Sila and Soul (Part 6)

So I'd like to discuss some of the complexities involved in the whole arena of moral values and that kind of consideration of ethics, and also some values and areas that we don't often even consider when we consider ethics and values, that are often not brought to light or talked about. But before getting on to that, let's rummage around just a little bit more in our consideration of the ontology of all of this, and partly recap what we've already said, partly a little bit new there, before moving on. And just reflecting just now a little bit, you know, it may be obvious at this point, but I'll say it as well: I don't feel like I have any answers to all these questions that arise in this area -- certainly not any easy answers. And at this point, I'm not sure even how much I'm adding that's kind of original to what's already out there. But as I said, I do want to perhaps shed some light or open up certain areas that are often less considered when we think about ethics, or we approach our moral life. And perhaps someone else or others will pick up some of these threads, some of this material, and take it forward, develop it at some point.

Okay, so just to, again, start with a little bit of a recap about the ontology. So mostly, with the heritage of modernity and postmodernity, many people, perhaps, I don't know, most people in the contemporary culture have either a conscious position or, if you like, an aspect of their position vis-à-vis ethics is that moral values are subjective. They're contingent. They depend on and arise out of culture, place, and the conditions of history here or there. That would be the dominant view, or at least a significant factor, a significant strand of most people's views nowadays. I do wonder, though, sometimes: if one is a long-standing Dharma-influenced practitioner, and heard lots of teachings, for instance, where moral values and ethics is not seen as culturally contingent so much, what happens in the psyche there, between the sort of pull of the contemporary view of modernity, towards regarding them as subjective and contingent, and the sort of Dharma view, regarding them as, in a way, absolute or laws of the cosmos and of the psyche? And what happens to a Dharma practitioner in the contemporary world inwardly in regard to all this?

In contrast to that contemporary view, Nicolai Hartmann asserts and posits that moral values are objective. He certainly admits, as we said, that historically, in different places at different times, in different cultures, and also different persons, the range of values of what he calls "the moral firmament" -- the whole edifice or structure of the totality of values -- that range is limited in the consciousness, in the moral consciousness of a certain culture or a certain person at any time. And that is limited and contingent, dependent on the culture. But just because our torch beam shines only on a small portion of that firmament at any time, it doesn't actually mean that the firmament itself is subjective. And so that's his position, and it, to me, is a very interesting position. What he offers as proof for him -- the fact of guilt, the fact of an intuitive sense of ethics -- to me, I'm not sure that they constitute enough evidence to be called 'proof,' strictly speaking, but that's his position, and it's certainly tenable and valid, and interesting and powerful.

Slightly different point: he also, interestingly, talks about not just the objectivity of values, but the objectivity of the hierarchy of values. Okay, so here's the collection of values, and he said these are objective. But also, their absolute scale, their arrangement on a hierarchy, he would regard as objective. Let me read a passage where he says that. He says:

Thus much can be said for certain: the rudiments of an absolute scale of values [so this hierarchy of values -- which is a higher value, which is a lower value, and where they stand on this sort of ladder] are contained in all moral feeling for values. It is clear even to a very primitive moral sense that honourableness takes precedence over outward advantage [yeah, so the honourableness is thus the higher value than outward advantage], that doing one's duty goes before pleasure.^[1]

So certainly, outward advantage and pleasure have value. But honourableness and doing one's duty have higher.

The same holds good as a whole of the more obvious gradations in the scale, for instance, in the general preference for moral worth before goods-values.

In other words, getting rich is not as high on the scale as acting morally, choosing morally.

In any case [he continues], so far as a feeling for the values themselves reaches, a sense of their relative importance usually accompanies it.

In other words, intuitively, we actually have this feeling of the relative importance of values.

The closer the values are in grade [the closer they are on that hierarchy], the less clearly can we discern the order of their [precedence]. Thus the inner situation approaches a conflict of values, which actually exists objectively only where values of equal rank stand ... against each other.

So we'll come back to that last point. And he talks about, in his words:

An astonishing infallibility, a strength of conviction in the sense of relative grade [so our intuitive sense of where things stand on this hierarchy] ... is enough to justify the old belief in a "moral organ" [someone called Hemsterhuis coined the phrase], an "order of the heart" [that's from Pascal] or ... a "logic of the heart" [as Scheler said -- so these philosophers talking about the organ, the instrument of moral sense in a human being]. It is a unique kind of order, with its own laws, which cannot be proved intellectually, but which equally scorns every intellectual argument brought against it. This is well enough known in the phenomenon of conscience, as in the unerring imputation of guilt, in the sense of responsibility and in the consciousness of guilt, but no less in the infallibility of the prohibitive shrinking from a deed beforehand.

