3.87
If the practical is devotional, it’s such that we can never be sure if our devotion is good. It’s never ‘sufficient’ or ‘good enough,’ and certainly not ‘perfect.’
Sports is often taken as a model for ethics: rule-based enforcement, pure visibility, arbiters aiming for pure objectivity through multiple angles available through instant replay, carefully measured symmetrical lines over the playing field, and winners established through a points-based system.
But ethics isn’t a game or competition. Ethics is an encounter between you and things, with no pre-set rules, pure visibility, full arbiter, symmetry, winners, or points. And yet, there are rules (continuously established within an encounter); visibility (some visibility, some obfuscation from different points of view); evaluation (no pure arbiter); a bridge—i.e., a space of appearances between you and the other—setting up not symmetry but instead an encounter through what is common; and there are, finally, better and worse ways to be.