When we say that something is good for us, we mean it will allow us either to continue to be what we are or to empower us to become even more fully ourselves, more capable of action and expression. This is why we say food is good and money is good and power is good: these things ward off our annihilation and preserve our being. But this is also why we can be so catastrophically wrong about what is good for us, because we can be catastrophically wrong about who and what we are. This is understandable, because the nature of our own being is one of those things to which we’re standing too close to see properly, or the kind of thing that’s so familiar that we don’t realize how little we actually know about it. Foremost among our misunderstandings about our own nature is the belief that we are fundamentally separate individuals, or even that we are nothing but our bodies. This seems to be because we have two broadly different kinds of experiences: subjective ones “inside” us and objective ones “outside” us, the latter of which others seem to share. We seem to deduce from this a more complete isolation between inside and outside than is actually justified, because despite the differences between these subjective and objective experiences, they are all experiences. What are we? Experience. Consciousness. What you experience isn’t happening to you—it is you. But if even your experiences of yourself are experiences, you have to ask yourself: who is experiencing all these experiences?

In fact, I’m fairly convinced that there isn’t actually any particular “experiencer” of our experiences. As Kant said, all our thoughts and experiences have a subjective form—that is, they must imply a subject for whom they are—but that doesn’t mean that there really is such a subject. Rather than the universe having an objective form, the form of being a “thing” “out there,” it seems more likely to me that the universe actually has a subjective form. It is not only an object, but the subject to which that object—its own self—appears. An infinite self-reflection. Consider: at first glance, there is no way to determine whether I am having an experience or that, instead, an experience of myself experiencing something simply exists, in which case “I,” the person writing this sentence, don’t exist outside the realm of the experiences that happen to include me. For whom are these experiences that include me? For no one, for God, for themselves. By all these things, I mean universal consciousness, an infinite field of subjectivity, of experience that takes its own various qualities as its objects. We are used to saying “I see a chair” and thinking that there are two objects—a chair and “I”—in some sort of objective world “out there,” and that “I” means a particular kind of animal whose organs create images “inside” its head. In fact, there is much greater reason to believe that the only “thing” here is an experience that has the quality of “I see a chair.”

If this is true, then “I,” the experiencer of all “my” experiences, is not the person writing this sentence, but consciousness itself, the same “I” that’s reading this sentence. Your “I” and my “I” are the same thing—what differs is the content of its experience. This changing content of experience happens even for our apparently unified selves when we move through time or space. Now, I am “me” writing this sentence; now, I am “me”, looking around the room. If, in the next moment, “my” experience is of being “you,” reading this sentence, how could you be certain that, a moment ago, “you” were not “me”?

But what does any of this have to do with values, or how we actually live our lives? I claimed that goodness amounts to being more fully what one is, so it is essential to understand what we are in order to be able to act accordingly. When you play a video game, you may control a character that in some sense represents you, but it would be a terrible mistake to identify so completely with the character that you forget the rest of your life outside the game and start to believe that your character is you. When we dream, we are rarely aware of ourselves as being contained within some “higher” perspective, that the person we believe we are in our dream, as well as everything else we encounter, are actually all just figments within a higher mind. Our waking experience of selfhood may not be so different, and the conduct and quality of our lives will change dramatically to the extent that we identify ourselves with the dreamer instead of the dream.

What could be good for such a being, for an infinite, universal mind? If goodness and being are ultimately the same thing, then what is best for the infinite mind is to become conscious of itself, to see itself for what it is and to know everything that it could be. I think this shape of awareness turning back on itself, of subject becoming its own object, is at the very heart of existence, and especially of the phenomenon we call life. It shows us how life can seemingly arise from non-life, and it points to what might be beyond life, to things we have likely only encountered in myth and scripture, to the divine. We know from physics that there are various features of what we would call inanimate matter that makes it react to itself under certain conditions. This is chemistry. And chemistry that reacts to its own reactions, sustains itself as a metabolic system that resists dissolution, is biology, is life. And life that reacts to itself? Self-consciousness. We can guess at what comes next: self-consciousness that reacts to itself, takes itself as its object, and realizes that, all along, it has been everything it thought was other than itself. After all, it’s not that chemistry isn’t physics, or that biology isn’t chemistry, or that self-conscious life isn’t life; it has always been the same unitary thing—reflecting, reflecting, reflecting.

So, what is good for us? To experience this unity. To pay attention to our experience, which is ourself. To be the mirror upon which God is reflected. If there is a meaning to life, a direction toward which life and the universe grows, this is it.

These disasters will grow ever more frequent and severe until this ultimate cause is recognized and eliminated. Even the more proximate solution to the specific problem of climate change—the rapid replacement of our fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable alternatives—is itself made impossible by the acquisitiveness inherent to capitalism, the inability of companies to surrender their profitability even for the sake of their own long-term interests. Because, ultimately, these disasters are caused by a confusion about what’s important. We are all sleepwalking into an absolutely nightmarish future because we believe there is no alternative to our current way of life and the values of individual power and wealth around which it is organized. We can watch movies and read books about people who aspire to other things—freedom, honor, truth, love—but we are taught that those values are “unrealistic,” unsuitable to our benighted world in which we have no choice (we are told) but to fight in a war of all against all for the highest prize of our own survival. We are somehow taught this in the same breath, at least in the United States, as we’re taught to worship Jesus Christ, which is ironic given that he famously said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, that we ought to sell all our possessions and follow him, and that we needn’t worry about ourselves because God, who knows even all the hairs on our head, will not let us come to harm. Nearly no one, not even those who call themselves Christians, can imagine how these teachings could be anything other than hyperbole, how they could be actual advice about how to live. We can’t even imagine it, because it is fundamentally incompatible with what we have been taught is valuable, namely our exclusively individual well being.

But these are indeed some of the truths we need to realize, and I hope it’s clear that nothing I’m talking about is specific to Christianity. All of it flows from the deeper truth that is expressed in the mystical tradition of every major religion, that divinity and creation are one, that each of us is the manifestation of God. We already have, already are, everything we need. And what would be the alternative anyway? A ceaseless, anxious accumulation, and then death. Money, possessions, power, even our individual lives—none of this matters in and of itself. The value of the finite is to be the manifestation of the infinite; divorced from the infinite, the finite is ephemeral and weightless. We must learn to base our values on a fuller understanding of what we really are, and what our universe really is. So long as we continue to believe that we are separate beings, afloat in a universe of separate beings, we will believe that value is ultimately to be found in self-preservation and empowerment, we will continue to accumulate limitlessly, and we will eventually be consumed by disasters of our own making. Ironically, then, even our own instinct for self-empowerment must point beyond this limited understanding of ourselves to the real source of value in our existence: the realization of our own shared divinity, and that of the entire world. Until we come to this realization, our world will continue to burn.

But does it include assassination? Does it include war? To what extent should any kind of political violence be practiced, advocated, or condoned? I’ll say this much for certain: political violence like this assassination is going to be inevitable so long as there are not effective, peaceful alternatives readily available. It is maybe possible for a person to totally refrain from violence even in the face of harm to oneself or to innocent people, but if it is, it must be the result of nearly superhuman discipline, and thus correspondingly rare. This is to say that to expect such infinite restraint from the majority of people in the face of escalating, unpunished abuse is naive to the point of delusion. How about this, from the White House Press Secretary: “violence to combat any sort of corporate greed is unacceptable.” Really? Any sort at all? What about when that corporate greed becomes its own kind of violence?

What happens if we consider the murder of a healthcare profiteer through the lens of self defense? How should we respond to a group of people who intend to steal the means of our survival and leave us for dead, especially if we have no hope of legal protection from them? Should we let such a group commit mass murder, especially of the most vulnerable, for the sake of the ideal of pacifism? Or worse, of civility and decorum? Or are we obliged to stop them, even at the cost of violence we never wished to commit? Is this not the struggle we find ourselves in against those who profit from death, whether it be in the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, or the military industrial complex?

But we need to remember that the real enemy isn’t corporeal, and so there is no number of dead CEOs that, by themselves, will be enough to achieve liberation. Rather, the enemy is the logic of separateness and infinite accumulation that we carry within us like a parasite and which sustains itself through our actions. It is this logic that has manifested itself as the death machine we call capitalism, and while the United Healthcare CEO was certainly a privileged cog in that machine, he was trapped in it just like we all are. In the end, we are all responsible to some extent for the machine’s continued functioning.

The dual nature of this problem—that it is everywhere but nowhere—mirrors that of the ethics of attention I talked about last time. For us to act properly, I said, we must first grasp our similarly dual nature as individuals, but also as manifestations of the universe, of the All. However much we disagree with the practices and direction of our society, we are in some sense responsible for them, because we as individuals are products of this society, and this society has no other existence from that of the individuals within it.

Therefore, changing our society and changing ourselves are one and the same thing. This is true in two senses. When we change our individual selves, society changes as a result, and that society feeds back on and influences us as individuals. But also, because of this feedback loop, it turns out that our self is never just our individual body, but the loop itself, back and forth between society and individual. What happens “out there,” to “other people,” will always find its way back inside us, which shows us that outside and inside are always two sides of a whole.

It is therefore a mistake to believe that when we commit violence against another person we are not also committing it against our own self, our own universal body. This is not to say that such self-inflicted violence is never justified, any more than it is to say that it is never justified for our immune system to destroy our own cancerous cells. But to lose sight of the fact that we are always acting from and against a single universal body is to risk the equivalent of an autoimmune reaction that destroys the systems which keep us alive.

Since the shooting, I’ve asked myself, as probably many people have, whether this might be the most effective way, in the present moment, of advancing our liberation struggle, whether this is the kind of act this moment requires of us whether we like it or not. But in considering the nature of what I’ve called the ethics of attention, I’ve come to believe that it is far less important to consider the effectiveness of particular actions than it is to always bear in mind the kind of dual beings we are. To the extent that we do so, and pay attention to the total situation in which we find ourselves, our actions will be appropriate. To the extent that the assassin acted for the good of all, rather than out of a need for individual revenge or empowerment (as so many men with guns do), I am prepared to condone his act, and to hope it will provoke the kind of change that our society requires without resort to further violence. Likewise, to the extent that he was willing to take another life solely to appease his own selfish anger, I condemn his act, and caution against the allure of self-righteous violence. Both motivations were present in his case—the selfish and the selfless—as they are in all cases to varying degrees.

So, should we be plotting the assassination of CEOs? If that’s really the best we can do for the world, given our circumstances, abilities, and limitations, then the answer, by definition, is yes. If we can agree that violence can ever be called for—e.g. in self defense or to protect the innocent—then we must accept that, in such a scenario, we should be prepared to carry it out.

But.

Violence is not the only or even the primary means to liberation, and I suspect that nearly everyone, nearly always, could find a better means of service to the universal body. That’s almost certainly true even for the assassin, but something kept him from finding it, and violence was the best he could do. So it is imperative for all of us to first do the work of understanding our dual nature as individual manifestations of the universal body, and to learn how to let our actions flow from that understanding. To do otherwise, to act as separate individuals against the Other, to cast ourselves as avenging angels waging war against demonic capitalists, is to fall prey to the very logic that is our real enemy, and thus to strengthen it.

Today, however, I want to begin to talk about what an alternative ethical system might look like, one which is based on the understanding that part and whole are as mutually essential as a body and its organs. When we grasp separateness and wholeness as two modes of the same thing, the ethical and political practices that result are radically different from the ones that dominate our thought today. In contrast to our current ethical systems which function in terms of notions like blame, consequences, actions, and intentions, all of which I refer to as the ethics of intention, I want to propose an ethics of attention.

As I’ve said, the ethics of intention are the natural result of a worldview in which an actor is fundamentally separate from the world they act on. It is essential to this worldview that the actor is in some way entirely undetermined by the world around them; this is what is meant by “free will” as the term is typically used. This free will is often taken to be the thing that makes a person who they are, and without which they would be a soulless automaton. The notion that everything is connected as part of a whole denies the possibility that anything could be entirely undetermined in the way necessary for free will, because within such a whole everything determines everything else. Considered in such a way, the universe is not a mass of billiard balls “freely” careening off one another, but rather a sheet in which every thread is bound to every other one, either directly or indirectly. That’s why this mutual connectedness, this determinism, is so deeply troubling to most people: it becomes difficult for them to see how they or anyone else could be a “person” if this is the case. However, this would just be to adopt the opposite of their current position; instead of believing that the whole is nothing but the parts, they fear that the parts are nothing but the whole.

