—but at the cost of ethical exposure. If history itself is the subject, no one remains fully answerable.

The engine paradox is simple: a struggle that promises its own abolition incentivizes closure. Once the end is known, means are justified retroactively. Responsibility is deferred to necessity.

Europe and Structural Closure

Theoretical purity, ideological totality, and failure through completion.

In Europe, Marxism encountered a philosophical culture already trained in systematic completion. Theory sought coherence before application; purity before practice. As a result, Marxism hardened into ideology.

This was not merely a political failure but a structural one. Marxism in Europe became a closed explanatory totality: every contradiction could be absorbed, every failure redescribed, every dissent pathologized. Practice was subordinated to theory. History was read rather than endured.

Once Marxism claimed to know the direction of history, it ceased to be relational. Workers became bearers of a role; parties became guardians of truth; violence became instrumental. Ethical responsibility migrated upward into doctrine. The system acted; individuals executed.

Failure followed not because Marxism was too radical, but because it was too complete.

China and Relational Adaptation

Pre-Marxist relational field. Practical reasoning. Deng Xiaoping as philosophical turning point.

China encountered Marxism from within a radically different ethical grammar. Long before Marx, Chinese thought had operated within a relational field: action was judged by effect, continuity, and balance, not by conformity to abstract principle.

Marxism entered this field not as a total system but as a toolkit. It was adapted, stressed, bent, and—crucially—left open. The revolution was not treated as historical closure but as a phase within ongoing adjustment.

Deng Xiaoping marks the decisive turning point. His pragmatism was not opportunism; it was structural realism. By rejecting theoretical purity in favor of practical outcomes, Deng dismantled Marxism’s eschatological residue without abandoning its ethical core. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a hybrid ideology but an open system: policy without final justification, reform without doctrinal apology.

Here, Marxism ceased to promise an end to history. It became a method for navigating it.

Vietnam and Situated Reform

Đổi Mới as relational endurance rather than ideological correction.

Vietnam followed a similar path, under conditions of greater fragility. Đổi Mới was not framed as a betrayal of socialism but as its continuation under altered circumstances. The emphasis was not on correcting theory, but on sustaining social coherence.

Market mechanisms were introduced without metaphysical fanfare. Ideology did not vanish, but it loosened. Responsibility remained situated: leaders were accountable for outcomes, not alignment. Reform was incremental, reversible, and explicitly provisional.

What mattered was endurance—keeping society viable under pressure—rather than fidelity to a completed model.

China–Europe Diagnostic

Relational but open versus relational but closed. Why relationality makes historical necessity obsolete.

The contrast is not East versus West, nor Marxism versus capitalism. It is structural.

European Marxism was relational in rhetoric but closed in form: relations were predefined by theory. Chinese and Vietnamese Marxism became relational in practice and open in structure: relations determined theory’s limits.

Once relationality is treated as primary, historical necessity loses its authority. There is no guaranteed end, only continued adjustment. No final synthesis, only managed tension. Responsibility cannot be displaced onto history, because history is no longer a subject.

This is why Marxism failed in Europe, where it sought completion, and endured, in Asia, where it accepted non-closure.

The lesson is not ideological. It is ethical: systems survive not by proving themselves right, but by remaining answerable to the consequences of their own action.

PART FIVE

TWO FIGURES AT THE GATEWAY

This part does not introduce “case studies.” It introduces two human crossings. Trần Đức Thảo and Paul Mus are not illustrative examples of East–West exchange; they are exposed figures who each reached a limit where philosophy ceased to be abstract and became existentially binding. Their symmetry must be felt in their lives, not asserted in concepts.

They stand at the same gateway from opposite sides.

Trần Đức Thảo

Phenomenology too solitary. Marxism too closed. Desperate synthesis where endurance was required.

Trần Đức Thảo encountered Western phenomenology at its most exacting center. He was not a peripheral reader. In Louvain, he edited Husserl’s work, managed his archive, and bore responsibility for the transmission of Husserl’s philosophical legacy to the postwar world. He worked inside the machinery of phenomenology, at the point where its rigor, its promise, and its limits were most exposed. Consciousness was restored to dignity, to lived thickness, to intentional depth. Meaning was no longer imposed from above; it emerged from experience itself. This was not an abstract gain for Thảo—it was a moral one. Exposure mattered. Responsibility mattered.

But the cost soon became unbearable. The phenomenological subject was lucid, but alone. Intentionality explained how meaning appears, yet said nothing about how meaning binds bodies together across history, labor, and obligation. Sartre’s declaration—l’enfer, c’est les autres—named precisely what phenomenology could not metabolize: the inescapable burden of others once no shared horizon stabilizes responsibility. Consciousness was open, but exposed without shelter.