Certainly this sense of grade varies [he continues], both in scope and [in] discrimination, exactly as does the sense of each value. There is also such a thing as blindness to the rank of a value, just as there is blindness to material things, and there is perhaps even a perverted or a quite dead valuational sense. But this is no objection to the certainty and real apriority of the sense of rank, where and in so far as it is present. Exactly the same is true of all genuine apriority [so again, for example, mathematical truths, a priori truths]; its universal validity is independent of how many people have the insight; and even if only one, or no one, actually has it, the fact remains that whoever is capable of it, necessarily has it just as it is in itself and not otherwise.

So there's the objective nature, according to Hartmann, the objective truth, the objective, independent existence of the values, and also the hierarchy of values. Again, I think what he offers as what he calls 'proof' to me is very suggestive -- it does seem to suggest that there's that objective existence of the hierarchy, but strictly speaking, I guess, from a logical point of view, it doesn't really constitute proof, in my mind. The fact of guilt, of conscience, the sense of responsibility and the consciousness of guilt, the shrinking from doing what we think is bad beforehand -- important sort of evidence, but strictly speaking, I would say, falls a little short of proof. If we want to lean more -- as many contemporary people do, and especially in the wake of sort of postmodern philosophy -- want to lean more on the idea of the cultural contingency and relativity of values, we're also in a little bit of a problem, because where do we find someone or some group of people who don't have culture? So what we witness, what we come across, are cultures. But we come across nothing else. We come across human ethical behaviour or unethical behaviour in the context of human cultures. So as Alasdair MacIntyre points out:

Man [or human being] qua animal [means as animal, considered as animal -- man] prior to and without any particular culture ... is a myth.^[2]

That's a 'myth' in the poor sense of the word, in the worst sense of the word. So sometimes people do have this myth of kind of wanting to reduce -- I've met certain people who want to almost reduce their lens of human being to the animality of humanity, as if that were more basic, more true, and more real than any cultural accretions or distortions or influences. But that's a myth, in the sense it's got this life given to it from a proposition, but there's no evidence for it. It's not possible to actually encounter such a being. Alasdair MacIntyre continues:

Our biological nature certainly places constraints on all cultural possibility; but man who has nothing but a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing. It is only man with practical intelligence -- and that, as we have seen, is intelligence informed by virtues [in this case he's talking about virtues embedded in culture; it's part of how he defines virtues] -- whom we actively meet in history.

So the 'proof' of the other side, that moral values are only culturally conditioned -- that proof is also an impossible. It's beyond our reach, because we never encounter anyone like that, or any group like that. But we also said, and we spoke briefly about mathematics as a kind of possibly similar set of ontological structures, if you like, that can exist in ideal form, in the form of ideas, in the realm of ideas. And that moral values might have a similar kind of existence -- not exactly the same, but similar. So we spoke about the mathematical number pi, an irrational number that can never really precisely instantiate exactly in the world of physical actuality, and the number i, the imaginary square root of -1 or other negative numbers. It's an imaginary, abstract mathematical construct. It manifests, as does pi, indirectly, and very cogently in the way that it shapes and forms manifest, physical actuality. But we don't actually encounter that directly. Or in a whole host of other mathematical laws, equations, entities, and also in the quantum -- Schrödinger's wave function -- a fluid, abstract mathematical entity existing in abstract, multidimensional mathematical space that bears a very close relationship with what actually manifests at a certain time and in a certain space, but it itself, we can't even really get our heads around, our usual discursive heads around what it actually is and where it might exist, and what exactly is its ontological reality.

And so, we said moral values may have a similar ideal existence, an existence in the realm of ideal forms, of ideas -- slightly different, but may exist there. And so, again, it's not conclusive, but the fact of the demand, if you like, for some kind of ontological position or bracketing or categorization of things like mathematical laws, mathematical entities -- the fact that there's some need, by most people who reflect on these things, there's some need for some sense of giving them some kind of different reality, different reality status than the usual things of physical actuality -- the fact that that exists in relation to mathematics opens the door, the possibility for legitimacy in other realms too. Certainly there are similarities in the area of logical rules, but there are also possibly similarities in the realm of things like moral values as ideal realities. Differences, which we've talked about briefly. But that, again, doesn't constitute a proof, but it constitutes something that opens a window of possibility, a window of possible legitimization.