But as I’ve tried to show over and over, the truth is not one or the other but both. Each person and thing determines itself against everything else, but that means that it simultaneously needs everything else in order to be itself. Each thing points to the other, which points back to it; everything is the other of the other. This relationship is what I’ve called either mutual essence or self-difference. If we understand each person and thing in this way, what we see is not the annihilation of what it means to be a person, but rather its radical expansion. Each of us is no longer merely an individual, we are the manifestation of the universe in individual form. Just so, what we mean by freedom radically expands. If we are merely individuals, even if we have free will as it’s usually understood, we’re still bound on all sides by the people and things who aren’t us. When we understand ourselves as the entire universe incarnate, there is nothing to hold us back. Indeed, to the extent that we learn to identify ourselves with all things, there is nothing that can happen contrary to our will. This is the true meaning of the prayer “Thy will be done”: in willing wholeheartedly for the universe to be what it is, and ourselves along with it, we set ourselves free.

Now, this is the time to point out that what I’m saying does not mean that it doesn’t matter what we do, that nothing matters, or that the universe has no room for improvement. This again would be to miss the trees for the forest, just as claiming that our problems are caused by evil people misses the forest for the trees. We have to understand ethics in the context of mutual essence just as we had to understand individual people in that context. We have to understand that, on the one hand, every action is an expression of the whole universe while, on the other hand, the way the universe acts is as individuals deliberating and making choices. If you only see the first part, you’re a nihilist, but if you only see the second part, you’re a moralist. Once again, the truth is both, in a relationship of mutual essence.

What does this mean in practice? It means that, on the one hand, actions are fully determined. Every situation has an infinite history, as does every person in that situation, and what happens next flows directly from what happened before. Furthermore, every person in every situation will always, always, act in their own self interest, because action is the outward expression of the actor’s understanding of what is good for them. Now, this does not mean that actors will never take others’ wellbeing into account when they make their judgments, only that it is impossible to act against one’s interests. To do so would be to succeed at failing—a contradiction. So, just as there is no such thing as free will in the way we normally talk about it, so too is there no such thing as altruism in the way we normally talk about it.

But then how are we to understand all the actions that seem like they’re altruistic, such as self-sacrifice? This proves something stronger than just the fact that someone else’s good can be good for me since, in the case of self-sacrifice, I appear to be giving up what’s good for me for the sake of what’s good for someone else. If I just tried to show that all action is always in the self-interest of the actor, what’s going on here? It means that my self-interest, indeed my self, has extended beyond my individuality. Real altruism isn’t self-lessness, but rather self-fullness.

What I’m talking about, of course, is love.

And this is the other side of an ethics built on mutual essence. To the degree that I identify myself with other people and equate my interests with theirs, I am no longer pretending that my actions are either self-serving or altruistic, rather, I am making self-service and altruism the same thing, in just the same way that my individual self and the whole universe are the same thing. If we understand ourselves as an expression of the universe, and I mean really feel ourselves to be that (which requires lifelong effort), our actions will not only be in our own ultimate self-interest (because we have acted from a complete understanding of our nature) but will also be in everyone else’s best interest as well, because we know that all people and things are nothing but our own self.

The heart of the ethics of attention, therefore, is learning our own true universal nature. This is in contrast to the ethics of intention, which concerns itself with the particular actions of fictional disconnected individuals. It might seem at first that this shift in focus would produce a profound, contemplative passivity, and while it may well result in less observable activity, the activity it does produce will be more effective for two reasons. The first is the reason I just gave, which is that a truer understanding of our nature will educate us about which objects and actions will actually serve our ultimate interests. Rather than chase things that either don’t matter or may even hurt us, the ethics of attention instructs us to use our time reflecting on what we are and what would be good for us.

The second reason has to do with the fundamental nature of action, that it flows directly from the actor’s self interest. As I tried to briefly demonstrate, whatever we may tell ourselves about the motivations behind our actions, there is an absolutely unbroken chain between an actor’s self-concept, their understanding of their interests, and the action they calculate to best achieve those interests. Regardless of how much you’re told that doing such and such is morally correct, and of how much you are punished when you fail to do so, you will not do it until you have been convinced that it is in your best interest. Sadly, for most people, it is precisely the avoidance of punishment that constitutes their reason for acting or not acting. But once we understand this ironclad relationship between self-concept and action, we are in a position to consciously influence our own actions in the only way possible: not by somehow spontaneously acting differently, but by deepening our understanding of who we, the actor, really are and what we want.

And we do this not through any particular action (because, again, the actions flow automatically from our self-concept), but rather just by paying attention to ourselves and our actions. This is also just what we’re already doing all the time. Just as we will always act in our best interests, we will always react to the outcome of those actions and adjust accordingly. What is different about what I’m describing is the need to perform this reflection consciously. In addition to the feedback loop that’s always in place between our self-interest and our reality, I’m talking about taking a step back to consciously consider that feedback loop, in essence creating another, higher, feedback loop between your individual self in the world and something else—your universal self beyond the world. Just as the results of past actions will change our approach to future actions, placing our attention on our individual self and its actions will change that self, along with the actions that flow from it. Hence, the ethics of attention: to become fully, in our own awareness, the kind of being we already are.

So, sure, there are particular practices I could tell you to do that would almost certainly be beneficial to this process. Meditation is the obvious one, and I hope what I’ve written here will help explain why meditation works. But if you pay attention to your experiences and feelings, and if you take them seriously and explore them, you’ll find your own way. You already are. So just pay attention.

I want to offer two—if not explanations, then ways of understanding what happened. The first is pragmatic and political; the second, deeper and metaphysical. My political analysis is that this result should be a repudiation of the Clintonite Democratic Party that co-opted Republican economic positions in the 90s. (They adopted some Republican social positions too, as on crime and immigration, but even those have an obvious economic valence). When they did so, America was left with two pro-corporate parties pushing neoliberal economic policies at the expense of the working class. Since both parties were in basic agreement on how they thought the economy should function—namely, that it should enrich the class to which the politicians and donors of both parties belong, with perhaps some of the wealth “trickling down”—they could only distinguish themselves on social issues, which lead to the deepening of the culture wars that have carried through to this day. 

What neither party establishment appears to have understood is how dissatisfied most Americans have become with the state of their lives under this socioeconomic system, and with good reason. The general economic trend of the last 40+ years in America (and in other countries to which neoliberalism was exported) has been the weakening of social services, increased costs of living, stagnant wages, deeper debt, deeper precarity, and rampant economic inequality, all accompanied by a profound collective mental health crisis marked by skyrocketing levels of drug addiction and increased suicide rates. Add to this the worsening climate crisis, about which nearly nothing has been done (arguably due to the government’s embrace of market-friendly regulatory ideology), and it should have been obvious that the way we organize our society needs to fundamentally change.

Change. That was the promise that swept Obama into office in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. He was given an overwhelming mandate to transform our government into something that would serve the people at the expense of the powerful. And he failed. I’m not going to talk about why I think he failed or whether it was even possible for him to succeed; I only wish to make the point that through eight years of the Obama presidency, the people’s desire for fundamental change went unsatisfied.

That brings us to the 2016 election. On the right wing, the voices calling for fundamental disruption eventually coalesced around Donald Trump, the classic strongman demagogue who promised to be the people’s avenging angel against the elites who’d been screwing them for decades. On the left wing, those voices coalesced around Bernie Sanders, who sought to fight right-leaning populism with left-leaning populism and reclaim the Democrats’ historic role as champions of the working class. Republican voters, despite initial opposition from establishment politicians like Jeb Bush and John McCain (and then cynical endorsement by others such as Mitch McConnell), nominated their populist candidate. Democratic voters…didn’t. Whereas the Democrats had been the anti-establishment party under Obama, they now became the pro-establishment party, advocating for more of the same. In a moment of such obvious populist fervor, the result should have been predictable. And so, we got our first four years of Trump.

I suspect that Biden’s victory in 2020 had much more to do with the fact that he got to play the anti-establishment candidate against Trump’s status as incumbent, and with the unique economic conditions presented by the pandemic, than with any actual policy substance. And now, in 2024, we got virtually the same result from virtually the same contest we had in 2016, only moreso. 

What’s the lesson? Americans have been voting to screw the elites in every election since at least 2008. We can talk about whether those votes have had or will have the desired effect (they haven’t, and won’t), but I think it’s obvious at this point that that’s what they were meant to do. If we are going to keep our country from descending into fascism and/or obscene corporatism, there needs to be a political party that runs first and foremost on a platform of working class solidarity, of the many against the few. It’s become a cliche, but it’s true: Bernie would have won in 2016, and he would have won in 2024. I expect that the only person who will be able to beat the representative of the Christofascist/corporatist wing of American politics in a Presidential election, assuming we continue to have those, is someone running on Bernie’s basic platform of progressive, working class solidarity. Adopting this platform will mean fewer donations from billionaires, fewer positions on company boards, and fewer lucrative speaking gigs. Sadly, this might be enough to dissuade the people presently at the helm of the Democratic Party from doing so, since they make at least as much money out of power as they do in power (I mean, my god, think of how much money the Harris campaign raised, and who got to pocket it). But if they actually want to win, this is what they must do.

But all of this is only a preamble to the point I really want to make, and which I’m probably more willing to stand behind. I am, after all, not a professional political commentator (for what those people’s expertise has proven to be worth), nor do I honestly spend much time at all thinking about electoral politics. That said, I don’t think any of the arguments I’ve made are particularly original or even controversial among political progressives, and strong cases have been made for them by people much more qualified to do so. Plus, most of the counterarguments I’ve heard, such as those that point to positive economic trends under Biden, somehow discount the validity of massive popular dissatisfaction on the basis of quantitative abstractions like “economic growth.” The response to such counterarguments is: “if everything’s going so well, why is everyone so angry?” The latter is the fact, not the former.

But no, the deeper point I want to make is about the dangers of blame and moralistic thinking, by which I mean the belief that some people can and should act otherwise than they do, and that the reason they don’t is that they are somehow unreasonably malevolent. Specifically, of course, I’m talking about the tendency of some people to attribute the outcome of this election to bad people acting badly rather than understanding it as an expression of the state of our society as a whole. If we think about this election as the former, as bad people acting badly, we too quickly absolve ourselves of any responsibility we might have had for the outcome. In a superficial sense, this should apply most of all to the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party as an institution. They should be made to explain how they failed to convince enough people that their vision for the country’s future was better than that of a mentally deteriorating criminal racist/misogynist. For all the money they collected from Democratic voters, whom they terrified with the rhetoric that Trump was bringing fascism to America, the Harris campaign and the Democratic establishment owe us an explanation for their failure that is more substantial than “I guess most Americans are racist.” In this moment, and always, we need to resist the notion that voters can fail politicians; rather, we should demand an account of how they came up short without blaming people for not already seeing things their way. Harris and the Democrats failed to make enough people believe that their lives would be considerably better voting Democrat than voting for Donald Trump to tear everything down. And what a failure that was.

Even more deeply, though, it’s all of us who need to reflect on how we’ve allowed our society to come to this. How is it that Harris was the best we could do? How was her non-vision for a future America that was in no way different from the America of the past four years the best we could collectively imagine? Why do we allow massive corporations and billionaires like Elon Must exert so much control not only on our political lives but our personal lives as well? Why do we spend most of our time working to enrich corporations at the expense of our own spiritual well being? Why do we trade freedom for comfort? Why do we pay taxes to a government that spends them on bombing children rather than housing and feeding our neighbors? This, again, is not about blame; it is a call for us to try to understand why we’ve made the choices we’ve made and, perhaps most importantly, what we believe is valuable and good in life. I have argued before that there can be nothing good that is only good for any of us individually, or for some of us at the expense of others. What is good is only good when it is good for all. We need to remember this whenever we are urged by those in power to fearfully cling to some perceived good at the cost of denying it to others, because even if we cling to it, it will no longer be good. What I’m saying, what I’ve been saying, is that none of us individually can be what we’re meant to be until we understand that we are all part of a whole, and our individual interests are the same as our collective interests. We need to realize this, and then expand our imagination of the kind of world we want to have. What does this look like? No surprise: solidarity. Mutual aid. Ecological stewardship.

