On the birth of Ethos all created beings bear within themselves negation: one negates so that the other

exists. While God is the negation of negation Master Eckhart Imagine you find yourself in a room, behind the walls that do not allow any scream to escape outside. You are bound, helpless, naked. You cannot see the sun. Youll never see the sunlight again. Even the light from the bulb will be scorching your eyes for only a few more hours or days.[ Exousa to sktous (Lk 22,53) the power of darkness.] Before you stands your torturer and executor. He hates you, for God knows what reason. Perhaps because of your conviction, your language, your faith or the lack of it, your culture or maybe, just like that, because he enjoys torturing and killing. Imagine you find yourself in a situation numerous victims found themselves in the past, recent and remote think of all Auschwitzs, Koevski Rogs, Srebrenicas, Rouandas and in which many of the victims find themselves today. In our world. In this very moment. At this thought which is shared by me as well we usually feel disgust. Repulsion. Something is wrong. My naked being, in its endless reality (danost), should have been an imperative in itself: for every being, at least for the one that has the right to carry the name of a human being, who can think and comprehend the gift of its own being, who should have been shining in its holiness. This is how we usually think. Life should have been sacred. Untouchable. But here, in this room, this thought does not apply. Will the murderer be stopped by my face? Not because it is mine but because it is a face as a face? Will he be stopped by an imperative Do not commit murder which is supposed to be inscribed in the very face of a human being, in the deep well of our eyes where you can see the invisible? Where he could see not only me, but also the depth of his own self? No, this does not apply in this room. The face is here just raw matter that is going to be disfigured. The eyes will be plucked out. The mouth will be smashed and flooded with blood, sensing the taste of its own flesh. The absence of all spirit, of all imperative. The horror and pain immobilizes every thought, but not also every question, every protest, every rage. How is this possible? Why things that are not right happen? Does this man have no conscience? No feeling for distinguishing between right and wrong? Why cant he be persuaded by any reasoning? By any appeal to virtues and human dignity, by any sermon on guilt and punishment? No word has any bearing in this room. No virtue or value. The only thing that remains is the absence of words, pain and a scream and the torturers enjoyment of it. The superfluous words only make him greater. Imagine that your torturer is incidentally also an amateur philosopher, and that he starts developing maybe only because he wants to heighten his pleasure in your protests (like fish helplessly tossing around in the net of nothingness) a popular variant of teachings also defended by Callicles in Platos Gorgias or by protagonists in the works by Marquis de Sade. What awaits you has no meaning and in this realisation the whole meaning is hidden. The strong one overpowered the weak one and destroyed him with pleasure. This is all that is going to happen and that is constantly happening. The arsenal of natural sciences quaestio facti is on his side. And for him everything else whatever

kind of quaestio iuris is only a matter of rhetoric. And in a sense, you know he is right. And if you had not known that, youll learn that soon. What is happening now, what is going to happen is not only a part of natural reality. The animal aetiology offers us wonderful analogies, but those analogies at the end only reveal us how little we know of animals. Psychology, with its understanding of aggressiveness as a genetically-evolutionary sediment scientifically systemizes only our common-sensical selfunderstanding. The evolutionary framework, the ethically historical scenery of brutal and senseless struggle for survival seems for the reality, which forces itself to the forefront here, something that is much too narrow. In this hidden abyss the epiphany of logos of the entire reality is going to happen. Epiphany of the cosmic law. The revelation of the structure of order or should I say chaos? of the visible and invisible things. All trivial real-life situations of interpersonal relations, all modalities of behaviour and speech, where someone inflicts sorrow and pain to someone else, are more or less intensive reflections of this law. In this hidden abyss of misery and horror the epiphany of the question of ethics happens. The fundamental question. All the rest are details. All easier ethical problems are just metaphorical expressions of the torture and murder. We are all in this room. Until we comprehend that, we have not understood the fundamental question of ethics. *** Philosophy focussed on this situation often in its past. From Plato to Kant, from Aristotle to Hegel, the most marvellous pages of their masterworks talk about this situation, although often only indirectly. And most often philosophy has sided and this to its great honour with the victim. It has tried to argue with various strategies that the thinking of a sadistic executioner is in fact no thinking at all. It has tried to reveal that the power the slaughterer has over its victim is in fact disability; that his thinking and doing is lost in the non-existing, in the darkness which is the location of evil because it does not really exist. It has argued that the truth of victims arguments, of his/her protest and words is in the fact that it relies on something that really exists: on virtues and values or on the moral law, on Gods or natural law, on the ethical categorical imperative or on the logics of the absolute Spirit. It has argued that the power of the torturer is only temporary, that it is nothing but a trespass that will receive its punishment if not the human punishment then the punishment that is going to be much harder: an instantaneous settlement, inscribed into the very heart of being. This firm trust into the ethical colouring of every action makes it almost insignificant which metaphysical geography different philosophical schools have chosen whether they have opened the realm of responsibility into the invisible horizons of the invisible or they have placed it into the perceptible cosmos. And yet: despite those efforts, the torturers have laughed and still keep laughing. But there is some knowledge hidden in their demonic snicker. I deny your presuppositions. And the preposition here is any kind of basis of ethics that stems from universally obvious truth of being. Callicles and Juliette cannot be persuaded. Logos cannot find the spot to place its lever. There are no axioms that could be anything more than general agreements and illusions of the weak. This laughter represents for the philosophy a much greater challenge than it has ever expected or has been prepared to admit it. But despite this fact, thousands of scholars today have lectures on ethics, there exist institutes for this and that kind of theoretical approaches to ethics, the appeal to humanitas,