And in regard to soulmaking practice, you know, we have this principle -- carved out through hard work and careful consideration and meditative exploration -- that we can move flexibly, fluidly, agilely, and carefully, with a lot of attunement and practical fruit, practical implication, practical significance, we can move between different logoi, different conceptions. So in this case, we can move between different ontological frameworks or conceptions vis-à-vis the realm of moral values. And so at times, we can lean into entertaining that logos, that conception of moral values having their own kind of real existence in the realm of ideal forms, ideal essences, the realm, the sphere of ideas. And we can entertain that, put that conception in the soul, in the consciousness, for a period of time, for a period of practice, or whatever, and see what happens -- see what happens in our meditation, in our outlook on life, in our outlook on different situations, in our sense of our existence and our journey.

Certainly, there is a meditative possibility we talked about briefly, of meditating on these ideal forms, meditating on a certain moral value, so to speak, at the level of an ideal form, in the realm of ideas. So when we do that, in that meditation, in that possibility of meditation, we're not talking about meditating on a rational definition: "We define 'kindness' as this, or we define 'justice' as this, or whatever, and I'm meditating on that rational definition or mulling it over." That might have its place -- logically arriving at a rational definition can be helpful for some people. We're really talking about something that goes beyond discursive thought. That process of pondering logically and rationally and coming up with something that's a rational definition may have a place. It can never capture, for various reasons -- some of which I'll go into more as we go on -- it can never really capture the idea in its fullness, in its sort of transcendent essence. Yet it might have its place.

Nor is that kind of meditation -- that meditation on an idea -- really meditation on an instance, on a particular instance of justice that we may have read about, or we may remember, or we may imagine. Again, and maybe more so even here than with rational definitions or pondering, an instance, the memory of an instance, the imagination of an instance, the hearing or reading about an instance of, let's say, justice or kindness or whatever it is, faithfulness, loyalty, truthfulness, whatever value, but the instance could serve as an entry point to this more transcendent realm, transcendent of the instance and the particulars of an instance -- so this or that particular instance of beauty, this or that instantiation of justice. So an instance could, in the meditation, be a starting point and an entry point, a springboard, if you like, to this other level of the essence of the ideational.

But I also want to say, I don't subscribe to the view that the ideational-imaginal -- and I've mentioned this before -- or the realm of ideas is a 'better' kind of meditation or level of meditation, necessarily, than meditation on an instance or an image. So we don't have to subscribe to the hierarchy that existed in the metaphysics, in the cosmology of ancient times and medieval times, between the world of physical actuality, of imaginal actuality, and then the higher level of ideational existences, the realm of ideas. And we could, at times, move into that, or some people may subscribe to that. Of course, everyone's free to do that. But there's no a priori reason why we have to subscribe to that hierarchy of 'idea over image.' Both can be available as ways in, as important resonances and meditations with regard to our ethical life, but also just with regard to our soul. Both may be helpful in building our moral beings, as Hartmann says it, and in soulmaking.

There's also one other reflection -- again, one we've touched on before, but there's also the possible idea, the possible logos and concept that the very shifting of cultural emphases and perspectives -- and the shift of the scope, the range of each culture's beam of light, torchlight within the whole range of the values in the value-firmament -- that that very shifting could be seen as, could be conceived as part of the World Soul's soulmaking. It's a movement of soul that's much bigger than an individual, and that moves through history, in history, with history, is history. And in a way, as it shifts, these cultural emphases and perspectives and their scopes, their individual scopes, what gets expressed is what can't be expressed or made manifest all at once. This is something we'll come back to later, that it's actually impossible -- just as in some of those mathematical analogies, it's impossible to capture or rather to manifest and to express, at the same time, all at once, the whole range of values. It's impossible to live them out. It's impossible to even perhaps see them all and hold them all in consciousness at once, perhaps. We'll come back to that later. But that's an idea that then takes in the notion of cultural relativity and contingency, but casts it in a different light, gives it a different basis, even in conception.

And in this kind of old debate between subjectivity and objectivity, does the mind create the values? Or are they objective, and the mind just receives them, witnesses them, notices them? Again, there's another level that's possible to us in our sense of it, in our conception of it, which has a non-separation between soul and world, between soul and its objects, its beloved objects, between soul and, in this case, moral values. They are not really separate. They participate in each other, and that's part of the sacredness and mystery, so that the whole dichotomy between subject and object has some mysterious, more mysterious kind of transcendence or synthesis, coincidence of the elements of that dichotomy, at another level. And again, we can get a taste of that in our practice, in our sense of soulmaking, and we can entertain it as an idea.

