Absolute Good

Happiness picture

The most challenging question in philosophy, to me, has always been defining a standard of absolute morality. Just to clarify, “absolute morality” is still subjective in some sense — ex: α doing a in scenario A is different from β doing a in scenario B. But there is, at the end of the day, wrongness and rightness built into the very nature of existence, and rightness is preferable to wrongness in a way other than rightness feeling better than wrongness.

The main problem with objective “goodness” to me stems from the nature of God. Now, if you are a Christian and believe in this sort of Frankenstein’s monster God where he is simultaneously a first cause from which everything can causally trace its roots to, and a personal being separate from the world (partially or entirely) with temporarily unfulfilled motivations in the world, then goodness is a little bit easier to construct, but the subsequent problem of evil can be tricky. But from a monistic worldview, discovering an absolute nature to good and evil becomes more difficult.

Plato is the first in western history to try, equating “the good” with God. While yes, God is by definition perfect, God is also immanent in Platonic cosmology. So, there is no “distance from God”. Sin in Christianity represents a distancing from God, as a result of transgression against him. In heaven, you are (as I understand it) very close to God. You are not literally being absorbed back into God and ceasing to exist as an individual being, in the way Henosis or Moksha works. So, evil cannot be “ungodliness” in my opinion.

There is another route, those activities which bring one closer to this “return to God”, can be seen as “good”, because God is good, while activities which keep someone cemented in the illusory world are “bad”. I don’t think this is satisfactory… I don’t think we should be trying to escape the world, or self-immolate. Is there a reason to think this is possible? That, following death, one escapes this illusion which has clearly been necessarily willed into existence by God? Others are more like Christians, and simply desire a sort of closeness with God, but in this context this closeness is more about truly understanding and internalizing the nature of God. This is more of a soteriology than a definition of good though. It’s just something you should rationally consider doing to minimize your own suffering. What we’re looking for, is good and evil.

There is lastly the Nietzschean-Existential crowd, who reject argument over good and evil, and even reject the intrinsic desirability of truth over untruth. It is simply up to you to exert your will onto the world. Or at least, this is how I understand it. No moralizing, none of that… I can appreciate it to some degree, but the power of autism is just too strong, and autists will continue to try and demonstrate why their way is the right way even if it is a hopeless endeavor. Not because they need others to believe them, and in the process seek to subvert power with words, but because it is important to them that what they know is consistent. In order to actually create meaning in life you have to genuinely believe in the legitimacy of this meaning. Living a lie or living self-destructively is certainly not what Nietzsche was encouraging people to do, I don’t think. And I’m no Nietzsche expert, but my understanding was always that you should do what you think is right (rather than “whatever you want”) and not feel the need to come to a consensus with the rest of the world on what is right, as this is just a cowardly attempt to subvert power. Of course, if you want what you think is right to be realized (which in a sort of by-definition way, you do) then this can only come about through the acquisition of power, the control of space.

Well, one who chooses to live unlike this will eventually be snuffed out by nature, so their shitty disposition is not worth moralizing. They’re degenerates, basically. Truth may not be intrinsically desirable, but I would say that contradiction is intrinsically undesirable because it is self-destructive. There is some space in between the “rational” and the “vacuously true” — propositions which are simply internally consistent and non-contradictory, but have an ineffable element to them. It is in this space where I would say aesthetic preferences reside, and I think Nietzsche is correct in saying (as I understand) that morality and philosophy in general is often generated as an attempt to rationalize and universally justify the aesthetic intuition of philosophers. This is true for political philosophy as well, but with the added element of trying to create a system where the common sludge doesn’t lag the philosophical class down with their petty interests. Oh well.

