The Immortal Divine, Part V: Crisis, Time, and the Revolutionary Potential of Questions

Introduction

"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
— Victor Hugo, Histoire d'un Crime, 1852

Through four essays, we have traced the paradox of transcendence from Nietzsche's assumption of divine authority in proclaiming God's death, through the transformation of the divine function in modern institutions, to the proposal of an ethics grounded in questioning rather than transcendent commands. We have shown how the question "What kind of world do you want to live in?" opens possibilities that transcendent ethics forecloses, creating space for authentic dialogue and immediate responsibility.

Yet a persistent critique shadows this proposal: Given existing power structures and vested interests, isn't questioning ethics hopelessly naive? How can genuine questioning occur when those who benefit from current arrangements control the mechanisms of discourse, education, and social organization? This critique assumes that entrenched power makes transformative questioning practically impossible.

This criticism, however compelling it may initially appear, rests on fundamental misconceptions about time, crisis, and the nature of ethical transformation. It assumes the permanence of current arrangements, ignores the complicity of traditional ethics in creating present crises, and fails to understand how human temporality—our finite lives flowing across generations—creates inevitable openings for change. Most significantly, it overlooks how periodic crises strip away the veneer of transcendent justification, revealing the contingency of all human arrangements and creating moments when genuine questioning becomes not only possible but unavoidable.

The Complicity of Traditional Ethics in Contemporary Crises

The critique that power structures make questioning ethics impractical conveniently ignores a devastating counter-truth: traditional transcendent ethics has not merely failed to prevent our current crises but has actively participated in creating them. From ecological collapse to systemic inequality, from technological devastation to the erosion of human dignity, transcendent ethical frameworks have provided the justifications that make these catastrophes appear inevitable, natural, or even divinely ordained.

Consider climate change. For decades, traditional ethics has offered transcendent justifications for the very behaviors driving ecological collapse. Divine dominion over nature, the sacred right of property, the moral imperative of economic growth—all these transcendent principles have shielded destructive practices from questioning. When environmental activists ask, "What kind of world are we creating?" they are told that questioning "economic reality" or "human nature" is naive utopianism. The transcendent status accorded to market mechanisms places them beyond ethical interrogation.

As philosopher Bruno Latour observed:

"The ozone hole is too social and too narrated to be truly natural; the strategy of industrial firms and heads of state is too full of chemical reactions to be reduced to power and interest; the discourse of the ecosphere is too real and too social to boil down to meaning effects."
— Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 1991

Traditional ethics, with its rigid separation between facts and values, natural and social, divine and human, cannot address crises that transgress these boundaries. It lacks the conceptual resources to confront problems that are simultaneously material and meaningful, natural and political, immediate and eternal.

The inequality crisis presents another damning indictment. Traditional ethics has long provided transcendent justifications for extreme disparities in wealth and power. Whether through divine providence, natural hierarchy, meritocratic desert, or market efficiency, transcendent frameworks transform contingent social arrangements into unquestionable moral orders. The result is a world where eight individuals possess as much wealth as half of humanity—a fact that traditional ethics can describe but not effectively challenge.

Philosopher Thomas Pogge captures this moral blindness:

"The affluent have been conditioned to think about poverty as an occasion for charity, not as an injustice they might be implicated in."
— Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2002

Traditional ethics focuses on individual charitable obligations while ignoring the systemic questions: Why does such poverty exist? What structures create and maintain it? These questions threaten transcendent justifications and are therefore pushed aside in favor of managing poverty's symptoms.

Even more troubling is traditional ethics' response to technological transformation. As artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and surveillance systems reshape human existence, transcendent ethics offers only outdated categories—applying concepts of soul, natural law, and divine image to realities that explode these frameworks. The result is either reactionary prohibition or uncritical acceptance, with no capacity for the nuanced questioning these technologies demand.

The critique that questioning ethics is impractical thus reveals its own impracticality. If traditional ethics has not only failed to prevent but actively enabled our current crises, then clinging to transcendent frameworks is not pragmatic but delusional. The question is not whether we can afford to embrace questioning ethics but whether we can afford not to.

The Historical Contingency of Current Systems

A second misconception underlying the critique is the assumption that current power structures represent permanent features of human existence. This temporal myopia mistakes a few centuries—or in some cases mere decades—for eternity. Yet the very systems that now seem unshakeable are remarkably recent historical innovations, and their apparent permanence is itself a transcendent illusion that traditional ethics helps maintain.

The modern nation-state system, which seems as natural as the mountains, emerged only after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The limited liability corporation, that seemingly eternal feature of economic life, was a controversial innovation of the 19th century. Central banking, fiat currency, international financial institutions—all are 20th-century creations. Even supposedly ancient traditions often prove surprisingly modern upon examination.