In closing, I am not pleased by the result of the election, but I believe it was in some sense necessary, and I am cautiously optimistic that it will mark a turning point in our expectations of what we expect from our government. This is not to say that the next several years won’t be ugly—they will—only that, with some luck and enough self-interest on the part of the billionaire class to keep the country functional enough to keep making money, I hope this will be the end of a particular corporatist trend in American politics, and the beginning of a more progressive one. Let’s all hope for that.

And now, on with the show.

I read a piece by Sam Butler a few days ago on the Drop Site News Substack that discusses the kind of government that tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would like to see in this country (and elsewhere), and how they are using the Trump/Vance campaign to try to bring it about. These moguls have latched onto an antidemocratic ideology sometimes called the Dark Enlightenment, which posits not that government should be run like a business, but rather that government should be a business—providing a service to customers (not citizens) who have no say in how the business is run other than via the customer support line. Dissatisfied customers can take their business elsewhere (to other technocratic “realms”) or be mowed down by the company’s privately-owned killing machines.

Given that this rightly sounds horrible to most people, why would some of the world’s richest people (and some of the world’s smuggest political “thinkers”) want such a government, and how do they think they’re going to sell this to regular people in a country that ostensibly prides itself on freedom and self-government? The answer to the first question is, of course, that all these people believe that they’ll be in the C-suite class in this new arrangement, just as they are in the current one, only with even more money and power and even less interference from the little people. The answer to the second question has to do with the supposed advantages such a new form of government would have over our current democracy, chiefly: that it would be more productive. They use other words, too—cleaner, more attractive, more “rational”—but these are all simply either means to or byproducts of greater productivity. Productivity of what? Again, there are concrete answers like money or technological innovation, but even these will amount to the means of achieving ever more productivity.

Why would ever greater productivity be good or desirable? The Elon Musks of the world wouldn’t have an answer because they wouldn’t even recognize it as a valid question. The best the “thinkers” in this group can offer is a vision of a future utilitarian utopia in which the maximum possible pleasure or “value” is achieved by filling the universe with planet-sized computers simulating uncountably many happy virtual consciousnesses. I’m not making this up.

But where is the actual good in any of this? For these people, and many others who consciously or unconsciously believe in the merit of a capitalist system, “good” simply means “more,” and the more productivity you can achieve in whatever you’re doing, the more you can make even more. Impediments are to be removed, frictions smoothed out. New products will be made to allow this, giving rise to new markets and more productivity. The world these people want to live in is just the one we already have, only moreso. It then becomes easier to see both why ordinary people might go along with this dystopian vision: it’s a confirmation and a continuation of a myth they already believe.

Our country (and increasingly, our world) is one that has succumbed to the myth of individualism, which teaches us the importance of fortifying ourselves against others and competing with them in a zero-sum game to accomplish our individual ends. This is a worldview that fears “the other,” and defines the individual self in opposition to it. Because that conflict with the other is the foundation of the self, and the self would cease to exist without it, it must rage on forever in an ever-escalating (sometimes literal) arms race. Think of how deeply interwoven gun ownership and private insurance are in this country, and realize that this is a culture that sees the world and other people as inherently dangerous. But without the possibility of ever achieving definitive safety (since a definitive reconciliation with the other would be the death of the self), the only strategy is to accumulate ever more money and power and try to control the world as much as possible for one’s own ends.

Except that all of these would-be rugged individualists do not realize that they are elements of a global system. We all are, all the time. And part of what any self-regulating system does is promote elements that are conducive to its functioning and exclude elements that would interfere with its functioning. In this case, the system is not the global body of the earth and all its lifeforms, but rather the ideological virus of domination (in its latest variant, capitalism), which has hijacked the functioning of that body for its own ends. It is a parasitic life form that, as part of its own life cycle and reproduction, must destroy or neutralize the host’s defenses and compel the host to act as its instrument. In the global body, therefore, anyone who challenges the parasitic ideology is excluded from institutions of power and, if necessary, killed, while those most willing to advance that ideology find themselves with every resource and opportunity to do so. Fools like Elon Musk believe that they are rich because getting rich is what everyone is supposed to do and that they are simply very capable of doing so. They think they got where they are all by themselves, that they’re the ones driving the bus. But they, like us, are hosts to the parasite, which ensures that the degree to which a person is likely to support the status quo is the degree to which they will have the power to do so.

One of the best things we can do to expel this parasitic ideology and heal our global body is to ask ourselves what is actually important. As I said, the proponents of capitalism and domination and productivity do not actually have an answer. “More” is a bad infinity, all means and no end, an unattainable future for which everything real is sacrificed. It is to their advantage, then, that the question of value and purpose is never asked or even recognized as a valid question, and that the people who ask it are chided as people who don’t live in the “real world.” Because when we ask the question of what is actually good, and when we find the answer, we see that it is the opposite of what the parasite wants. The parasite—which is just the belief in pure separateness, pure difference between self and other and all the various organs of the universal body—thrives on conflict and domination. What is good doesn’t contradict difference, but situates it within wholeness. What is good, therefore, is love, kindness, generosity—all these things that let us see ourselves in other people and the world. When we realize this, we all become mirrors within which the world is reflected, and the world becomes a mirror for us. In place of a bad infinity, which never arrives, we witness the infinite good which is always present. 

Here is a condensed version of the Parable, in which the God the Father is personified as the lord. The identity of the servant is revealed later.

The lord sits in state, in rest and in peace. The servant stands before his lord, respectfully, ready to do his lord’s will. The lord looks on his servant very lovingly and sweetly and mildly. He sends him to a certain place to do his will. Not only does the servant go, but he dashes off and runs at great speed, loving to do his lord’s will. And soon he falls into a dell and is greatly injured…I was amazed that this servant could so meekly suffer all this woe; and I looked carefully to know if I could detect any fault in him, or if the lord would impute to him any kind of blame; and truly none was seen, for the only cause of his falling was his good will and his great desire…Then this courteous lord said this: See my beloved servant, what harm and injuries he has had and accepted in my service for my love, yes, and for his good will. Is it not reasonable that I should reward him for his fright and his fear, his hurt and his injuries and all his woe? And furthermore, is it not proper for me to give him a gift, better for him and more honourable than his own health could have been? Otherwise, it seems to me that I should be ungracious. And in this an inward spiritual revelation of the lord’s meaning descended into my soul, in which I saw that this must necessarily be the case, that his great goodness and his own honour require that his beloved servant, whom he loved so much, should be highly and blessedly rewarded forever, above what he would have been if he had not fallen, yes, and so much that his falling and all the woe that he received from it will be turned into high, surpassing honour and endless bliss.

…

The place which the lord sat on was unadorned, on the ground, barren and waste, alone in the wilderness. His clothing was wide and ample and very handsome, as befits a lord…But his sitting on the ground, barren and waste, signifies this: He made man’s soul to be his own city and his dwelling place, which is the most pleasing to him of all his works. And when man had fallen into sorrow and pain, he was not wholly proper to serve in that noble office, and therefore our kind Father did not wish to prepare any other place, but sat upon the ground, awaiting human nature, which is mixed with earth, until the time when by his grace his beloved Son had brought back his city into its noble place of beauty by his hard labour,

…

I saw the lord sitting in state, and the servant standing respectfully before his lord…Outwardly he was simply dressed like a labourer prepared to work, and he stood very close to the lord, not immediately in front of him but a little to one side, and that on the left; his clothing was a white tunic, scanty, old and all worn…There was a treasure in the earth which the lord loved…it is a food which is delicious and pleasing to the lord…I watched, wondering what kind of labour it could be that the servant was to do. And then I understood that he was to do the greatest labour and the hardest work there is. He was to be a gardener, digging and ditching and sweating and turning the soil over and over, and to dig deep down, and to water the plants at the proper time. And he was to persevere in his work, and make sweet streams to run, and fine and plenteous fruit to grow…And all this time the lord was to sit in exactly the same place, waiting for the servant whom he had sent out…In the servant is comprehended the second person of the Trinity, and in the servant is comprehended Adam, that is to say all men…For in all this our good Lord showed his own Son and Adam as only one man. The strength and the goodness that we have is from Jesus Christ, the weakness and blindness that we have is from Adam, which two were shown in the servant…The sitting of the Father symbolizes the divinity, that is to say to reveal rest and peace, for in the divinity there can be no labour.

…

[after the servant returns] the lord does not sit on the ground in the wilderness, but in his rich and noblest seat, which he made in heaven most to his liking. Now the Son does not stand before the Father as a servant before the lord, pitifully clothed, partly naked, but stands immediately before the Father, richly clothed in joyful amplitude, with a rich and precious crown upon his head. For it was revealed that we are his crown, which is the Father’s joy, the Son’s honour, the Holy Spirit’s delight, and endless marvellous bliss to all who are in heaven…Now the Son, true God and true man, sits in his city in rest and in peace, which his Father has prepared for him by his endless purpose, and the Father in the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Father and in the Son.

Beneath the imagery and the emotion of the parable, we can also see the same three-part (Hegelian) movement we’ve seen before in the context of how all things relate to each other. The lord, i.e. God the Father, is the universe as substance, as the All that simply is. We can see this from his passivity, from the way he simply sits on the ground while the servant toils. The servant, meanwhile, differs from the lord in dress, demeanor, and ability. We can think of this as the moment wherein a thing is defined in contrast to its other. This is humanity as separate from God and from creation. Finally, though, after the servant has tilled the earth, literally putting himself into it, he is revealed to be God the Son, and God the Father now has a place on earth, uniting the earthly and the divine. This is the moment of mutual essence, or what I’ve called self-difference, wherein each thing can only be what it is in relationship with everything else. Just as the servant was rewarded for his suffering even more than if he had never fallen, so is the product of this reflection greater than if the separation had never taken place, since it is only in separation that all of these things could have their own existence such that they can give each other their mutual existence. God is then to be found in the earth, in creation, and in every person, and when we become consciously aware of this, our consciousness becomes a mirror within which God is reflected, who in turn is our own reflection. God is and always has been everything, but this is the process of development in which we participate, by which God becomes conscious of himself through us, through our consciousness, which is his consciousness. Our seeing him in ourselves is, in the same action, him seeing himself through us (which is us seeing ourselves through him, and so on).

So, it’s crucial that we don’t stop at the moment of separation and cling to our identity as individuals, and instead take the next step of seeing ourselves in others and in the universe at large. I’ve argued that the “reunion” is inevitable because even gross individual self-interest will bring one to realize that their own goals and wellbeing can only ultimately be achieved by realizing one’s place within the whole. But the separation, as long as it endures, is the source of every kind of suffering and “evil.” The belief that one’s being, what one fundamentally is, is defined by the opposition to everyone and everything else, leads to the feeling that one lacks something they need and must compete with others to get it, without realizing that we already have everything we need and the people with whom we’d compete are our own self. As I argued last time, this separation and the suffering it produces is in some sense necessary, and that everything we do, even in our confusion, is part of the work that must be done to realize our true nature. But our task is to reduce that suffering by doing whatever we can to bring about that realization, and there’s no better place to begin than with ourselves.

O, wretched sin what are you? You are nothing. For I saw that God is in everything; I did not see you. And when I saw that God has made everything, I did not see you. And when I saw that God is in everything, I did not see you. And when I saw our Lord Jesus Christ seated in our soul so honorably, and love and delight and rule and guard all that he has made, I did not see you. And so I am certain that you are nothing…

• Julian of Norwich

[Cosmic] consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or ever will enter into it; a great deal of this is, of course, from the point of view of self consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true.

• Richard Bucke

In his book, Cosmic Consciousness, Richard Bucke tries to define the mystical consciousness possessed by Buddha and Jesus, among others, and one of the traits he claims is common to that “cosmic consciousness” is the belief that there is no evil in the world and there never has been. To most of us, this seems like an incredible claim; “absurd,” as he acknowledges. A few times in the past couple weeks, I’ve made the claim that the universe is indeed perfect, at least from a certain perspective. Namely, I’ve claimed that the universe is perfect as a singular whole because it just is what it is and couldn’t have been otherwise; it is the One, the All, not only God’s creation but God itself. 