Also in regard to ontology, in this whole question of "What is real? What is true?", we need to consider the whole question of free will versus determinism. This is obviously a really important question. Without a notion of free will, the whole subject of morality just goes away. It has nothing to stand on. So we can't talk about morality, and what's ethical and what isn't, if everything is determined. Everything is determined either physically -- just, "Well, we do this because we're programmed, hard-wired that way from biological evolution, or because we trace -- it's just the way neurons work, or whatever, physiological impulses," or social determinism -- "These and this and this were the conditions in the society, in the culture, in the upbringing, whatever, and therefore this act ensued." And there's no room then for anything but that determinism. If that's the case, and there's no space for free will, the notion of free will, then the whole contemplation of something called 'morality' just has nothing to stand on. There's no basis for it.

So this is really quite interesting. And again, I have this question: well, which is real, which is true? We've touched on a couple of times at different points this whole area about guilt, and we can obviously have two views regarding guilt. So we've explained how Hartmann is, in a way, a sort of champion of guilt. He won't give it up, as something important to our moral growth, our moral being, to our soul, that it's wrapped up with our sense of personhood and autonomy. And it's a corollary of free will. If I have free will, and I chose something morally questionable, then I am culpable, and I have guilt with that, in relation to that. So that's one view, as Hartmann outlines it. And we've mentioned it a couple of times.

The other leaning here would be just to open things up and see more in terms of conditions, and there's an assuaging, a quietening, a dissolving of guilt then, a dissolving of suffering where there has been this tight grip of guilt, and the kind of self-contraction and self-obsession that often goes with that, and the contraction and spinning only around a view of the past, kind of stuck in a whirlpool, a vortex, looking at the past, looking at the self -- it's all very contracted. And just like in a whirlpool, it's almost like nothing can come out of that whirlpool at its worst. And so I've talked and written about working with that kind of contraction of guilt in one of the chapters in Seeing That Frees,^[3] "Ending Blame,"^[4] and other places in talks, etc. -- really, really skilful, really, really helpful to be able to open out and see in terms of conditions and less in terms of self.

But actually, both are important. And there's a way of opening the guilt out when it's just got too problematic [and] it's actually not helpful at all. It's not doing what Hartmann thinks or what Hartmann claims, I think, helpfully, that it can. It's not helpful. It's unhealthy guilt. It's doing nothing helpful in terms of our orientation and our attitude towards future behaviour. It's completely wrapped up in looking at the past. It's not serving our moving forward in a richer, deeper, more ethically upright, more sensitive, more careful and attuned orientation to the future, and future choices, and our future taking responsibility. So actually, both are possible. There's a way that we can, we need to think in terms of self. Buddhists go on and on about no-self, but actually, self is important. And even if you read carefully the Buddha's passages, there are lots of teachings that have to do with self, that rest on self-view.

And there are the teachings of hiri and ottappa, and 'shame' in terms of what others think of us, and in terms of our conscience, etc., hiri and ottappa in Pali. And they are teachings around self, and plenty of other teachings that have to do with self. So we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and lose a sense of responsibility. And for that, it's the self that needs to be responsible. So do I buy into that as an ultimate truth? No. It's a certain truth that I can move into and out of, and sometimes it's really helpful. And at the same time, or at different times, I can see less in terms of self, or in terms of not-self, or just in terms of conditions. So there's the kind of balancing of them, but there's also, I think even more skilfully and helpfully, the teaching that we can move flexibly between these two views. Sometimes I can look -- and it's important to look -- in terms of self.

I was talking with someone the other day. So many people practising Buddhadharma or other related kinds of traditions, and Advaita, think the whole movement is towards dissolving the self, dissolving the self-sense, and liberation is living in this dissolved self-sense. And I would say no, that's only a relative truth. Self is so thoroughly empty that we can pick it up again, knowing that it's empty. And we can put it down. We can be liberated to such an extent that self and the arising of self is not a problem. You don't have to be stuck in some kind of no-self view, or trying to attain some kind of ongoing state of no-self. We're so free from self, we're so free in relationship to self that it can come up. It can arise, and we can put it down -- both.