solidarity and world ethos has even become part of common political jargon; it has become clear that ethics as a rationally and therefore universally groundable project has become, if we put it mildly, questionable. In our time, the negation of the primary foundation of ethos in being that stems from the esoteric and shadowy conventicles has become the hidden horror of civilisation also, and in particular, when this civilisation hides its ethical groundlessness behind the speeches on law and rights, on morality and ethics, on human dignity and universal ethos. The garbage of slogans and nicely put ideologems trying to conceal the reality of the marrow of the contemporary and past slaughters can nowadays convince only the gullible. And that, at least that, we, the philosophers have never been. *** There is something that the contemporary ethics does not want to speak openly about: it does no longer believe in the ontological grounding of the ethics, at least not in such an ethics as it was practised in the past. If it is cynical enough, the ethics can claim: all we need is politics and law, instinctive morality and collective repression. And indeed, social ethics may be an illusion, and the socially conditioned morality always false, not genuine (as it was expressed with his usually lucidity and ability to simplify by Henri Bergson in his swan song, the essay Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion), its foundations may be the ever-changing principle of selfishness and mutual limitation. But despite that, it is hard to degrade it into an illusion, since it does in many ways inform our lives. Let us re-define philosophy then. It is not important if ethos has an ontological basis or not. Let the morality be just a habit, thos just tos. The torturers just need to be caught and they should be taken to court. The task of a sobered philosopher is a social and consensual pragmatics that is depending on his spiritual and political preferences communitarian or more formally egalitarian. But philosophy, real philosophy, cannot be tricked. It harasses us with questions about the grounding and the awareness of the fact that torture chambers, those of the past and those of today, keep evading the world of the positive law and consensuality, stands as a warning to us that the machinery of ius and consensual morality in philosophical horizon is just an artifice, chimera, an illusionary force. Even if we managed to secure a complete and full effectiveness of law and impose total crime prevention in a utopian society of tomorrow, the victims of past would still blame us and if we were really ethical, their cries would be stronger than the peace of today. The ethos without any social regard, unhabitual morality that was to aptly described by Plato in his famous story about the Gygess ring is decisive for philosophy. This ethos in its sense-lessness feeds on itself. This ethos is still powerful in various spiritual and cultural environments and also there where it seems that these environments are doomed to decay and remain only feeble figures in the dance macabre of relativity. Socratess disciple Aeschines was asked once what profit the philosophers get from philosophy. He answered: Even if all legal regulations were cancelled, we would still live the way we do now. However, by comprehending the possible reality of ethos, despite the fact that this is, as we have seen, often flaunted by philosophers, we have not done much. The basic question namely is: how can we intellectually ground such an attitude? How can we lean it against the logos that is binding for the executioner? How can we stop the other to keep laughing at us in the torture chamber?