And yet, we’re living in a moment of climate crisis, rampant inequality, and genocide, with every reason to believe that things are going to get worse before they get better. How can we possibly call this perfect? In the sense that an acorn is perfectly itself, but is imperfectly the oak tree that it will become. Where we are now is a product of all our collective choices, and what we do next will come as a reaction to where we are now. Perfection is thus always mixed with imperfection so long as there is a gap between what a thing is and what it could grow to be. If we accept that this moment is a necessary step on the path to a better world, then this moment is also good in the sense that, despite the tremendous pain and suffering, it is bringing us closer to what we can become.

Many people will deny the necessity of our current situation and say instead that those “responsible” for the innumerable daily atrocities we witness could and should have acted differently. To this I say: they would have acted differently if they’d had different reasons for action, which would have been different if the situation had been different, which would have been different if history had been different, and on and on. These atrocities are merely the fruit of the tree of which we are all branches. I think people would prefer to believe that there is something innately good and moral in them that has nothing to do with the circumstances that created them, and that, even if they’d been in the same position of someone they condemn, lived that person’s same life exactly, they’d have made a different choice. From where I’m sitting, it’s much easier to see why someone would want to believe such a thing than to prove how it could possibly be so.

People will ask questions like, “so you think genocide is good?!” In the sense that this is meant, that is, whether I think genocide is laudable and something we ought to be doing, the answer is, obviously, no. I can, and do, fervently wish that things had happened differently without believing that they actually could have. There is danger in believing that a better world can be brought about by, on the one hand, congratulating ourselves on a moral fortitude most of us have never had to prove, and, on the other hand, condemning others for making the choices any of us would have made in their shoes.

The real work of bringing about a better world is that of realizing our dual nature as individuals who are nevertheless part of a whole. From our perspective as individuals, we are in some sense opposed to the universe outside ourselves, and we must in some way remain meaningfully separate, otherwise we would simply dissolve into it, as we do in death. But this separation is also why we can sometimes imagine that we and everyone else are not merely fruit of the same universal tree.

The crucial step is to realize that, though we are in some sense separate and distinct from the universe, we just as much rely on it for our substance, our literal sustenance. We come from it, are nothing without it, and need it to persist as these momentary eddies within the stream of the universe. We are different in arrangement and perspective, but not substance.

So, in the sense that we are part of the universe, we are perfect: we are what we are, and could not be otherwise. But we are imperfectly what we can and will become. The root of our imperfection, our suffering, and what we might call sin or evil is not our distinction from the universe, which is necessary, but the failure to subsequently bridge that distinction by realizing that the objective and the subjective, the infinite and the finite, the whole and the part are not mutually exclusive but are rather mutually essential. Neither can be anything without the other; there can be no whole without parts, no river without water.

This is why I argue that our primary ethical task, the ultimate goal toward which all our actions not only should but will lead, in time, is the realization of our true nature as an expression of the whole universe, of God, not by exalting or effacing our individuality but by recognizing it in its proper context. The sooner we do, the sooner things will really begin to change.

But what actually is suffering? There are many different kinds and degrees of suffering, but what do they all have in common? I think the answer may be surprisingly simple. Suffering is not pain, for as the saying goes, “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Rather, suffering is the belief that the present moment should be other than it is. I think there’s a fair amount of complexity hidden in this simple definition though, and much of it is contained in the word “should.” This is a word that can have many different implications depending on its context, but I think we’re primarily concerned with two: one meaning of “should” is evaluative and amounts to the claim that the situation would be better if things had occurred differently. Such a claim would seem to be ambivalent about whether or not things could actually have been otherwise: it accepts that its claim may be perfectly hypothetical. 

Opposed to this evaluative meaning of the word “should” is the much more forceful, moralistic meaning of the word, which creates a space for other moralistic words such as “wrong,” “evil,” or “sin.” When we use this meaning of the word should, someone or something is in the wrong for the way things have turned out. There seems to be an unavoidable implication of agency here too, a claim that someone or something chose to do something wrong, even when such a claim would seem to be ridiculous on reflection, like blaming your computer for not working the way you expect. This is because moralistic thinking is inextricable from the possibility of choice: only freely chosen acts can be good or evil as those words are typically understood.

Because of this insistence on the necessity of free choice, the moralistic meaning of the word “should” also makes a much stronger claim about the nature of possibility than the evaluative meaning: according to the moralistic meaning, things absolutely could have happened differently because it was possible for different choices to have been made. Without that possibility, that is, if everything that happens is predetermined, there is no possibility of free choice, and thus the moral force of the word vanishes.

What does this have to do with suffering? The belief that things could be otherwise is only possible if we mistakenly believe we live in a universe of separate, disconnected things, because in a connected universe that expresses itself as a whole, to change one thing is to change everything, and any one thing that happens is caused by everything else. In short, without separation, there is no space for blame. Just so, it is only the belief in a universe of separate things that allows one to believe in a separate self that is suffering as a result of the “free” actions of some other separate being. We can see then that suffering has an even simpler meaning than the belief that things should be otherwise: suffering is just the belief that one has been wronged by another, whether it is another person, some inanimate thing, or the universe, or God. Curiously, this other may even be, and often is, one’s own self.

Most of us will therefore attempt to alleviate our suffering by righting these perceived wrongs and/or putting ourselves in a position to avoid being wronged in the future. This latter is the drive to empower ourselves, to make ourselves more capable of resisting others, expressing ourselves, and achieving our desires. In other words, we are all caught up in a process of fleeing suffering while pursuing empowerment. I don’t mean this as a value judgment, but rather as a purely descriptive statement of what it means to be any kind of living being; to flee suffering and pursue empowerment is as natural and inevitable as the flow of time. However, as we attempt to alleviate our suffering, both personally and collectively, we must eventually realize that suffering will be inevitable so long as we maintain an identity in opposition to others, a separate self. In other words, an ego. Because so long as any “other” remains, there will be a limit to our empowerment and an incessant return of suffering. The failure to realize this has caused us to treat the earth and other people as potential threats to our ego, our power, or our “freedom.” We have therefore tried to dominate these others, in some cases to literally consume them, and to transform them into extensions of ourselves. This drive, and the misconception on which it is based, is ancient, but its modern form is, of course, capitalism.

But as I’ve said, the futility of this attempt to avoid suffering by destroying or consuming the other will eventually become unavoidable for each of us individually and for humanity as a whole. So long as there is a separate self, an ego, there must be an other against which the ego can define itself. This is the moment of negative relatedness I’ve written about before that is necessary for there to be separate, intelligible things at all. Without this negative relationship, also called “duality,” there would be only an infinite indistinctness. But this negativity also binds the things it opposes together into this relationship in which neither can be what it is without the other. This explains some common and apparently contradictory behavior, namely, the tendency of nearly everyone from time to time (and some people very often) to wallow in their own suffering, even and especially instead of doing anything to alleviate it. This is because most of us identify ourselves with the ego, the self that is defined by its separateness. Suffering actually strengthens this sense of self that’s based in separateness because it sharpens the opposition between self and other—again, curiously, even when the other who’s supposedly wronged us is our own stupid self. This probably also does a lot to explain why even those people who are least persecuted by others nevertheless claim to be among the most persecuted: the opposition, imagined or not, strengthens their separate, exclusive identity. Most importantly, though, this shows that suffering and the ego cannot exist without each other because the ego needs the other for its existence, but the other is also the cause of its incessant suffering.

Earlier, I said that suffering may be the engine of ethics, of action in general. This is true even once we realize the futility of trying to abolish suffering by dominating everyone and everything around us. Because once we begin to despair at this futility, something or another will make us realize that the only way out of suffering is to dissolve the sense of our separate self, such that there is no more absolute difference between that self and the other. There will then be no more other to wrong us and no more self to be wronged. This of course does not mean we should try to pretend that there are no differences at all between things, but rather that we must realize that all difference is only self-difference, that every particular thing only is what it is as part of a whole and in relationship to every other thing, like the organs in a body. The separate self, the ego, does have an important role to play in allowing us to differentiate and objectify the elements of our experience; as I said, without separateness and negativity, there is a sense in which things as such don’t even exist. But that separate self is also the source of suffering, and that suffering will remain until it forces the ego to overcome itself and reclaim the rest of the universe as its own essence, its own body.

The primary ethical implication of this is that we ought to treat everyone, including ourselves, with a compassion born from the understanding that they are the product of everything that came before them. We should also express reverence born from the recognition that each and everything and person we encounter, including ourselves, is an expression of the infinite whole, of the All, of God. This also has profound political implications, because it forces us to acknowledge that both ourselves and our most depraved opponents are products of the same vast system, flowers on the same tree. We all have much more in common with each other than most of us realize, or perhaps would like to admit.

Hamilton Nolan makes this point brilliantly (and even uses a tree metaphor) in the context of the upcoming US election and, specifically, Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris:

For generations, there has been a mutual agreement from both major parties to do what must be done to protect America’s ability to militarily dominate the world—the gun that protects our concurrent ability to be richer than everyone else, the velvet fist that allows us to extract trillions of dollars in value from the Global South and use it to raise our own national standard of living. This commitment to maintaining the global order, people like Dick Cheney understand, is more important than all the other, smaller issues that voters get worked up about. This is the tree, not the branches…It is going to be very hard to uproot this tree without acknowledging that you and me and Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney are all sitting in it, together.

So, if we are asking ourselves what we should collectively be doing differently going forward, concluding that our problems are caused by immoral people is not only superficial—amounting to trying to reshape the tree by plucking off a few of its fruits or trying to cure the illness by treating only the symptoms—it is also deeply confused if it amounts to the claim that people should have spontaneously been something other than what they are, like an orange sprouting from an apple tree.

But it may be asked at this point whether such a view of individuals as expressions of the whole eliminates any meaningful understanding of freedom and condemns us all to nihilism, since everything and everyone is always just going to be the universe unfolding according to its own nature. I think this is the result of taking the opposite viewpoint from the individualist, moralist one we’ve been talking about. Instead of individuals and their choices being real and important, the nihilist viewpoint claims that only the universe as a whole is real and that no meaningful change or development is possible (since it just is what it is). From this latter viewpoint, individuals are inessential and any apparent meaning or value is illusory. Of course, the truth is that most people hold a mix of the two: most people are fairly self-obsessed most of the time and consider others’ actions from a moral standpoint, but in their reflective moments or when they think about the “big picture,” they may cheerfully state that “nothing matters.” Both of these viewpoints are, of course, one-sided. The individualist viewpoint claims that there’s no tree, only a trunk, branches, and flowers; meanwhile, the nihilist viewpoint claims that there is only a tree, but no trunk, branches, or flowers. We need to understand that the individual and the universal are mutually essential—neither is anything without the other.

It turns out, then, that there is a sense in which the universe is imperfect: the degree to which we, as an expression of the universe, do not realize that that’s what we are. We are the universe experiencing itself, but our realization of this fact is imperfect, and we frequently lapse into the confused belief that ourselves or something in us is somehow separate from or outside the universe. So long as we do, the universe cannot fully realize its own nature—our own nature. Our overarching ethical purpose is therefore to perfect this realization of our nature, to understand that the parts and the whole give rise to each other, are nothing but each other, each referring infinitely to the other for its definition. And we will find that the pursuit of this ultimate goal will have the effect of clarifying and resolving our shorter-term goals, because as we more fully understand the kind of being that we are, the more we will understand what would be good for such a being, and what such a being ought to do.

Thanks for reading, and please subscribe to Hamilton Nolan’s Substack; it’s great.

That said, I’d reached a point in my last post where I wanted to talk less about the nature of reality and more about the ethical impact of that reality, that is, what the fact that we’re all parts of a universal whole means in our day-to-day lives. There are some abstract ethical principles that I think will be found at the heart of all the particular ethical discussions I want to have, and I’ll try to draw those out at certain points, but hopefully the more concrete topics I want to focus on will contextualize those ethical principles and make them more immediately useful.

So, for my first post back, I want to talk about the most comprehensive ethical challenge we currently face: climate change. 

