"While these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing."

- Barak Obama, 2nd Inaugural Speech

Making real, bridging meaning, recognizing the heart of the matter in action. In Obama's speeches one can catch the scent of Hegel. During the campaign of '08 we hear the Swabian echo of "pure self-recognition in absolute otherness" punctuate his "A More Perfect Union" speech. There, a "single moment of recognition...is not enough" but "where we start" and where "perfection begins".

Today, fidelity to founding principle finds itself not in sentimental supplication to inert ideas, finished "for all time", but rather in a duty requiring "new responses", an action and a work, a constant task of making real:

"...if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself... it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned that this fear of error is the not just the error itself?" (PG §74)

Today we hear the same call to move beyond a false sense of perfection into an adroit movement whose certainty resides in a stubborn resolve to dust itself off, to pick itself up in response to shortcoming, confident that real perfection gets annealed through pain and experience. Indeed, "we are made for this moment", for "engagement can more durably lift suspicion and fear." And it's this moment that makes us.

Exceptionalism turns neither on a regard for the simple immediacy of a given image nor the idolatry of accomplishments past. It comes in the guts to liberate ourselves from semblance, in an active, engaged knowing that "we cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics...we must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect."

Who knows if intent or scholarly affinity energize this echo. Perhaps what shows itself cannot be said. And yet, something appears to be "self-sundering or stepping forth", sounding between the lines.

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