*** The two basic principles of any ethical situation in a torture chamber are two hypostases that are not a couple, since every one is unique in itself; two Beings that are not a couple, since every one is unique in itself. The point where the other totality seems as a fragment, as a point of singularity of the One. And a reciprocal one. Two worlds that cancel each other, that cannot be contemplated from the third focal point. Two worlds that are not a couple. The victims world in its entirety. The victims being. And the other, not, not the other world. Again the unique: the victims being. In a murderous enhypostasizing of the reality the victim thus finds itself there where it really is in the being of the other. The murderer is unique. The lightness of being lies in the fact that I am able to remove the disturbing element from my world that is everything. And if I sense the totality that is paradoxically obvious in this disturbance this awareness only makes the rage of my ontological murderousness even greater. This nature of being in the realisation of hypostasiveness of the very ontological structure of oneself pushes away any kind of ethos of cohabitation. Or even worse: the ethos of cohabitation arises as the very attractiveness of the elimination of the other totality. This murderous character of ontology does not mean, however, the constant and prevailing existence in this status. I am not that pessimistic or perhaps, that is not pessimistic enough for me. Our usual state when we are or we tend to be surrounded by pleasant things or creatures that we like and that give us pleasurable excitement that we love and take care of them when we behave ethically, hides in itself the same murderous logic. (For example, do we need to repeat after Heraclites of Ephesus in this time of pornographic pandemics that has infected more or less everyone of us that Dionysius and Hades are one and the same? That eros can be a part of the same ontology which indulges itself in the very oblivion of the other and in the reduction of this other into the very object of desire? In the reduction of his/her being to pleasure (jouissance) or pain that exists only if it is visible for me, buyable and mediawise available?). We all know that on a certain level. The successful neodarwinist exposures of the selfish gene in reality only reveal our most intimate ontological trauma. We are at the same time shocked and fascinated by the stories about common people who turn out to be murderers, about average families that turn into the chaos of blood and violence. He killed them as flies. This saying reveals more than just a truism the expression conceals the strict analogia entis. However, this is not merely the case of enthusiasm for thriller or any other kind of thrill. The wholeness of our political life i.e.(that is) the realm of our being that is the result of the investment of hypostasis in the common world is a reserved, civilised, symbolical form of torture and murder. The other has to be conquered. The sweetest moment is the moment of realisation who is the boss, who is the master. And if needed, the other is symbolically removed. The other is nothing. Or has to become nothing. This is not the case of sports where these things are so obvious that it would be indecent to explain them further and that provokes at least in principle harmless catharsis. The same goes for the economic life where symbolic forms of murder may became real and manifest themselves in the deprivation of food or decent standards of living. And we can find the same paradigm at the most sublime level also in the cultural and for those of us who consider ourselves religious particularly painful religious sphere. The model of competition and self-distinction, that of amassing social power and reputation, yearning after public presence, fraternising with the

powerful and the eviction of the weak, different and those who do not understand all that is just the transposition of the situation in the torture chamber. And let me repeat it is all too comprehensible transposition since it is not the result of this or the other petty perversion but it is rooted in the basic ontological structure of hypostasis. This is what we are. More precisely: this is what I am. This is the structure of my existence. That is why these symbolic translations of the real murder are so unrootable, so strong, so unchangeable. And that is why so little is needed to turn them into real killing. Before we judge these symbolic translations from the pedestal, it is good to understand them in their true logic. And above all, to see how this logic operates within ourselves. *** Let us say that our torturer changed his mind. Not because he remembered that his grandmother used to say that killing is wrong or because he was frightened by a police siren, but just like that. He changed his mind completely. Revert. Ethically convert. What happens in such a conversion? How is it possible that ethos emerges from the non-ethos? First, let us try to describe this. With the above description of the executioners thought before every thought we have little or nothing for the ethics such as it is commonly understood. Meta-ontological understanding of hypostasis and its murderous (un)ethical character does not result into any generally binding ethos, but it reveals before us the original situation within which ethos can choose its direction. The actual ethical life begins only when I am able to transfer the special awareness of my own hypostasis onto the other. I do not invest my own hypostasis into the other because the other is the phenomenon structured in a special way (for example, as a face or someone that I perceive as bindingly sacred being); the reason for this radical transfer, this radical investment of me into the object lies in me. Phainmenon can never conceal in itself the ethos, because the relationship towards the reality of the other who cancels me in his/her own being is inscribed in the very essence of the ethical, while phainmenon is always something that happens in my horizon of being. This is also true at the level of reflexive understanding for any kind of realisation (izpostavitev) of ethos by logos: any kind of etho-logy is impossible because every imposition of logos is in fact the abolition of logos. Logos as my thought is linked to the inner-world, to my inner-worldly horizon. But ethos suspends the logos of my world and by doing so it cancels the logic as such. The exposition of the logic of ethos is impossible because ethos is that what is defined by paralogos. The entrance of the other into my horizon is the entrance of the one that is never revealed and of the one who, because of that, cannot be thematically approached by the usual thought. The others come to life because of my radical investment. I insist because of the benevolent, friendly, kind-hearted transfer, because it became clear from our imagining of the ontological premises of the executioners thoughts that we can think also completely different kind of transfers: the transfers of our own hypostasis that recognises the other as a foreigner in order to exploit him/her that is, who, by recognising the face or the sacredness only intensify the antiethic jouissance of exploitation (whether economic, social, sexual etc.). Only with benevolent, friendly, loving investment that has no ethical reason because it is the very root of ethos, the ethos can emerge from the twilight of predetic lack of hypostasis. That what seems alive, that which is in my being and therefore in my grace, in the transposition of my being becomes