As historian Eric Hobsbawm demonstrated in "The Invention of Tradition":

"Traditions which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented... They normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past."
— Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1983

This invention of antiquity serves a crucial function: it transforms contingent arrangements into transcendent necessities. When we believe something has "always been this way," we stop asking whether it should continue to be. Traditional ethics, with its focus on eternal principles, naturally allies with this mystification of history.

Consider the transformation of work. The 40-hour work week, now treated as natural law, was a radical innovation fought for by labor movements. The weekend—that sacred institution—didn't exist for most of human history. Yet within a generation, these arrangements come to seem eternal, and traditional ethics develops justifications for why they must remain exactly as they are.

The rapid changes of recent decades make this contingency even more apparent. The internet, social media, smartphones—technologies that have fundamentally restructured human interaction—are younger than many people reading this essay. Yet they already generate their own transcendent mythologies, their own claims to inevitability, their own ethical frameworks that treat their existence as given rather than chosen.

This historical perspective reveals the critique's temporal fallacy. Power structures that claim questioning ethics is impractical are often younger than the people making such claims. If such dramatic transformations have occurred within living memory, how can we declare future transformation impossible?

The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi captured this temporal wisdom:

"Those who dream of the banquet wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow wake to join the hunt. While they dream, they do not know that they are dreaming."
— Zhuangzi, "The Butterfly Dream"

Current arrangements are the dream from which we have not yet awakened. Their seeming permanence is the illusion of the dreamer who cannot imagine waking. Questioning ethics does not ask us to accept this dream as reality but to recognize its contingency and ask what we might dream instead.

Generational Change and the Persistence of Questions

The third misconception in the critique involves a fundamental misunderstanding of how ethical transformation occurs across time. Traditional ethics, with its eternal principles, imagines change as either impossible (the principles are eternal) or catastrophic (the principles are overthrown). But questioning ethics operates through a different temporal rhythm—one that acknowledges human finitude while embracing generational renewal.

Each human life is brief, but humanity persists across generations. This creates a unique dynamic: while individuals may become entrenched in particular answers, the questions themselves persist and renew with each generation. A child born today will ask "What kind of world do I want to live in?" in circumstances unimaginable to their grandparents. The question remains constant; the context that shapes possible answers continuously evolves.

Traditional ethics fears this generational renewal, seeing it as a source of moral decay. Each generation that questions inherited truths threatens the eternal principles on which transcendent ethics depends. Hence the persistent lament about "kids these days" that echoes across millennia—it expresses the anxiety of transcendent frameworks confronting temporal change.

But questioning ethics embraces generational renewal as a source of moral vitality. When young people ask why they should accept inherited arrangements, they open spaces for transformation that habituated adults cannot see. The question "Why must it be this way?" becomes revolutionary simply through being asked anew.

Philosopher John Dewey understood this generational dynamic:

"The young live in an environment of questions; the old live in an environment of settled issues."
— John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916

This is not a flaw to be corrected but the mechanism through which human societies adapt and evolve. Questions that seem naive to those invested in current arrangements may reveal fundamental contradictions invisible to those within the system.

Consider how questioning has transformed attitudes across generations. Questions once dismissed as absurd—"Why can't women vote?" "Why must races be separated?" "Why can't same-sex couples marry?"—became the common sense of subsequent generations. The questions persisted until the transcendent justifications for inequality crumbled.

The #MeToo movement exemplifies this generational dynamic. Behaviors that previous generations accepted as "natural" or "boys will be boys" suddenly faced the question: "Why should we accept this?" The transcendent framework that naturalized harassment couldn't withstand genuine questioning from those who refused to inherit their elders' accommodations.

This generational persistence of questions creates what we might call "moral compound interest." Each generation's questioning builds on the previous, creating cumulative pressure on unjust arrangements. A question dismissed by one generation may be entertained by the next and answered by the third. The temporal rhythm of human life ensures that no answer remains final, no arrangement escapes interrogation forever.

Traditional ethics, committed to eternal principles, cannot account for this generational dynamism. It can only condemn change as decline or reluctantly accommodate it as "development of doctrine." But questioning ethics recognizes generational renewal as the heartbeat of moral progress—not toward some transcendent ideal but toward worlds we continuously create through our questions.

Crisis as Revelation: The Unmasking of Transcendent Authority

The fourth and perhaps most profound misconception in the critique concerns the nature of crisis itself. Traditional ethics views crises as aberrations—departures from the normal order that must be resolved by returning to eternal principles. But questioning ethics recognizes crises as revelatory moments when transcendent justifications collapse, creating openings for genuine questioning that stable times foreclose.