This is what many liberal commentators get wrong when they assume that climate action is futile because it asks us to sacrifice in the name of far-off benefits. “How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?” asked Observer columnist Nick Cohen despondently. The answer is that you don’t. You point out, as Yoshitani does, that for a great many people, climate action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more exciting than anything else currently on offer. — Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

I’ve been reading Naomi Klein’s absolutely essential book, This Changes Everything, about climate change, its causes, and its solutions, and one theme has especially resonated with me. As she herself puts it, the climate crisis is not an inconvenient truth requiring painful sacrifices for an impersonal greater good, or for a future we ourselves won’t see. Rather, the climate crisis is providing the impetus to fix what’s wrong with our economy and our culture so that we can live better lives today. The lifestyle changes required at the individual and political level that an effective climate response requires only amount to “giving things up” from a purely individualistic mindset that isn’t serving us anyway, either from an emotional/psychological standpoint or, ultimately, a physical one, as our lifestyle is rapidly degrading the conditions for life on Earth. The vast majority of human beings are not “winners” in any sense in our current system, and even among the middle and upper classes in “developed” countries there are crises of depression, anxiety, and loneliness that are the result of the individualism at the root of capitalism.

On the other hand, the economic and political changes we need to make in order to combat the climate crisis simply from a pragmatic perspective of avoiding a civilization-ending ecological catastrophe—e.g. transitioning to a degrowth economic model, ending our consumption of fossil fuels, consuming less in general and sharing more in common—have the potential to not only reduce the radical economic inequality inherent to our current system but also combat the individualistic worldview that has alienated so many people even in privileged communities. This is because these changes would be the result of our being forced to act like what we already are, both as a species and as individuals: parts of an integrated, organic whole, rather than would-be conquerors afloat in a mechanistic and hostile nature. We cannot be healthy as individuals or as a species outside of this organic context, so, far from standing to lose anything (most of which we don’t need anyway—seriously, think of all the crap we own and all the crap on all those shelves in all those big box stores), the changes we’re being forced to make will allow us to gain, or regain, many of the most valuable parts of our humanity.

There is no longer any doubt that these changes must happen, and must happen immediately if we are to avoid the greatest ecological catastrophe to ever befall the Earth. Furthermore, there are excellent reasons to believe they will improve, not deteriorate, everyone’s quality of life. So why is there so much ferocious resistance to them? The answer is that the people who have gained the most from the status quo (in a material if not a spiritual sense), and who therefore have the most to lose by its abolition, have promoted their worldview over the past hundreds (arguably, thousands) of years to the point that it has simply become common sense, invisible to rational scrutiny. This worldview states that everyone is fundamentally out for themselves, and that it is only by accumulating as many resources for ourselves as possible that we can potentially protect ourselves from the depredations of other people or the dangers of a cruel and alien Earth. Think about the fears deployed against us to force us to do things we otherwise wouldn’t: if you don’t sell your labor, you will end up on the street and die alone, unwanted by anyone. Once you do sell your labor, you have to make sure you have enough money saved to avoid getting thrown out on the street when you’re too old to sell your labor any more. And then you need even more money to defend yourself against inevitable market shocks (or it’s the street for you again). And then you need to make enough money to pay to protect your money, and on and on. This is the gun that’s held to all our heads, and every time we comply, the people in power get a little richer. This is the basic shape of our worldview of individualism and accumulation.

But the convenient truth, as Naomi Klein puts it, is that this worldview must, if even for no other reason than pragmatism, be cast aside for one that is based not on individualism and accumulation but rather on community and resource sharing. It is convenient because it’s what would be best for us anyway; we are, in effect, being forced to build the kind of world that the best of us have been trying to build anyway, one that is just, with real freedom and security for all. In order to help this transition along, though, we need to learn to recognize the self-serving fictions deployed against us by the powerful, free our imaginations to conceive of better ways of living, and, most of all, realize the kind of beings we are and the things we actually need: not possessions, but connections with other people and with nature. By making those connections, we become more fully ourselves because, in the end, we are more than individuals; we are these connections and everything they connect. We are the whole. And by making the transition to a new kind of world, we stand to lose nothing we actually needed, and stand to gain a new life for ourselves—not in the future, but now.

This week, we’ll wrap up this discussion of certainty by exploring the ethical implications of these truths about the nature of reality. It will also be a culmination of everything I’ve written here so far, as my plan is to move away from the more abstract philosophical groundwork I’ve been laying and onto a consideration of how it relates to our current sociopolitical predicament.

But first, what does our discussion of the nature of certainty and knowledge (the philosophical field called “epistemology”), which led to a study of the nature of reality (the philosophical field called “ontology”), have to do with ethics? We saw in the first post on certainty that the ethical danger of uncertainty is that we can’t even be sure we know what’s good, and so don’t know which actions we’re supposed to take, if any. So, we need to begin with a consideration of what goodness actually means, and the first thing to note is that “good” always means “good for.” There is no such thing as goodness in the abstract; we’re always talking about the goodness of things, however broadly defined (e.g. as objects, people, or situations). “Good for” in this case means, for example, that it’s good for a knife to be sharp. It can also have the meaning of suitability, for example that a knife is good for cutting. Obviously, these two meanings are interrelated, because, for example, while a knife is good for cutting, a sharp knife is even better. Furthermore, they both relate to the idea of goodness as a guide to action (or inaction): if the knife is dull, it would be good to sharpen it, just as if something needs to be cut it would be good to use the knife. Whichever meaning of “good for” we use, however, we can see how ethics directly relates to ontology because goodness is always going to be relative to that for which it is good. In short, to know what is good for something we must also know what that something is.

Thus, the prerequisite study for any kind of ethics is ontology, is learning what anything and/or everything actually is. And unless we want to get stuck in the same trap as not being certain what “good” means, we’ll need to find some kind of certainty about what “being” actually means. It turns out, then, that in order to do ethics, in order to have a practical impact on our world, we have to walk a similar path to the one Hegel laid down: we need to achieve some kind of certainty about the nature of being and see what it can teach us about the broader world of our experience before we start making judgments about what is good or bad.

As I’ve tried to show throughout this blog and especially in the last few posts, all of existence is fundamentally a unity. This means that, in one sense, there is only one thing—a totality that contains everything and which has no outside. In this sense, this unity can only ever be what it is, and there’s nothing else it could be. In other words, it and everything in it is perfect. This is the universe as perfect substance.

This is, more or less, Spinoza’s argument: everything is God, and God is perfect because there is nothing else it could be but itself. A corollary of this argument is that everything that happens is necessarily determined to happen the way it does, because everything is just God or the universe unfolding according to its own nature and nothing else, because there is nothing else. For these claims he has been accused, among other things, of nihilism, of the notion that nothing can be better or worse than anything else because everything is already “perfect” and nothing can ever happen that is not predetermined. If his critics are correct, then the title of the work in which he makes these claims, The Ethics, is nothing but a joke, since ethics would seem to be impossible in the world he’s describing. A similar problem is posed by the much more conventional conception of God as an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent creator, namely: the problem of evil. If God is perfect and good, why does there appear to be so much evil in the world He created? And if this is the way He wants things to be, what are we supposed to do but accept it as part of His plan?

Both Spinoza as well as Christian mystics like Marguerite Porete and Julian of Norwich bite the bullet—God and the world are perfect—but also claim a space for meaningful human ethics. We are not, they argue, simply passengers on a runaway train. This is because there is another meaning of the term “good for,” and that is: good for us. The universe is indeed a unity, but a self-different unity, and humans (and any other self-conscious beings) are the “difference” in the “self-difference.” We are not the universe (or God, or existence) insofar as we are “only” limited “parts” of the universe, but neither are we anything but the universe (or God, or existence). We are the mirror held up to the universe, just as the universe is our mirror, but neither could be what it is without this difference from the other that is then resolved by identifying with the other. We are the universe experiencing itself; through us, it exists for itself. Without us, it could not be good for anything. We are the universe as subject.

Most people do not think of themselves this way, as the universe experiencing itself; not even I do most of the time. But insofar as we do not, insofar as we are not the universe, not only are we imperfect in our limitation, to that extent we do not even exist. To the extent we believe ourselves to be other than the universe, that is, other than existence, we identify ourselves with nonexistence, with pure negation. We have seen that being is ultimately a unity, and so if we differentiate ourselves from that unity without simultaneously claiming it as our own self, to that extent we are not. This is the hole that most of us carry around and try to fill with things we mistakenly believe we do not already have, things that, in fact, we already are. To the extent that we are the universe, we lack nothing, but to the extent that we are not the universe, there is an emptiness inside of us that will never be made whole. 

This emptiness is the home of evil. Every time we treat another person, or the earth, as something other than our own self, we separate ourselves from perfection and goodness, and the emptiness grows. Just as good only exists for us, so evil only exists for us. This is how the Christian mystics I mentioned can stand by the idea that creation as such is perfect, and evil does not exist. The universe in itself, as the ultimate substance of everything, is perfect—it just is what it is, and couldn’t be otherwise. But the universe as subject, as us, contains both the possibility of good—of recognizing that we and everything else are already what we ought to be and couldn’t be otherwise—and of evil—of failing to recognize ourselves in the universe and identifying instead with nothingness. 

This is why the work of ethics actually has much less to do with actions than most people think; rather, ethics is the work of understanding one’s relationship with the universe. As I’ve tried to show in previous posts, our actions flow directly from our self-concept. Certainly, there is the matter of choosing appropriate means to achieve a given end and then actually executing the action. The real ethical work, however, has to do with understanding what is good for us in a particular situation, which asks us to consider who we actually are in relation to our surroundings. For example, consider how such an apparently insubstantial difference as just thinking of someone as a friend instead of an enemy has the potential to produce radically different actions in the material world. Apparently abstract philosophical questions like “who am I?” and “what is the nature of being?” therefore turn out to have immediate practical implications. There is, in fact, an ethics in Spinoza’s Ethics, a good toward which he believes we ought to work: “Knowledge of God is the mind’s greatest good; its greatest virtue is to know God.” To the extent that we know ourselves to be the universe, to be God, our actions will be as perfect as ourselves. But first, we must do the work of knowing God, and thus knowing ourselves.

Next time, I plan to start looking at some examples of this counterintuitive ethics at play (or not—mostly not) in our world today. Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to message me here or wherever with questions, objections, or feedback. See you next time.

This week, I want to walk through the first couple stages of the Logic. I’m a little reluctant to do so because this was never meant to be a Hegel blog, not to mention that what comes next might seem extremely abstract and remote from our everyday concerns. However, I think it’s worthwhile because, as I claimed in my very first post, there is a straight line between understanding the underlying principle of reality and taking effective action in the world. It will be helpful to remember, as I mentioned last week, that what we’re talking about here is not some thought of being that we’re just playing around with in our heads. What we’re talking about is our experience of the world we live in, but as a pure unity, a pure “this” before we apply labels and divisions. The rest of this post will try to show how all the various things we’re familiar with begin to emerge from the backdrop of this unity, but never fully separate from it.

So, we begin with Being. Being is the pure, immediate reality we encounter before applying any labels or identifying anything within it. This immediate reality contains even our experience of this immediate reality, because, again, there are no distinctions at all, not even between thought and being. However, as we observe this Being or think this empty thought of Being, we realize that Being becomes (as Hegel hinted in the introduction) Nothing. What at first appeared to be total fullness turns out to be indistinguishable from total emptiness, just as pure light is as blinding as pure darkness. We mean for there to be a difference, a contrast, but it can’t be found in either Being or Nothing because each is identically determined by its total indeterminacy, defined by its lack of definition. When we mean to consider Being, we find that it passes over into Nothing, and vice versa. What, then, is the nature of the difference between the two, and where does it come from?

The breakthrough comes with the realization of the relationship between Being and Nothing, that they are not in fact two separate things but rather the constitutive features, the moments, of a singular process that both contains and is created by them. As we observe Being, we see it become Nothing, which in turn becomes Being again; as we observe Nothing, we see it become Being, which in turn becomes Nothing again. It turns out that Being and Nothing both become more fully determined, more fully defined, when they are considered in the context of the other, because we discover that Being is not merely empty indeterminateness, but also that which becomes Nothing. In other words, Being is revealed to also be Ceasing-To-Be. Likewise, Nothing is not merely empty indeterminateness, but is also that which becomes Being: Nothing is revealed to also be Coming-To-Be. It is the greater definition of Being and Nothing that arises from their opposition that constitutes their difference, and not only do Being and Nothing make each other different, they make each other more fully what they are. They appeared to be the same, but each pointed beyond itself to the dynamic relationship that more fully defines them. Though we thought we were looking at Being (or Nothing), it turns out that what we’ve been looking at is Becoming: the process of Being and Nothing each becoming its other.

