The Ethics of Oneness

Fifth and final part of a discussion of certainty and its importance.

Four weeks ago, we talked about the often unappreciated importance of certainty, as well as the surprising difficulty in finding it anywhere. Three weeks ago, we saw how Hegel proposed to overcome other philosophers’ proposed barriers to certainty and achieve the one foundational truth from which all subsequent knowledge flows: thought is. Two weeks ago, we explored what this truth actually was and how Hegel argued that we could only properly learn its true nature by allowing it to develop itself before our passive, scientific observation. Last week, we observed the first few stages of the self-development of this truth and saw that every particular thing with which we’re familiar, everything that is, is implicitly contained within it, like an oak tree in an acorn.

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.