Thảo did not abandon phenomenology; he pressed it to its breaking point from within its own institutional heart. His turn toward Marxism was not ideological enthusiasm but ethical desperation. He needed a world where meaning was not merely lived but shared, where responsibility could circulate rather than collapse inward. Marxism promised relational density: labor, struggle, material continuity.

Vietnam, too, appeared as a promise—not romantically, but ontologically. A society where relationality preceded individuation, where exposure was not a private wound but a collective condition.

Yet the structure he entered could not hold what he sought. Marxism, as it then existed, demanded closure. History had a direction; contradiction had an end; responsibility dissolved into necessity. The openness Thảo required was precisely what Marxism could not tolerate. Non-closure became a flaw to be eliminated.

Thảo was thus crushed between two insufficiencies: phenomenology, open but solitary; Marxism, relational but closed. His marginalization was not merely political or personal. It was structural. He attempted synthesis at a moment when only endurance—remaining exposed without resolution—was possible. He sought a form that history could not yet sustain.

Paul Mus

Responsibility without alibi. Immersion without synthesis. Action under non-closure.

Paul Mus stands at the opposite side of the same threshold. Scholar, linguist, anthropologist—yes—but also unmistakably a maverick. Unlike most theorists of Asia, Mus did not observe history from the archive alone. He entered it bodily.

Paul Mus was not an observer who arrived late. He was born in Indochina and raised there, long before theory, before politics, before war. His earliest familiarity with the world passed through a Vietnamese nanny, through daily gestures, tonalities of language, rhythms of life that precede reflection. Asia was not for him an object of study but a formative milieu. Long before he became a scholar of civilizations, he had absorbed, almost unconsciously, the textures of local life and the presence of Asian spiritual traditions—Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist—not as doctrines, but as atmospheres. This early intimacy explains something decisive: Mus never exoticized Asia, nor did he romanticize it. His understanding was affective before it was conceptual, bodily before it was theoretical. Responsibility, for him, was never abstract; it had faces, voices, and memories.

In this, Mus resembles another figure shaped by colonial proximity and ethical rupture: George Orwell. Like Mus, Orwell was formed in a colonial context—Burma—where daily contact with domination produced not superiority but disgust, not certainty but moral fracture. Both men distanced themselves from their colonial family pedigree rather than inheriting it. Orwell’s later decision to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War marks the same refusal of inherited alignment that led Mus to oppose French intransigence in Indochina. Neither man became a revolutionary ideologue; neither sought redemption through system. What they shared was a refusal to accept innocence once exposure had occurred. Their ethics were born not from theory, but from lived contradiction—and from the impossibility of returning to the comfort of distance once one has been shaped, early and irreversibly, by the world one is suppose

Trained as a paratrooper by the British, he was parachuted behind enemy lines into Japanese-occupied French Indochina as an intelligence officer. His understanding of Vietnam was not second-hand; it was lived as the life of a maverick man of action, under risk, fear, urgency, and irreversible consequence.

After the war, Mus became political adviser to General Leclerc and negotiated directly with Hồ Chí Minh. He stood at the moment where decolonization might still have been possible. He understood, with painful clarity, that the opportunity failed not because it was unthinkable, but because of French stubborn intransigence—an inability to relinquish mastery, an insistence on closure that led directly to the wasteful catastrophe of the French Indochina War.

Mus did not seek synthesis. He did not attempt to reconcile East and West into a higher unity. He accepted non-closure as the condition of action itself. Where Thảo sought a system capable of bearing responsibility, Mus accepted responsibility without system. His immersion was not appropriation. It was exposure.

This is why Mus resisted both colonial rationalization and revolutionary abstraction. He did not believe history would redeem violence, nor that culture could neutralize power. There would be no final justification, no doctrinal shelter. Meaning and incompleteness would have to be inhabited, not completed.

Mus’s refusal of synthesis was not intellectual modesty; it was ethical rigor. To synthesize would have been to close what must remain open.

Thảo–Mus Structural Contrast

Completion versus inhabitation. Ideology versus exposure. Symmetrical chassé-croisé between East and West.

The contrast between Thảo and Mus is not one of success and failure, nor of East and West. It is structural.

Thảo, though being himself of Eastern origin, moved from Western philosophy toward Eastern collectivities seeking relational shelter. Mus moved from Western power into Eastern worlds refusing conceptual possession. One sought completion to survive exposure; the other accepted exposure to avoid false completion.

Their paths cross without meeting.

Thảo embodies the danger of seeking ethical rescue through system. Mus embodies the risk of acting without alibi. One attempted to resolve non-closure; the other inhabited it. One was crushed by closure; the other lived under its absence.