So, what did we just witness? The development of Being into Becoming was that of the implicit becoming explicit. Becoming was always implicit in Being, but it was only in Being’s own development during our observation that Becoming became explicit. As we observed Being’s development, we learned that to be always also means to become. Each new stage of the development of Being is not the emergence of something new; rather, it just becomes clearer what we’ve been looking at all along. This is how it will turn out that absolutely everything is contained within this first thought of Being: implicit in the thought of Being are all the various ways of being—being positive, being negative, being real, being a thing, being finite, being infinite, being an animal, being a person, being the Absolute.

But just as Becoming was always implicit in Being, somehow contained within it, so Becoming also contains Being (and Nothing) within it. Everything is carried forth through Being’s own self-development, and there will never be a moment when Being will stop being what it is and become something that somehow isn’t Being. So, if there can never be anything that is not Being, and Being always contains everything implicitly within it, then a fascinating conclusion follows: there can never be anything that is not everything contained within Being. Hegel describes the science of Being as essentially circular, with the beginning grounding the end and vice versa, but we can see already that reality is also fractal: every particular element contains the whole, and the completely simple contains the infinitely complex. 

The story of Indra’s Net illustrates this principle beautifully:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

As a wise person once said: everything is everything. 

Next week, we’ll wrap up this little series on certainty with a discussion of the ethical implications of the last few posts, namely: what does it mean that there’s only one certainty, but that it contains everything? How should that change how we live?

See you then.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be worth very much in terms of telling us about the world and how we ought to live, but as I said last week, out of this one certainty will emerge everything that it means to be and to be known. It is a simple truth that contains absolutely everything, but in an undeveloped, embryonic form. This simple unity of thought and being will turn out to be the being of objects and of people and of space and time—all of this will be included in what it means to be. But being will also always maintain its character of intelligibility because it is nothing other than thought. So, this week, I want to talk about what this certainty, this unity of thought and being, actually is. Next week, I’ll walk through the first few stages of the Science of Logic to show how it begins to develop itself into the entire world of our experience.

With the Science of Logic, Hegel proposes to not only study the nature of thought, which would have been the typical understanding of the term “logic,” but also to study the nature of being. As I discussed last time, he believes he can do this because he can show how thought and being collapse into a unity such that the study of one is always the study of both. But what is this unity, this “simplest of all simples”? Hegel calls it “Being”—immediate, indeterminate, pure being—but he cautions that Being is both this immediate indeterminacy and also the thought of this empty immediacy. This is because, again, we are dealing with the unity of thought and being, and despite the ostensible first topic of the Logic being “Being,” we are always also talking about thought.

An important word of caution: we need to resist the idea that this is just some mental trick we’re performing that isn’t connected to the world “outside,” that we’re picturing the world inside our heads and manipulating that picture. What we’re talking about is the reality we encounter, but as the oneness that exists before we add labels or draw distinctions, even the distinction between subject and object. It’s the “this” that encompasses not only everything before us, but even our own awareness of it. What we are talking and thinking about is perhaps what meditators experience as the state of consciousness called samadhi—the felt extinction of the difference between subject and object.

But what does it mean that these two qualities—the subjective and objective, thought and being—can nevertheless always be discerned within this unity? For one thing, it means that there is no such thing as unintelligible being, nothing that can exist beyond the grasp of thought, as Kant believed. It also means that, in some sense, what is is thought. This would contradict our popular worldview (physicalism) that claims there is something “out there” that exists independently of thought. Contrary to physicalism, there is, for example, no such thing as a tree that falls in a forest without anyone around to hear it, or, at least, a falling tree is somehow also the thought of a falling tree. This may mean, mysteriously, that there is no tree until it is also the thought of a tree for someone or something (or perhaps even for the tree itself), but whatever the case may be, the thing and the thought of the thing are, from the most fundamental level of being to its most particular, the same.

There is something in our ordinary experience that has this quality of somehow both being something and being about something at the same time: consciousness. Consciousness is always of something, yet there is also always a kind of difference between consciousness per se and its object, despite the fact that, again, there is no such thing as objectless consciousness, even if its object is the pure, empty indeterminateness of its own self. So this unity with which Hegel proposes to begin the Logic can be thought of as this empty consciousness, but an infinite rather than a finite consciousness like mine or yours. It is a consciousness that is being: the universal mind. Hegel writes of his project:

Logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth unveiled, truth as it is in and for itself. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit.

So, it is Being as universal mind, Being that is not different from thought, that is the starting point of Hegel’s Logic. And as he described in the introduction, the necessity to avoid presuppositions about the topic of study means that we cannot presuppose a method by which it can be studied, because method itself, the movement of thought as it encounters something, is a feature of our topic. We must therefore only observe Being and whatever it may reveal about itself.

Next week, we’ll see what it begins to reveal about itself in the first few chapters of the Logic and how it will turn out to contain everything there is. Thanks for reading.

1. The certainty of our knowledge is something we rarely consider, despite the fact that,

2. It actually turns out to be difficult to find any kind of certainty that isn’t unfounded, illusory, or entirely subjective. Far from being a merely academic concern, however,

3. The lack of any foundational certainty threatens the entire project of ethics, because we cannot be certain of what is valuable.

I ended by introducing Hegel’s Science of Logic as a possible way to achieve that certainty and thereby ground not only our knowledge of the world, but also our knowledge of ethical value. I also claimed that I would be writing two posts on this topic, but it’s clear to me now that I’ll need at least one more after this to both articulate Hegel’s argument as well as draw out its ethical implications. These posts are also likely to be more technical than usual, but I’ll do my best to make the core argument of The Science of Logic as legible as possible because, despite it being a punishingly difficult book, it is also the most profound work I’ve ever encountered.

But first: what does logic have to do with any of this? It has everything to do with Kant and how much Hegel thinks Kant got right about our relationship with the world we encounter. In staking out his claim to a kind of subjective certainty about the nature of our experience, that we can be certain of how the universe looks to us but not as it is “in itself,” Kant critiques the empiricism of Hume, who claimed any such certainty to be an illusion. But on the other hand, he also critiques the rationalism of thinkers such as Leibniz, who claimed that it is possible to have certain knowledge of things like God and the soul just through the immediate use of reason. In short, these rationalists claimed that, just by thinking, they could know something about the world “out there.” But we’ve already seen how Kant responds to such claims with his famous Critique of Pure Reason: the things we encounter in our experience are only ever our mediated representations of an unknowable reality, and any attempt to derive the existence of something we can’t possibly encounter in our experience, e.g. God, will say nothing at all about reality, but merely about our own rational apparatus. God, or the ultimate cause, is simply something reason has to believe in so it can make sense of the rest of its experience.

Hegel sides with Kant against these “dogmatic” rationalists: when you think of objects, you are not somehow magically crossing over to them as they actually are with only the power of thought, but rather encountering a mediated manifestation of an object in thought. In short, when one thinks of objects, one is, in part, thinking about thought. This is the definition of logic: the thought, or study, of thought. Most of what goes by that name today is formal logic, the study of the empty forms of thought like “if P then Q; there is P, so there must be Q.” But from this, Kant distinguishes another kind of logic—transcendental logic—which is the study of how objects appear in thought. For example, Kant thinks he can talk about the thought of objects “in general” because there are certain logical rules for how objects must appear to us, e.g. as having certain qualities or relationships, like causality.

So this is why Hegel’s science will be a science of logic, that is, a scientific study of the nature of thought: like Kant, he believes that thinking about objects is actually thinking about thought. But how will this leave us any more able to say anything about the world as it really is and not just about how we think it is? Because Hegel believes Kant has made an unjustified and fatal presupposition, that thing which any good science must exclude to the greatest possible extent. Kant’s presupposition? That thought and being are two different things.

Hegel takes the opposite position—that thought is identical to being—but he does not simply assume this and assert it. Rather, he says there are two ways to arrive at this conclusion. The first is laid out in his most famous work which preceded the Science of Logic, the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is another “scientific” work in that it allows the subject to explicate itself for an ideally passive observer, but instead of a science of logic, the Phenomenology is meant to be a science of consciousness. It begins with consciousness confronting its most immediate, most certain object: “this,” whatever “this” happens to be. This starting point is, in effect, Kant’s presupposition that thought and being are somehow different and divided: consciousness (thought) confronts its other (being). But over the course of the Phenomenology, Hegel allows this confrontation between thought and being to play out of its own accord for the passive observer (with occasional commentary and his famous “previews” of what’s to come), and we see a recurring movement take place. Thought, in trying to apprehend its object, realizes that the latter is somehow contradictory to thought’s initial understanding of it. For example, “this” was supposed to be the most specific, most certain object that could possibly exist for it, except that, on the contrary, everything is a “this.” In order to more firmly grasp its object, consciousness must revise its concept of it until, eventually, it realizes its own involvement with its object. The object of consciousness appears as it does for consciousness. Here again we see Kant’s argument about the entanglement of subject and object, and from this point on in the Phenomenology, every time consciousness is forced to revise its concept of its object, it must also revise its concept of itself, perhaps most dramatically when consciousness encounters another consciousness.

Perhaps by now it’s clear where Hegel is going with this. By the end of the Phenomenology, after consciousness has struggled to find itself in the world that, all along, it had assumed was something other than itself, it realizes that the world is its own self. Hegel calls this final stage of conscious development “absolute knowledge,” not because it “knows” everything, but because the very division inherent in knowledge between knower and known has collapsed into a singularity of thought and being.

So this is Hegel’s first argument for the identity of thought and being. It employs a technique or structure that is common in his work: it takes a presupposition, namely Kant’s assumption that thought and being are different, and allows it to dissolve itself. This result of the Phenomenology, the science of consciousness, is therefore the beginning of the Science of Logic, which will allow thought to examine itself in its pure form as absolute knowledge (this is why it will be a science of logic, thought’s study of itself). Perhaps even more importantly, though, it will allow the Science of Logic to exceed the limitation imposed by Kant and examine the nature of pure being as such, which has been revealed to be none other than pure thought.

But one need not read the Phenomenology or take Hegel’s word (or mine) to grasp the oneness of thought and being. He offers a second argument, one that emphasizes less the experimental/observational element of science, on which we might say the Phenomenology relied, but rather science’s exclusion of presuppositions. If we wish to make a science of thought, i.e. a science of logic, then we ought to abandon the distinction between formal and transcendental logic, which amounts to the abandonment of our presuppositions about the form and content (respectively) of logic, because those are things we must let the science reveal to us. We cannot presuppose a method either, since the movement of thought, if it has one, will also be part of the subject matter we wish to observe. If we then abstract from our reality all form, all content, and all method, what are we left with? Either: pure, undifferentiated, indeterminate, unmediated being or, what Hegel will provocatively claim is the same thing: nothing.

But this being (or nothing) is, again, not something other than our thought of it, for that presupposition of difference must also be suspended. What we hold in our minds, then, the beginning of our science of logic, is a being (or nothing) that is no different from our awareness of it, an immediacy that is simple (i.e. that has no parts). Hegel calls this “the simplest of all simples, the logical beginning,” and the science of logic, as with the science of consciousness, will be nothing more than the observation of this subject matter in its own development. Out of this singularity will emerge everything that it means to be and be known, but this first certainty, the oneness of thought and being, is its foundation. Descartes came close when he claimed, “I think, therefore I am,” but the only real certainty is this: thought is.

Next week, we’ll talk about what the subject of the Science of Logic, this unity of thought and being, actually is and how it can ground our knowledge of the world and our ethical practice. Thanks for reading.

Think about all the things we think we know without ever asking ourselves this question.

This will be the first of two posts about the nature and importance of certainty. As I hope I’ve just demonstrated, certainty is something that is taken for granted so often as to become almost invisible to conscious consideration. But far from being a merely academic or philosophical topic that holds no value for most people, investigating the nature of certainty will turn out to be the cornerstone of all ethical practice. 

But first, how do we come to know anything at all? There are really only two ways: direct experience or received experience. Direct experience offers a kind of certainty in the sense that there’s no doubt that we’re having a particular experience, but on the other hand, at one time or another we’ve all been mistaken about what is “actually” happening to produce that experience. This is the nature of illusion, and it reveals the crucial (and fragile) relationship between experience and interpretation in the creation of knowledge. Mere observation is not sufficient for knowledge; we must also interpret what we observe. Received experience suffers from the same vulnerability to mistaken interpretation, but compounded at every degree of separation from direct experience. So is there any reliable means by which we can achieve any kind of certainty about the world?