self-being foreigner (alien), and orphan, a widow, using the Old Testament terms which became through Levinas a part of contemporary philosophical metaphorics. To realise this possibility is and this is what I argue in opposition to Levinas and his ethics of otherness which is today so widespread that almost no one dares to challenge it completely my business. The ethics of pure alterity or at least that of the primary status of the other is (unfortunately) an utter illusion. A horrible task is imposed on us. A horrific responsibility. We are rarely at its level. I am asked to break with my own basic ontological structure. The series of breaks in being. The moment when synhypostasis appears before me are rare. And yet, these moments are the only one that defines me ethically. Only the frequency and intensity of those moments measure whether someone among us is a good person or what Yiddish speakers say with a interesting elision a Mensch (and I have a feeling that sub specie aeternitatis everything else is pretty insignificant). The emergence of ethos is thus a paralogical breakthrough. The other being the only one opens itself to me. I am annihilated in my own hypostasis. The totality is destroyed in kairos. Some other totality shines in its place. The holiness of being shines. Not universal, communal, but other. Other that is unique. *** With this description of the emergence of ethos we touch upon the overwhelming question. Why does such a transfer occur? Why do I step out of my murderous ontological structure? Is it enough to answer that this event occurs within me, that this is the root of ethos that cannot be ethical? Probably not. The question of ethics poses itself as the question: what is that triggers this unforced paralogical invention, the suspense of my own, unique being? If my hypostasis is structured murderously and if no phenomenon of my world, nothing that exists and nothing that reveals itself cannot lead me towards the loving transposition of my own hypostatic being into the other, where then does this ethical conversion stem from? How are we to understand the emergence of hypostatical reality that stands in opposition to our murderous character? The emergence of desire and praxis that accepts synhypostasis against its own and unique being? Let me attempt to formulate an answer (which again represents the draft of my ontology). The emergence of ethos from the pre-ethical hypostatical potential is the result of the suspense of myself in relation to my source and my end. The emergence of ethos can be understood only from the metaontology of hypostasis. From its openness in its own otherness which is because hypostasis is being the other of being. The suspense of my being always happens in contact with other beings, with the origin and the ending of my own unique being. Ethics is always based on the event between my being and its (logically (logosno) incommensurable) other. In the relation with the outer-essential (zunajbitni), with the configuration of the apophatically understood Nothingness. The ontology of me as hypostasis, as the only being, leads me towards the symbolical and real murder until I open myself for the radical otherness of my own being and until I suspense myself the very being through which and in which everything exists to the criterion of being and non-being. In other words: the commandment do not kill is apophatical in the most radical sense: the possibility of hypostasis, its absoluteness so to say, transforms

through this conversion into nothingness. The other before me is invested from my part with the same radical unknowability, with the same turn in which I keep discovering my own ethos. And if I really exist, then also the opposite is true: the moral law is an eventful configuration of Nothingness in hypostasis. The total intimacy and the extimity that is only felt in its extreme intimacy. This is where its mysterious and uncontrollable, unprovable and unpredictable character lies. Ethos is a metaontological technique of the thussness of being (taknosti biti). The paralogical (paralogosni) co-existence of unique beings, which is the real basis of any ethical event, has a deeply ethical. Ethics in its deepest meaning is the architectonic of being in contemplating the ungraspable prebeing.