Together, they mark the gateway this book approaches: the threshold where dialogue no longer aims at synthesis, and responsibility can no longer be delegated—to history, to culture, or to theory.

What follows does not resolve their tension. It institutionalizes it.

This lineage of intellectuals who refused the safety of pure spectatorship extends further. Graham Greene belongs unmistakably to it. Not merely a novelist of conscience, Greene was entangled with intelligence work, political missions, and zones of conflict where ethical clarity dissolves under pressure. His Indochina experience—often misread as cynical or prophetic—was grounded in proximity, not abstraction. Like Mus, Greene understood that action contaminates innocence, but withdrawal only disguises complicity.

William Somerset Maugham offers a parallel figure from an earlier generation. Beneath the polished irony of his fictional  secret agent Ashenden lies the autobiographical lived experience of intelligence service, including episodes censored directly by Churchill himself in the name of raison d’État. Maugham’s brief but telling encounter with Churchill marks a recurring fault line: when lived exposure threatens to exceed what the state can tolerate, narrative must be trimmed, truth managed. These men—Mus, Orwell, Greene, Maugham—do not form a school. What unites them is more fragile and more demanding: thought tested by action, writing constrained by power, and an ethics forged not in exemption, but in proximity to irreversible decisions.

PART SIX

INSTITUTIONALIZING NON-CLOSURE

If the Gateway marks a structural insight, Part Six examines something rarer and more difficult: attempts to live non-closure institutionally without converting it into doctrine. These are not solutions. They are experiments in endurance.

Caodaism

Syncretism without synthesis. Ritualized non-closure.

Caodaism does not resolve difference; it stages it. Emerging in southern Vietnam in the early twentieth century—precisely at the intersection of colonial pressure, civilizational fracture, and spiritual saturation—it refused the modern demand for coherence. Confucius, Laozi, the Buddha, Jesus, and even Victor Hugo are not integrated into a higher unity; they are placed side by side, ritually present, structurally unresolved.

What matters is not the eclecticism itself, but its form. Caodaism does not claim that contradictions disappear. It organizes their coexistence. Doctrine is displaced by choreography; theology by posture; synthesis by rhythm. The divine eye does not close the system—it watches over an order that knows itself to be incomplete.

This is not relativism. Nor is it spiritual convenience. Caodaism accepts that no single lineage can absorb the others without distortion. Instead of forcing convergence, it institutionalizes restraint. Non-closure becomes livable not through theory, but through repetition, hierarchy, and ritual discipline. Responsibility is not dissolved into transcendence; it is distributed across a plural symbolic field that refuses final arbitration.

In this sense, Caodaism functions as a lived analogue of the Gateway: not a solution to difference, but a form that prevents difference from hardening into domination.

Freemasonry and Confucius

Ethical rationalism without transcendental closure.

The pairing may seem improbable, yet the structural affinity is precise. Freemasonry, at its core, does not offer salvation, revelation, or metaphysical completion. It offers formation. Symbols are tools, not truths. Rituals transmit orientation, not doctrine. The “Great Architect” is not a theological claim but a limit-concept—an explicit refusal to legislate transcendence.

What is preserved is ethical rationalism without final grounding. Moral work is never complete, initiation never finished, judgment never delegated upward. The Mason is bound not by belief, but by obligation enacted under uncertainty. Silence, here, does not exempt; it disciplines.

Confucian ethics operates under a homologous constraint. There is no redemptive horizon, no ultimate justification beyond harmony sustained through conduct. Li (ritual propriety) and ren (humaneness) do not resolve moral tension; they regulate it. The cosmos does not absolve. Heaven does not intervene. Responsibility circulates horizontally—through roles, relationships, and time.

Both traditions reject transcendental closure without lapsing into quietism. Both institutionalize ethical work without promising purity. And both depend on form—ritual, repetition, graded responsibility—to prevent openness from collapsing into indifference.

Seen together, Caodaism, Freemasonry, and Confucian ethics do not converge. They resonate structurally. Each represents an attempt—partial, fragile, historically situated—to give non-closure a durable social shape without converting it into ideology or salvation.

They are not gateways themselves. But they keep the threshold from closing.

PART SEVEN

THE GATEWAY

Micro-Bridge: From Exposed Figures to Enduring Forms

What Part Six made visible retroactively clarifies the fates of Trần Đức Thảo and Paul Mus. Both carried ethical exposure personally, in their bodies and biographies, without the protection of a form capable of sustaining it. Thảo bore exposure without institutional shelter; Mus accepted immersion without doctrinal closure. Neither failed by error. They encountered a historical asymmetry: exposure preceded endurance.