So extending that into its moral implications, also, with regard to responsibility and free will, and the determination by conditions in the environment, in the history, in the upbringing, biological, etc. Even if you just reflect for a moment, to take only one of those positions -- "There is always free will. There's always responsibility," or "Everything is determined" -- to take only one of those, you can feel how brittle it is. And just a little bit of reflection, to me it just sounds silly. Either of those options just sounds silly, really silly -- silly in that they don't really reflect a truth, and silly in terms of what it then implies in terms of how we live and how we consider ourselves, and how we judge and discern morally, and consider other people.

So the flexibility of view, again. And as always, why? Why this view now? Why that perspective at a different time? As I said, it might be sometimes that I'm so caught up in a tight whirlpool and vortex that's not constructive at all. It's just suffering, and I need to ease that suffering. I need to loosen something. So I adopt a certain view of, for instance, reflecting on conditions, etc., and I can do that very carefully, as I've outlined elsewhere, develop skill that way. Or at other times, I can feel, painful as it is, that I want to keep my sense of guilt and responsibility here. I want to look in terms of self, because as Hartmann says, that's part of building my moral being, and it might serve soulmaking. So as always, the question is, why? What's the intention? What am I trying to serve or support or open when I adopt one possible way of looking over another in the range of flexibility of ways of looking? [34:07]

Let me read you one passage from Hartmann, because he said something that struck me as very interesting when I read it, with regard to free will and this whole question, and its ontology. So he writes:

Freedom [so he's talking about free will] is the rising of initiative above the blind happenings of the world.^[5]

So a human being can take an initiative. They're not just determined by the kind of random or purposeless movement of atoms or wider social forces.

As such this is a value; it lifts a human being out of the connections of nature in which he is rooted, it allows him to tear himself away, to rise into the "second realm."

He means a second realm ontologically.

Lack of freedom is total determination from outside, the serfdom of [a human being] under the universal course of events.

And this is the bit I found interesting:

The profound struggle of human thought to attain a metaphysical proof of the freedom of the will is a witness to its worth.

In other words, so much intellectual energy has been expended over history trying to prove that human beings have free will. None of it has succeeded so far, but how much humanity has tried -- that effort, he says, "is a witness to its worth."

However desperate the problem may look [the problem of trying to prove that freedom of will exists], however violently all psychological theories deny it [and he's probably thinking particularly of Freud, as he was writing around that time], man cannot and dare not permit himself to be robbed of it. He struggles with all his might to retain his belief in it. He has even a deep consciousness that he is free.

So we feel somehow that we are free.

He feels that, even if he be not free, he ought to be. For he ought to be a moral being, a person.

So for Hartmann, personhood and moral being -- they go together. Without moral being, we're not really persons.

The will to be unfree, or even to renounce without a struggle the consciousness of freedom, would be a renunciation of his selfhood.

So again, there's perhaps the impossibility of a proof of that kind of metaphysical idea, that kind of anthropological idea, that we have free will. [37:33] But there's something in the fact of our -- humanity's -- struggle and striving to try and prove it, our wanting to retain that sense and that notion of free will. That itself tells us something. Yeah? So again, we talk about, what's an orientation towards truth and reality, and proof about truth and reality, and orientations that have more to do with soulmaking and what the soul needs? Of course they overlap. But extending that a little bit, could we not say, or could we say the same things with respect to ideational forms, these ideas -- for example, independently existing moral values? [38:30] There has been, I think, a failure to furnish proof, proofs that moral values exist independently, that they're not just culturally contingent, etc. So far there's been a failure, philosophically, throughout the history of humanity. But the failure doesn't prove that they don't exist. It just says, "Well, so far we haven't found that."

Again, now, we could adopt a position of the viability of different logoi, different ideas and notions, different conceptual frameworks about ontology. And we can enter into different conceptions. And for example, a conception of moral values as existing independently in this realm of ideas, the sphere of ideal existence. And we can also even entertain the idea of a moral Absolute, which I'll come to later -- some kind of synthesis of all moral values. And I'll come back to that later. And so, we can enter that, and the perceptions that follow, that come out of such a conception. And we can do that, you know, as I said, flexibly, temporarily, lightly, experimentally -- all that is available to us, I think, as human beings, as thinking beings, as meditators, as soulmakers.