One possible answer is: science. It’s the method we’ve developed to try to safeguard our knowledge from the distortions of illusion or preconception. And what, ultimately, is science? Observation, yes, but even more importantly it is a method for resisting biases. Science allows its subject to reveal itself without interference by our own notions of what we’re looking at. Unlike superstition, science is the determination to observe and be taught by reality rather than impose oneself on it or try to fit it into the system of one’s own preconceptions.

However, this doesn’t actually address the problem of interpretation inherent in both direct and received experience. If we have followed the scientific method, we can know that we have obtained a particular result via a particular means of testing, but it is exactly in the work of designing the test and interpreting the results that doubt can creep back in. The way that a particular experiment is designed may allow our preconceptions to confirm themselves with a particular result.

Perhaps an even deeper problem is determining whether a particular instrument or experiment can reveal what it claims to. What means would we use to verify the means by which we verify something? And how would we verify those means? Either, we end up with an infinite regress that would seem to preclude any certain knowledge or, as is more often required by pragmatism, some means is used to verify another, which in turn verifies the first, and we get a closed loop of certainty in which our system is self-consistent but not grounded on anything.

And what about our results? They’re like unconnected snapshots without our interpretive work of fitting them together into a whole, but the whole is never something we can properly observe. This is because experience—any kind of experience—is always constrained by perspective: there is no way to see everything from all sides at once while occupying no particular position. We therefore run the risk of inferring that the whole must be nothing other than what we see in our particular results, because those particular results are all we have. This is scientism: the unjustified inference that all of reality must be the kind of objective, quantifiable thing that can appear in a particular kind of experiment.

So, science is not a means to achieve absolute certainty. It can give us the tautological certainty that its results are its results, and that some of its tools confirm the results of other of its tools, but ultimately it is a circle surrounded by our preconceptions about what we think we’re looking at. But then, so what? No one can doubt the accuracy of the predictions obtained by science (at least, those about the “natural” world), and even if I don’t know every detail of, say, a tree—its molecular composition, its scientific classification—I know not to walk into it. Don’t I already know what I need to know? Don’t I already know the important things? 

Well, how would I know? How would you know?

How can we know what’s important? How can we know that we do know what we need to know? Questions like this, about epistemology, are often dismissed as idle philosophy, but if you can’t be sure you even know what’s important, what’s good and what’s bad (or what those terms even mean), then we’re not just talking about epistemology anymore—it turns out that we’re also talking about ethics, about why anyone ought to do anything at all.

Unfortunately, if this question of certainty, with all its ethical significance, is not dismissed as idle or naive, then it is likely to be dismissed as insoluble. Hume, the empiricist, claimed that certainty is impossible because it’s not something we can ever observe. We think we see things interact, see one thing cause another, but all we actually have are the snapshots of our observations, as with the results of our scientific experiments. We do not see causality or regularity—we infer them from repeated observations. They are the narratives, the interpretations, that we apply to our observational data. But there is no certainty here. There is nothing we can observe in the world that can guarantee that the next rock we drop won’t fall up.

Kant thought he could achieve a kind of certainty by putting Hume’s insight on its head: whatever is “actually” happening between objects, it's going to look like causality to us. He argued that human experience, by its particular nature, imposes logical structures of certainty—structures like causality—onto the reality we encounter. But this is a dubious certainty, and one which Kant takes great pains to constrain. However certain we may be about the structure and content of our experience, we can say nothing at all about what reality “actually” is. And even our own subjective faculties are suspect, for how could we ever get outside them to evaluate them? We see the same problems we encountered in considering scientific experimentation: either infinite regress or circular reasoning. Our reasoning might demand that there be an ultimate ground of certainty on which to base our knowledge and our ethics, but without encountering such a thing in our experience, we may have to conclude that such a demand is just a quirk of reason, something it has to believe in order to make everything else hang together. If Kant is right, we can never ultimately know anything; he claims that reason is capable enough to determine its own limits and is indeed sovereign within them, but we can never know anything about where reason or consciousness actually comes from, or whether there is any ultimate purpose to anything that we do. All we can know are the rules that our form of consciousness plays by. As Kant infamously boasted: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”

I find this deeply unsatisfying, and so does Hegel. He describes the Kantian argument this way:

Although we do not have cognition of things in themselves, nevertheless, within the sphere of appearance we do have correct cognition…This is like attributing right insight to someone, with the stipulation, however, that he is not fit to see what is true but only what is false.

This is the argument Hegel hopes to overcome, and why his ideas are worth discussing despite their famous difficulty. He proposes a way back, or down, to certainty—a certainty that is not “merely” philosophical or subjective, but something on which to build an ethical practice. And the method he employs he calls, not accidentally, a science. Namely, a Science of Logic. But this will not be the empty formal logic you’d likely encounter in a college course with that name; rather, it will deal with the very shape of reality itself and how we can come to know it intimately.

Next week, we’ll explore what the Science of Logic can tell us about the nature of certainty and how it can impact our ethical practice. If you’ve been reading any of my posts so far, a lot of it is going to sound familiar. See you then.

Spinoza offers a famous, and somewhat notorious, proposition for this ultimate ethical principle. He wrote it in Latin, so it’s come to be known by the Latin word at the heart of the principle: the conatus doctrine. It states that it is the fundamental nature of any being to strive (this is the usual English translation of conatus) for the preservation of its being. Critics claim that this proposition is inadequately argued—basically just stated as a self-evident truth—and that, while it may have a kind of common sense, it is far from true by definition. Part of the latter claim is that the conatus doctrine is (apparently) psychological. After all, what would it mean for, say, a rock to strive to persist in its own being? Spinoza must therefore be talking about organisms with volitions and desires, which is far removed from talking about fundamental truths about being. Self-preservation may be a kind of default behavior, but in the end it is just a possible (albeit very common) choice that a being can make, and there seem to be plenty of examples of human beings choosing not to preserve their own being, either through self-sacrifice or suicide.

It is true that Spinoza does not offer much in the way of argumentation for the conatus doctrine, but its meaning can be better understood if we keep in mind that Spinoza is almost fanatical in his reduction of everything to ontology, i.e. the study of the nature of being. For him, everything psychological or ethical must ultimately be explained in terms of what something is. So when he says that being a thing is immediately, i.e. the very same as, the imperative to preserve itself, he is not making a psychological claim about some kinds of beings, but rather a statement about being anything at all. In short, Spinoza knows what he’s saying: his argument is ontological, not psychological. So how can he respond to the apparently obvious counterexamples of suicide or the absurd self-striving rock?

Recall from our discussion over the last few weeks that what something positively is can only be grasped in negative contrast to something else: “this” only means something if there’s a “that,” otherwise everything is a “this.” What we’re describing here is, in fact, the conatus doctrine: to be one thing is to immediately resist being something else. Without this negativity, this difference, this resistance, it is not possible to positively be anything. Thus, to be and to resist non-being is one and the same thing. The mistake is thinking that any particular thing can have a being independent of its negative interrelations with other things, to believe that objects can ever be free-standing or just somehow “floating” in space independent of one another. This is the mistake of the mode of thought called “the understanding,” which can only think of objects as separate and unrelated and which confuses its own divisive activity with a reality it imagines to be outside itself. Again, objects are their relations with one another; the differences between them created by the understanding are only necessary to make these relations possible. Otherwise, there would be no difference and therefore no beings.

This might be sufficient to explain how a rock can “strive” to preserve itself: being a rock is the same as being not not a rock—no mind necessary. It wouldn’t be much of a rock if it spontaneously turned into, say, air. We can also think about this in terms of chemistry: it’s relatively easy to smash a rock into smaller rocks, but to make the rock something else requires massive amounts of energy. That energy is required to overcome the “striving” of the rock to remain a rock. 

But what about self-sacrifice and suicide? What are we to make of an apparently self-annihilating being? We have to ask ourselves: what is being annihilated, and what is performing the annihilation? A rock may be just a rock, but what are we, actually? I think it’s safe to say that we are not merely our bodies, simply from our ability to distinguish between “me” and “my body.” Rather, our identity appears to be fluid, mysteriously expanding and contracting according to the situation, and self-sacrifice and suicide are the two poles of a spectrum of identity. With self-sacrifice, I demonstrate that my self-concept is greater than the limits of my individual consciousness; with suicide, I demonstrate that my self-concept is nothing but my individual consciousness—not my body, nor anything in the world that might give that consciousness substance and allow it to be consciousness of anything. With suicide, I demonstrate that I am nothing but a consciousness that desires total oblivion. But in doing so, I do not really destroy myself; rather, I destroy that which torments myself, even if that leaves myself totally empty. As I’ve argued before, there is no action without reason, and reasons always flow from self interest. Thus, action is only ever in service of some kind of self, and truly attempting to destroy oneself is a contradiction.

The conatus doctrine stands. To be anything is to strive to continue being that thing, because the conatus doctrine amounts to an ethics of self-expression, an ethics that is an ontology and an ontology that is an ethics. Your being and your actions are one. But to be human is to have a breadth of possible identities that, say, rocks do not. It is therefore essential to do the work of understanding what we are, because all of our actions are an immediate extension of that self-concept. If I really am nothing more than myself, or myself and whomever shares my blood or nationality or whatever, that is, if I am only on one side of the line between self and other, then I will try to preserve that self by resisting the other and taking from it. This is the ethics of competition and mutual hostility that flows immediately from the worldview of pure difference, and which in turn developed over time into the capitalist world we inhabit today.

If, however, I recognize that what I negatively define myself against also positively defines me, if I see not only my difference but my substance in the other, then I will have grasped a concept of self that transcends its difference from the other. This is the realization that everything is merely self-different, and an entirely different ethics flows from it, not one of competition but rather of cooperation and symbiosis. This is not a contradiction of the conatus doctrine of self-preservation, but rather the only true means of its fulfillment. We know all too well that the ethics of competition leads to exploitation of humanity and nature, as well as both literal and metaphorical arms races that drive that exploitation forward exponentially. And perhaps there may be some short term solution to the symptoms of this vicious cycle—maybe a technological fix for some of the byproducts of our industrial explosion—but there can never be an ultimate fix for all of them. This is because our entire civilization is a manifestation of this infinite arms race logic, and there is no way it can end other than collapse.

That is, unless we overcome our purely negative self-concept and embrace the fuller understanding of self and other as mutually essential. When we do, we will stop this infinite deferment of value into the future, this infinite, empty striving to be stronger and better. Instead, we will become the actually infinite, an end unto itself, perfect as we are and lacking nothing. This is, in fact, already the case; we just don’t realize it.

If you recall from last time, the first moment of thought is the positive moment, or the moment associated with the mode of thought called “the understanding.” This moment considers objects “as they are,” abstracted from their contextual relationships and entirely on their own terms. Objects are just that—objects: free-floating and unrelated.

But, as we saw in the last post, the understanding finds that it can’t coherently grasp what its object actually is without putting it into a negative relationship with something else. For example, “this” only means anything if there’s a “that,” otherwise everything is equally a “this.” From a subjective perspective, what this negative relationship looks like is that all the particular objects we encounter share a particular negative quality that makes them, in part, what they are, namely that they are not us, or not me. This is the relationship of pure difference I’ve been talking about between self and other.

Most people are only used to explicitly thinking in terms of the understanding, in terms of objects and the relationships between them. But as I mentioned last time, the objects of our experience simply can’t be objects without the particularity granted by the other modes of thought, specifically this negative moment of difference. They need this negativity to distinguish them from each other and from the “background” of our experience. So even though we may believe that the objects we encounter are just “out there” in the world, it is actually we who make them what they are to us. Hegel has a very provocative and instructive name for this form of consciousness that, whether it realizes it or not, negatively constitutes the very objects it encounters: “Desire.” Desire is what gives things their particular significance to us; it is what lights up our world.