I think it is possible that there can be a near-reconciliation of this way of living with goodness if you generalize worldviews to the maximum possible extent, which I am taking from the notion of “right-hand” and “left-hand” paths in esoteric circles… Firstly, if you haven’t read my substack on the demiurge, it will be useful to understand where I am coming from here. But just to clarify, when I talk about the demiurge, I am not talking about the Gnostic demiurge. In Gnosticism, the demiurge is solely responsible for creating material, which is substantially different from the spiritual, and he is either seen as evil or as ignorant. In Platonism, the demiurge is the “second cause” and is the embodiment of nous or intellect, and is considered by Platonists as ultimately good and sometimes even given a level of prestige similar to the prestige the personality of the Godhead gets in Hinduism. Philosophical contemplation and heroic action are both seen as fundamentally good actions because they are considered as replicating the demiurge. My issue with this, is that the Demiurge came into existence necessarily accompanied with a complementary force. Whereas the demiurge is the source of order, heterogeneity, creativity, and truth, there must be a residual source of decay, chaos, entropy, contradiction, and emptiness. The monad, which can be thought of as the number 1, can be considered as both perfectly ordered and utterly chaotic. Or maybe more accurately, as neither, as the dichotomy has nothing to pull on yet. It simply doesn’t exist. It can’t exist. Plato and the Orphics attributed the identity of Ananke — necessity, sister of time, to the anti-Demiurge. But the idea is represented in other figures, like Nyx and Gaia and Typhon.

The Egg of Creation is coiled by the serpent of Ananke. The serpent is a common representation of primordial chaos — from Jormungandr to Leviathan.

I cannot call it “absolute good”. Absolute good, if it exists, means something other than the colloquial understanding of moral goodness in traditional societies. But, what is more colloquially considered good behavior in traditional societies is essentially that which affirms and/or emulates the demiurgic force in this dichotomy. If Nietzsche is correct in saying that absolute good/evil, truth/untruth are simply not worth the amount of mental focus philosophers put into them, then at least it is possible through some sort of very long and arduous process that we can sharply reduce the number of subjective goods down to these two goods, through a process of eliminating contradictory ideas. And then after that I suppose we can analyze which one is better utility-wise, which shouldn’t really be *that* relevant to the question of good/evil but is still relevant to our lives.

I was recently in conversation with some of the old chums about Buddhism, and the topic of Vajrayana came up. He suggested that Vajrayana is one of the most Aryan dharmic religious sects due to its continued emphasis on Vedic deities like Indra and a less pacifist nature, but I was not familiar with this religion. Upon further inspection I found many unwholesome elements to it — extreme (often dangerous) drug use, sex magic, and a general engagement in impure activity such as the handling of semen, blood, human flesh, feces... While yes, I could support some of the elements of it, such as the upholding of the animalistic, and of course I would like to generate a tulpa girlfriend using my incel brain powers. But the heavy emphasis on breaking taboos which are not just customary, but completely rational and natural (ex: the handling of semen, blood, feces, and human flesh). Even a wild animal knows not to sleep where it shits, and to avoid those who do. There was also this element of self-destruction. The consumption of drugs to the point where it is dangerous in order to more efficiently break down the illusion of the world. I am strongly against the use of hard drugs in search of “enlightenment”, which is what I was discussing with them upon learning this. It is impossible to be enlightened by using a substance you are fully aware causes deliriousness and clouds the mind on a chemical level, it is like watching a magician do a trick you already know the inner workings of. But to these sorts I guess drug-induced temporary brain damage is just part of taking the fire exit to enlightenment (REDDIT COMPANY REFERENCE). The reason it preserves some more “Aryan” features is for reasons other than it being Aryan in motivation. For example, the worship of deities has a lot to do with the reason they generate tulpas. Again, not really something I am all that opposed to. But the laxer attitude towards meat consumption and violence may have to do with the taboo of these things in more orthodox dharmic religion at that point in time. Meanwhile, in the earlier Indo-European societies, the consumption of (sacrificed) meat and the destruction of your enemies (given you have a casus belli) would be considered virtuous.

Nonetheless, most people never construct a good reason for such evil and are (in our previously defined respect) evil simply because they envy that which is good and blame it for their suffering. At least our tantric monks over here drinking blood and semen are doing it as a means to an end, and not because they are neurotic BPD hoes with daddy issues (ex: the average Satanic Wiccan). But uhh, yeah, I intended for this post to be longer, but you know. It’s finals week soon. I’m tired. I need to study. I’m recently getting over sickness as well. And I started this article a bit prematurely. If any of the Buddhists or Nietzscheans want to tell me why I am right or wrong in the comments, go ahead.