Human history punctuates itself with crises that strip away transcendent authority's mask. These moments—wars, pandemics, economic collapses, ecological disasters—reveal the contingency of arrangements that seemed divinely ordained or naturally necessary. In crisis, the question "What kind of world do we want to live in?" shifts from philosophical speculation to urgent necessity.

The two World Wars exemplify this revelatory function. The first shattered the transcendent authority of European civilization, revealing the barbarism lurking beneath claims to divine mission and cultural superiority. The second exposed the genocidal potential within transcendent ideologies of race and nation. From these ruins emerged new questions—about human rights, international law, and the possibility of perpetual peace—that previous generations couldn't formulate while trapped within transcendent frameworks.

As philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote after World War II:

"We stand before nothingness. The bond with the past threatens to tear apart... But this abyss is also our opportunity."
— Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, 1947

This abyss—the collapse of transcendent meaning—creates space for authentic questioning. When old justifications lie in ruins, we must ask anew what kind of world we wish to build.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a recent demonstration of crisis as revelation. Suddenly, arrangements deemed economically necessary—commuting to offices, constant travel, 24/7 consumption—proved entirely contingent. "Essential workers" revealed themselves as those who actually sustain life, not those who accumulate wealth. Questions suppressed by transcendent appeals to economic necessity erupted: Why do we organize work this way? What do we actually need? Who deserves care?

Climate crisis operates as a slow-motion revelation, steadily stripping away the transcendent justifications for unlimited growth, human dominion over nature, and the externalization of environmental costs. As floods, fires, and storms intensify, the question "What kind of world are we creating?" becomes impossible to ignore. The transcendent myth of human separation from nature collapses in the face of immediate, physical consequences.

Financial crises serve a similar revelatory function. When markets collapse, the transcendent authority of economic "laws" reveals itself as human construction. The 2008 crisis exposed how arrangements justified as natural and efficient were actually contingent choices benefiting particular groups. The question "Why should banks be saved while homeowners are abandoned?" challenged transcendent narratives about moral hazard and market discipline.

These crises do not automatically produce transformation—traditional ethics works frantically to restore transcendent authority, to explain why the crisis changes nothing fundamental. But each crisis creates fissures through which questioning can enter. And unlike transcendent principles, questions can evolve with circumstances, adapting to new revelations and possibilities.

The ancient Greek word "crisis" (κρίσις) originally meant "decision" or "judgment." Crises force decisions that stable times defer, judgments that comfortable circumstances avoid. They are moments when the question "What kind of world do we want to live in?" demands an answer—not from transcendent authority but from we who must inhabit that world.

The Revolutionary Patience of Questions

Understanding these temporal dimensions—the complicity of traditional ethics in current crises, the historical contingency of present arrangements, the generational persistence of questions, and the revelatory nature of crisis—transforms our assessment of questioning ethics' practicality. What seemed naive idealism reveals itself as profound realism about how transformation actually occurs.

Questions possess a revolutionary patience that transcendent principles lack. A principle, once established, must defend itself against all challenges or collapse entirely. But a question can persist through countless incomplete answers, evolving and adapting while maintaining its essential interrogative force. "What kind of world do you want to live in?" meant something different to enslaved peoples than to their descendants fighting Jim Crow, something different again to those confronting algorithmic bias—yet the question's power persists across these transformations.

This patience should not be mistaken for passivity. Questions actively work on those who encounter them, creating what we might call "moral irritation"—a persistent discomfort with unjustified arrangements. Even when power suppresses explicit questioning, the irritation remains, growing stronger with each transcendent justification that fails to satisfy.

Consider how the question of women's equality persisted across centuries. Each transcendent answer—divine ordination, natural complementarity, separate spheres—eventually exhausted itself against the question's persistence. Power structures adapted, offered compromises, invented new justifications, but the question remained: "Why should gender determine possibility?" Today, as that question extends to challenge binary gender itself, we see its continuing revolutionary potential.

The civil rights movement exemplified this revolutionary patience. The question "Why should skin color determine dignity?" persisted through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and continues today in confronting systemic racism. Each partial answer—from "separate but equal" to "colorblindness"—fails to fully address the question, which continues to reveal new dimensions of racial injustice.

Environmental movements demonstrate how questions can lie dormant before erupting with revolutionary force. The question "What are we doing to our planet?" simmered for decades before climate science made it undeniable. Now it reshapes everything from individual consumption to international relations, revealing the inadequacy of every transcendent framework that treats nature as mere resource.

