Openings: Acknowledging Essential Moments in Human Communication

5. Our Perfect Capacity for Being Open

85 —5— Our Perfect Capacity for Being Open By way of enacting acknowledgment, we create the openings of those dwelling places that are necessary for us to feel at home with others. This feeling is a comfortable way to be. Genuine friendship promotes the experience; it helps to perfect the relationship between the self and the other, whereby even when separated by great distance, the two can dwell together, like devout religious souls who dwell lovingly with God’s presence, no matter how absent it may be at the time. Saint Augustine’s Confessions, for example, tells the story of how its author, distanced from God by his pagan ways, still was able to struggle with his “restless heart” and eventually hear and respond to God’s call. The book, to be sure, is a religious touchstone for the act of acknowledgment . The word “confess” is from the Latin confiteri, meaning “to acknowledge.” And so Augustine acknowledges that “to praise you [God] is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation . You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. . . . You never abandon what you have begun. Make perfect my imperfections.”1 The stirring referred to here is the metaphysical impulse of perfection that supposedly is implanted in us by God so that we can be moved to do good and just things 86 • Openings as completely as possible. It’s a spiritual, psychological, physiological , and evolutionary thing. As indicated by dictionary definitions of the phenomenon, the “completeness” of perfection can also be associated, for example , with the “integrity,” “soundness,” and “flawlessness” of a given object. Thus, a triangle (with its three sides that connect to form three angles totaling 180 degrees) is, by definition, perfect. When, however, this geometric form is employed aesthetically in a work of art, such as a painting, only an equilateral or right triangle may be the appropriate (perfect) choice. The completeness of perfection can also be associated with the “contentment” and “satisfaction” that people experience when, for example, attending a social gathering, such as an art exhibit, where the atmosphere is exciting and friendly, and the featured artist’s use of triangles in her paintings is perceived to be both fitting and fascinating. Enjoyable occasions, with their atmosphere of good moods, promote openness toward others. There is something contradictory in what I just said about perfection. Perfection opens us to others. But it also defines the completeness of a given object such as a triangle. Such completeness admits a closed nature: all that is needed for the triangle to be the object that it is, is there before our eyes. A genuine friendship also admits something of a closed or finished nature, for if the friendship is truly genuine (perfect), it, by definition, cannot be more than it already is. Unless, however, we define the relationship in accordance with the more perfected standard that Montaigne commends and that was first noted in chapter 2. In the perfect friendship, the self and the other “grieve” that they are “not two-fold, three-fold or four-fold and that [they do] not have several souls, several wills, so that [they] could give them all to the [other] that he [or she] loves.”2 The perfect friendship, in Montaigne’s sense, is never finished; rather, it is always in the process of wanting to become something more and better than it presently is. Striving for perfection reveals imperfection. Notice that the workings of Montaigne’s perfect friendship are perfectly in line with the ontological dynamic and ethos of human being: it is open to the possibilities of the future whereby it perhaps can further improve on its current status. This openness , we have seen, defines the objective uncertainty of our being. Our Perfect Capacity for Being Open • 87 We are perfection in the making. Is God necessary for this to be the case? I have no idea, although I admit that I am intrigued by the question. Conscience, acknowledgment, ethos, and perfection all display noteworthy ontological status. Is this status a trace left by One whose face we will never see directly and totally as long as we are alive? Another open question. The spatial and temporal structure of our existence is constantly calling for concerned thought and action. The questions raised above admit as much...