Food only is food to that which eats it; it lacks the significance of food outside that relationship. It may be something else—a tool, a threat, a friend, or nothing at all—but it is only food to me if I can eat it. But now consider a slime mold, the kind of life form for which the entire world may lack significance except in terms of “food” or “not-food.” For a slime mold, there are no such things as computers or works of art or the myriad other objects we encounter in the world. Those things only exist for beings like us with greater complexity, which means that we have more complex (negative) relationships with the world, and therefore more numerous desires. As a result, a greater number of things stand out from the “background” for us. We endow the world with greater significance. Notice also that this means that a narrower self-definition can result in a narrower world with fewer significant things. We all know people with one-track minds for whom the world loses all other significance aside from a particular goal. These people live in a world that contains only tools or obstacles.

Also notice that we’re still only talking about the negative moment of thought, and even this moment is not often consciously acknowledged. As far as the understanding is concerned, “I” may “have” a desire for an object, or the object may have the quality of “desirability,” but the understanding fundamentally can’t see that both my desire and the desirability of the object arise together as a relationship of negativity. Without the negativity of this relationship—that is, if there were no difference between us and the object—then there would be no object separate from us and no separate self to desire it. This is to say: desire and lack are one. To exist as a distinct being is therefore necessarily to desire. Total satisfaction of desire is nothing short of death, the dissolution of self back into the world. Temporary satisfaction of particular desires is possible, as after eating a meal or attaining a desired object, but some desires must necessarily return for as long as we live, for it is these desires that maintain our metabolism as separate beings. Those familiar with Buddhist doctrine will likely already recognize the significance of this necessary tension between desire and lack. This is the root of suffering, its fundamental logical shape: the lack of something which nevertheless defines us.

But now let us consider the final, reflective moment of thought, in which we learn that both the positive and negative moments are mutually constitutive, that what anything is is to be the other of its other. If we are unused to thinking of things in terms of their negative relation to us, we are even less used to thinking of things as also somehow positively constitutive of us. But to think this way is to realize that our world gives rise to us, is our own self, and that we in turn give rise to the world and give the world its consciousness and agency. As the saying goes: “we are the universe experiencing itself.” 

The negative moment of desire remains, but its significance is transformed. The self-different self doesn’t truly suffer because it doesn’t truly lack. The difference between self and other, the negative moment of desire, must be maintained, but it is recontextualized within an infinite, self-sustaining process by which the whole gives from one hand and receives with the other. When I see myself as part of the world, I understand myself and the food I consume to be two organs in the same body. When I pluck fruit from a tree, I am no longer taking it from something alien to me and using it to strengthen myself for further conquest. Instead, I am maintaining the total organism that sustains us both: the tree feeds me so I can tend the tree and the rest of the earth.

These are the two basic ethical shapes embodied by pure difference and self-difference, respectively. From the perspective of pure difference, the self takes from the other to better resist the other. And because the self, desire, and suffering all co-arise as a result of the pure (i.e purely negative) difference between self and other, the self becomes defined by an arms race against the other, its own ever growing desire, and its own infinite suffering. This should sound familiar. It is how many people spend their lives, and it’s how we’re expected to spend them. But we thwart those expectations to the degree that we take care of each other and the world. This is the perspective of self-difference, where we see ourselves in others and understand our own existence in the context of the greater whole. 

I’ve used the metaphor of a body and its organs a few times in this post. It’s an extremely useful example of what self-difference actually looks like in practice, but it can be carried further to drive home the danger of its opposite, the belief in pure difference. In a very real sense, we, and all the life forms on this planet, constitute a single ecosystem, a single body. But if we do not come to a fuller consciousness of this fact, if we continue to consume the resources of the earth as if it were something other than our own body in a futile attempt to drown our suffering, then we will become the terminal cancer of this planet, and we will all die with our host. The attitudes we take toward the world and other people, our understanding of ourselves as either a cancer or a cure for this universal body, matter, because our actions flow from our self-concept. I can only hope we have enough time to collectively understand ourselves and our purpose more clearly.

I also found this method to be of limited use until I spent more time with the work of Spinoza and Hegel—both of whom have been referred to as mystics, often derisively—and realized they were indeed arriving at the same mystical conclusions, but by way of methods and described by language much more compatible with a Western context.

I think, at root, the difference between mystical teachers on the one hand, for example Laozi or Meister Eckhart, and philosophers like Spinoza and Hegel on the other hand is that the former often found ordinary thought to be an obstacle to the experience of truth and so tried to confound that ordinary thought in such a way that the student’s mind would make a qualitative leap to a higher comprehension of reality. Spinoza and Hegel, however, sought to use ordinary thought as a ladder to that higher comprehension. In this way, their work does not disavow thought, but teaches it to overcome its own preconceptions.

While I think Spinoza tended to identify the ills of the world as a simple failure to think things through to their ultimate conclusions, that is, to fully exercise thought, Hegel showed how our misconceptions can arise from thought itself. Specifically, he showed how a particular mode of thought which he called “the understanding” would often be mistaken for—and take itself to be—the entirety of thought.

In this post, I’d like to describe Hegel’s model of how thought “moves,” and the various “moments” within that movement. This discussion might be a little more technical than previous posts, but it will hopefully provide some additional context for some of the more paradoxical or metaphorical things I’ve written here. I’ll also relate these moments of thought back to the concepts I’ve been calling pure difference and self-difference, which will hopefully more fully illustrate what I mean by them.

Hegel conceives of thought as a movement between three “moments,” each performed by a different kind, or mode, of thought. The first moment is when thought tries to grasp its object in isolation, and it is the work of the mode of thought Hegel calls “the understanding.” It is a moment of abstraction because it removes its object from its context, and it is a positive moment both in the sense that thought 1. posits, i.e. places, its object before itself for consideration and 2. considers it in terms of what it is and traits that it has (positively) instead of what it is not or does not have (negatively). Indeed, the understanding cannot conceive of things negatively, because, as we will see, negativity always entails either an implicit or explicit relationship between the things that the understanding keeps separate. 

To use the familiar example of yin and yang, the understanding views each as entirely positive and entirely separate; there is yin, and there is yang, and they are essentially different. For the understanding, “this” is only this, “that” is only that, and the interactions between any two things are only one (positively) pushing up against the other. This is the billiard ball model of classical physics which, while intuitive and mostly adequate for describing our experience of reality, nevertheless results in a number of apparently insoluble problems. I mentioned a couple of these in my introductory post, such as Hume’s claim that we never actually observe causality and that there doesn’t appear to be a mechanism by which the external world could cause us to take any kind of voluntary action (the Is-Ought Problem). 

But it also causes a much more dangerous and insidious problem, which I’ve been calling the belief in pure difference. This is the metaphysical claim that reality is and is only these separate things, and it amounts to the understanding mistaking its own activity for a reality independent of itself. The understanding can only “see” separate things, so it mistakenly believes that the universe is filled with separate things! As I’ve briefly introduced in previous posts, and will demonstrate further in future posts, this worldview has dire ethical and political consequences, and is in fact the very root of suffering.

“Ordinary” thought tends to stop at the level of the understanding, at least as far as it is explicitly aware. Arguably no thought would be possible at all without the following moments, but they are, at any rate, largely invisible to conscious thought that has not undertaken the task of self-examination. When it does so, however, it will arrive at the next moment, wherein thought realizes it cannot coherently grasp its object in isolation and must therefore turn to something else with which to compare and mediate it. 

Here is a gloss on Hegel’s own example to try to demonstrate what this looks like. Basically, the understanding selects an object and calls it “this.” “This” is purely positive, purely demonstrative, abstract, and immediate. But when the understanding tries to grasp what exactly “this” is, it realizes that everything is a “this,” and is forced to place its object in a contrastive, negative relationship with something else: “that.” The apprehension of this relationship, and indeed of all relationships, is the work of reason, in this case “dialectical reason,” as in a dialogue. To continue with the yin and yang example, dialectical reason understands that what it is to be yin is to not be yang, and vice versa.

This brings us to the third and final moment. It is not only the unity of its positive and negative moments, that yin is both yin and not yang; that is just the insight of the first two moments together. Rather, the insight of the third moment is that the two previous moments are reflective, that is, both yin and yang are not each other, and thus each moment 1. finds itself in and 2. constitutes its opposite. Notice also that positive and negative moments are no longer fixed (as in the understanding) or purely negatively related, flipping back and forth between each other (as in dialectical reason), but are now also positively related, each defining what it means to be the other in a kind of loop or spiral (as yin and yang are typically depicted). Each is and is not the other. Hegel calls this the moment of “speculative” reason, not in the sense of being in some way uncertain, but rather in the sense of the original Latin, meaning “to look at,” as in a mirror. In contrast to the abstraction of the understanding, this moment is concrete, actual, because it grasps both its object and its context. And this is what I have been calling the relationship of self-difference.

I hope this helps to clarify some of what I’ve been discussing in the last few posts without being too technical. I also recognize that most of what I’ve been writing about thus far has been quite abstract, so I appreciate you bearing with me while I lay the groundwork for the practical application of these concepts. As I hope I’ve at least begun to show, the concrete world we live in (and hope to save) is in no small part a result of—or a reflection of—what we believe it to be, so changing that world will ultimately require us to change our beliefs about what it is. Thanks for reading.

People who think that pure difference is obvious would claim that difference can only mean pure difference, that something less or other than pure difference would render the word “difference” meaningless, leaving us with no way to talk about the obvious multiplicity of particular things.

People who think that pure difference is obviously wrong would perhaps point to the ability of things to influence each other. They would claim that one person is not purely different from another because they can influence each other across the line that mutually defines them. But this is not actually a contradiction of pure difference because, contrary to the claims of both groups I just described, the defining trait of pure difference has less to do with the line and more to do with the fact that one’s self lies on only one side of it. Claiming to be able to influence someone across the line stops short of claiming one is on the other side of the line. In this sense, both groups I described actually believe in pure difference but neither understand that what’s at stake has less to do with the line and more to do with where the self is in relation to it.

What I actually mean by self-difference is indeed that self is on both sides of the line. This does not mean, as the former group might claim, that there is no line, and as such that there is no difference. Difference is maintained, but as self-difference. What this means in practice is the ability to look out at the world and say both of the following truly: “that is not me,” and “that is me.”

What I just described, two contradictory statements that are nevertheless both true, would seem to be a paradox. However, it is only actually a paradox, or only actually problematic, if one has already adopted the position of pure difference. In fact, this kind of paradox is just the result of defining things as necessarily only one thing or another. But what possible alternative might there be to understand the relationship between things without dissolving all difference?

My proposed alternative to pure difference is, of course, what I’ve been calling self-difference, but that’s a term that is maybe more easily relatable to the whole rather than the parts, the “self” rather than the “difference.” When considering the various things that pure difference claims are essentially different, it may be helpful to use a different term to explain the relationship between them: “mutual essence.” Mutual essence is the heart of, or perhaps even simply another term for, what we call “duality,” and what it means is that what one thing is, its essence, is intertwined with and cannot be separated from what something else is.

Let’s look at an obvious example of duality to see how pure difference and self-difference (i.e. mutual essence) seek to address it: light and darkness. A proponent of pure difference would have to say that light and darkness are essentially different from each other. They might defend this position by claiming that what we call light is “actually” (meaning “only”) particles called photons and that what we call “darkness” is nothing but the absence of those particles. In this sense, only light really is anything, and darkness is, at best, a subjective experience that has no independent meaning. This would be a far cry from the position mutual essence would have to take, which is that darkness must in some way be symmetrically essential to light.

However, there is a subtle conflation of terms the proponent of pure difference relies on in order to make this argument. Their claim is that light is photons, but that’s not exactly correct. Photons are photons, and light is the presence of photons, just as darkness is their absence. Now, this may seem like mere wordplay, but it reveals something absolutely essential to our understanding of our lives, our world, and the very nature of reality. Every duality, every distinction and difference, can be reduced to the duality between presence and absence. More than that, what every thing is is such a duality. Why? Because total presence or total absence, pure being or pure nothing, would make the existence of any particular thing impossible. Things are their differences: light can only be light when there is darkness, just as atoms can only be atoms when there is a void to give them definition. Green can only be green in the absence of not-green (which is part of what makes red and blue what they are, i.e. they share in what it means to be not-green). Thus everything is both what it is and what it is not, because it can’t be what it is without its other.

This is what I mean by self-difference. Light and dark, being and nothing, self and other: they arise together in their difference. Each of them is nothing more than the other of the other.

Who are you? The other of [the other of you]. And what are you without the other?

A reflection without a mirror.