This revolutionary patience operates through what Antonio Gramsci called a "war of position" rather than a "war of maneuver":

"The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare... The war of position demands enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people."
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1929-1935

Questions wage this war of position within consciousness itself, slowly undermining transcendent justifications and creating readiness for transformation when opportunities arise.

The Static Temporality of Traditional Ethics Versus the Dynamic Temporality of Questions

The fundamental distinction between traditional ethics and questioning ethics lies in their relationship to time itself. Traditional ethics operates within what we might call "static temporality"—it seeks eternal principles that transcend temporal change, viewing time as the enemy of moral truth. Questioning ethics embraces "dynamic temporality"—it recognizes time as the medium through which moral understanding develops, viewing change as opportunity rather than threat.

Static temporality manifests in traditional ethics' core assumptions:

• Eternal Principles: Moral truths exist outside time, unchanging and absolute
• Decline Narratives: Change represents falling away from original perfection
• Preservation Imperative: The ethical task is protecting eternal truths from temporal corruption
• Cyclical Return: History should circle back to foundational principles
• Temporal Hierarchy: The past (revelation, founding, discovery) holds authority over present and future

This static view creates numerous problems. It cannot account for genuine moral progress—the abolition of slavery, women's emancipation, LGBTQ+ rights—except as "development" of principles that somehow always existed but remained hidden. It struggles with technological and social innovations that create genuinely new ethical challenges. Most damningly, it provides no resources for addressing crises except returning to principles that often enabled those very crises.

Dynamic temporality, by contrast, recognizes:

• Temporal Emergence: Moral understanding emerges through temporal experience
• Creative Possibility: Time brings new possibilities that past principles cannot anticipate
• Generational Renewal: Each generation contributes to evolving moral understanding
• Crisis as Opportunity: Disruptions create openings for transformation
• Future Orientation: We create the future through present choices rather than recovering the past

This dynamic view aligns with how transformation actually occurs. The question "What kind of world do you want to live in?" acknowledges that the world we inhabit today differs from yesterday's and tomorrow's will differ from today's. It embraces this temporal flow as the condition for moral creativity rather than lamenting it as moral decline.

Philosopher Henri Bergson captured this dynamic temporality:

"Time is invention or it is nothing at all."
— Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907

Questioning ethics embodies this inventive temporality. Each moment presents new possibilities for answering the fundamental question, new configurations of the world we might create together. Rather than seeking to escape time into eternal principles, it works within time to create meaning.

Conclusion: The Dawn of Questioning

The critique that power structures make questioning ethics impractical ultimately reveals more about the critic than the criticized. It exposes a mindset trapped within static temporality, unable to perceive how change actually occurs across generations and through crises. It reflects investment in current arrangements disguised as hardheaded realism. Most revealingly, it demonstrates the very need for questioning ethics—the need to ask why current arrangements should continue rather than assuming their permanence.

We have seen how traditional ethics, far from preventing current crises, has actively enabled them through transcendent justifications that place destructive arrangements beyond questioning. We have recognized the historical contingency of systems that claim eternal necessity. We have traced how questions persist across generations, creating cumulative pressure for transformation. We have witnessed how crises strip away transcendent authority's mask, revealing opportunities for genuine questioning.

The revolutionary potential of questions lies not in their ability to provide final answers but in their persistence through all attempts at final answering. "What kind of world do you want to live in?" cannot be definitively answered because the "you" constantly changes—new generations, new circumstances, new possibilities. This inexhaustibility is not weakness but strength. It ensures that no arrangement, however powerful, escapes interrogation forever.

As we face unprecedented global challenges—climate catastrophe, technological disruption, systemic inequality, potential nuclear annihilation—the practical necessity of questioning ethics becomes undeniable. Traditional ethics offers only the principles that brought us to this precipice. Questioning ethics provides the tools to imagine and create different futures.

The choice is not between naive idealism and practical realism but between static frameworks that preserve destructive arrangements and dynamic questioning that enables transformation. In a world where change accelerates and crises multiply, clinging to eternal principles is not prudent but suicidal. Only by embracing the revolutionary patience of questions can we navigate the rapids of transformation.

The immortal divine persists, but its voice now speaks in questions rather than commands. Each crisis, each generation, each moment presents anew the fundamental question: "What kind of world do you want to live in?" Our answers create the future, but the question itself remains eternal—not as static principle but as dynamic opening, not as transcendent command but as immanent possibility, not as the end of ethics but as its perpetual beginning.

In learning to question well—with patience and urgency, with humility and courage, with awareness of our temporal situation and openness to transformation—we discover not the death of ethics but its resurrection in forms adequate to our unprecedented moment. The dawn of questioning has always been breaking. The question is whether we will finally learn to see by its light.