Caodaism, Freemasonry, and Confucian ethical rationalism show what neither Thảo nor Mus could yet rely on—forms that hold incompleteness without demanding synthesis. These institutions do not redeem the exposed subject; they prevent exposure from collapsing into isolation. They neither rescue nor absolve. They endure.

This is why Caodaism becomes fully intelligible only now. Not because its symbols were obscure, but because the conditions for reading it were absent. In an age obsessed with closure—doctrinal, ideological, technological—ritualized non-closure appeared incoherent. Only after the exhaustion of salvation, ideology, and total systems does its discipline of restraint become legible as strength rather than confusion.

The Gateway emerges precisely at this juncture: where exposure must find form without being neutralized.

The Gateway of Shared Incompleteness

Dialogue without convergence. Responsibility without guarantee.

The Gateway of Shared Incompleteness is not a synthesis, a method, or a new ethical system. It names a structural condition already operative but previously unacknowledged: that dialogue becomes ethically real only when no participant can close the field, and no tradition can claim the right to final arbitration.

“Shared” does not mean equal. Asymmetry persists—of power, history, damage, responsibility. What is shared is the absence of final justification. No doctrine, ontology, or eschatology is permitted to absorb consequences into necessity or transcendence. Incompleteness is not a lack to be repaired; it is the condition that keeps responsibility exposed.

The Gateway differs from pluralism. Pluralism tolerates difference by neutralizing it. The Gateway sustains difference by refusing exemption. It differs from relativism by retaining weight: actions bind, histories endure, harm does not evaporate into interpretation.

Dialogue here is not aimed at agreement. Convergence is neither expected nor desired. What matters is that each participant remains answerable without guarantee, acting under conditions where justification will always arrive too late and never fully.

This is why the Gateway cannot be institutionalized as doctrine. The moment it hardens into a system, incompleteness is betrayed. It must remain a passage, not a residence.

Orientation Toward the Tao of Ethics

Naming ethical form without deploying it. Threshold, not doctrine.

At this point, the Tao of Ethics can be named—but not yet entered.

What has been traced throughout this work is not Taoism, nor Eastern wisdom as such, but the possibility of an ethical form that neither redeems nor condemns, neither closes nor abandons. A form in which responsibility persists without heroic tragedy, without salvation, without ideological necessity.

The Tao of Ethics does not offer rules, virtues, or final ends. It names an orientation: attentiveness to relational distortion, restraint in action, refusal of excess, and sensitivity to timing rather than principle. It does not resolve tragedy; it prevents tragedy from becoming an alibi. It does not deny harm; it seeks to avoid amplifying it through moral grandiosity or systemic blindness. More importantly it stresses both the possibility and the categorical necessity for dialogue.

This essay does not unfold that form. It stops deliberately at the threshold.

The Gateway marks the limit of what can be said without turning ethics into doctrine once again. What follows belongs to another work—one that will not argue for the Tao of Ethics, but attempt to inhabit its discipline.

For now, it is enough to recognize the passage:
no shelter,
no synthesis,
no exemption—
only shared incompleteness,
and the responsibility it leaves behind.

CODA

Gateways, Not Conclusions

This work ends where it began: not with answers, but with exposure.

What has been traced across traditions, figures, failures, and forms is not a doctrine of ethics, nor a comparative reconciliation between East and West. It is the slow emergence of a shared condition: that no ethical life worthy of the name can any longer rely on shelter—whether metaphysical, ideological, institutional, or tragic—to absorb responsibility in advance.

Quietism promised peace through withdrawal and mistook non-closure for exemption. Salvation promised redemption and displaced responsibility into grace or system. Modern duty endured without consolation but risked rigidity. Ideology promised relationality and collapsed into closure. Each, in its own way, sought a final resting place for judgment.

None was sufficient.

What remains is not a void. It is a field—uneven, asymmetrical, historically burdened—in which action must occur without guarantee and without absolution. The figures encountered here did not solve this condition. They exposed it. Some endured it personally. Some attempted to stabilize it institutionally. Some failed, and their failures remain instructive.

The notion of a gateway names nothing more than this: that ethics begins not when certainty is restored, but when its loss is acknowledged without nostalgia. A gateway does not promise arrival. It only permits passage. One crosses it without knowing what will hold, and without the assurance that crossing was justified.

Dialogue, under these conditions, cannot aim at convergence. Its dignity lies elsewhere: in sustaining difference without immunity, and responsibility without final reason. This is not an ideal to be achieved. It is a discipline to be maintained.

Nothing here closes. Nothing resolves.

If something has been gained, it is a refusal: the refusal to let incompleteness become an excuse, and the refusal to let responsibility harden into purity or despair. Ethics, in this sense, does not culminate. It persists.

The gateway remains.

And that is enough.