One of the things Hartmann ponders -- and it's kind of partly a legacy from the history of philosophy -- so he ponders, like all moral philosophers do, the nature of 'the good' or the nature of goodness. And that phrase, 'the good,' I think I mentioned it earlier as a sort of part of the heritage from Plato and, I don't know, perhaps before, even, 'the good.' And surveying different moral philosophies over the course of history, he says, oftentimes, what different systems of morality do is, they take one value, whatever it is, dependent on the system, and they say that is the highest good. That's the fundamental good. And then they try to derive other values from that, or place them in relation to that. So he writes:

All recognized moral systems speak of the good as of something known. [But] by it they always mean only one certain, special value, which they hold to be the only one and the highest. And according as they regard pleasure, happiness, collective unity, justice, love, and so on, to be the good, the various types of morality are distinguished. Even this diversity itself shows that in reality none of these values is the good.

Now, historically, there was another solution to this which came from Plato, which is the idea of 'the Idea of the Good.' So in the realm, in the sphere of ideal existence, there's a sort of absolute synthesis of all the values, and that is the good. And so he writes about this now.

But if, like Plato, one sets over against such limitations of content [in other words, some specific views about this or that value being 'the good' -- one sets over against that] an "Idea of the Good" and places it above the virtues, even then one does not get a definition of its content. [So I don't know: what exactly is that -- 'the good'? It sounds so abstract.] The "Idea" remains empty.

He mentions also Leibniz and a "concept of perfection," and he says that "comes perhaps a little nearer to [this] goal" of trying to get a sense of the good. Again, remember, we talked about pāramīs, and one of the translations of pāramīs, the Pali word, is 'perfection.' And I pointed out, well, that would be a problem because, in a way, these virtues and values are not perfectible in instance and in physical actuality and manifestation. But the idea of a perfection that's out of reach to manifestation, that can never itself be completely manifest, may work as a translation of pāramī. And he says it has something to do with what Leibniz is talking about. [43:56]

So there is, historically, I think starting with Plato, this idea of 'the good' -- so over and above any virtues, there's the good, which isn't a virtue itself. It's this kind of mysterious, absolute synthesis of all virtue that kind of is the origin or the pinnacle, and it kind of exists at a different level. Hartmann pooh-poohs any kind of belief that we can think our way to some premature synthesis of what that might be, what such an Absolute might be, through dialectical, philosophical reasoning or whatever. He says that's a kind of pipe dream. Whether or not there might be a sense of that in a more meditative consciousness is, to me, a different question.

At any rate, Hartmann defines 'goodness' and 'the good' in a different way, which I found quite interesting. And he writes:

In all morally positive conduct there is found a trend not only towards values, but towards what is always the higher value.

I'll read that again:

In all morally positive conduct there is found a trend not only towards values [so obviously, morally positive conduct has a trend towards values], but towards what is always the higher value.

So that, to him, is the good. It's situational. There's a choice between different values, and what constitutes goodness, or constitutes an instantiation of goodness, is the choice and the preference and the alignment with, based on sensitivity to what's the higher value. So to choose something -- for example, to choose in favour of comfort rather than my kindness to another, or convenience or pleasure rather than some kind of altruistic expression, or to choose my security at a certain level, whether it's financial or some kind of existential security, over, for example, truthfulness or justice -- these would be examples of choosing what's lower (comfort, convenience, pleasure, a certain level of security) over what's higher or more noble, we might say. That wouldn't constitute goodness. But if I choose the altruistic, if I choose the higher and more noble, if I choose justice, truthfulness over my comfort, my convenience, my pleasure, my security, then I'm choosing the higher value. There's a trend towards the higher value. And that is goodness. So the good is that higher value in any situation. And goodness itself is my capacity to feel that and to orient towards that and to choose that.

So sometimes, those kind of choices are very simple, very obvious. It's clear in a certain situation what the different relative heights are, and there's nothing except our own fears and self-contraction, etc., that's preventing a manifestation of goodness, preventing this orientation, sensibility to, orientation to, and choice of what's a higher value. [47:57] But actually, in life, our free will meets and has to negotiate, has to choose between various kinds of value conflicts. So we come across situations that are complex -- either in the structure of the situation, or actually there's something even deeper: there are conflicts between different values themselves. So we gave some examples of different situations where the setup of the situation means that I have to choose between an allegiance to this value over an allegiance to that value. And I might feel torn, and part of it's accepting the guilt that comes with choosing one and neglecting to choose, neglecting to support and give life to the other value. And some of those are really simple and kind of everyday, everyday encountered situations that we come across, and we gave some examples before.

But others are really quite profound and difficult. So I was thinking, for instance, of Nelson Mandela, and in a way, taking the risks that he did for the sake of justice -- risking his life, certainly. I think the sense was it was probable that he would lose his life, or certainly, a long, long time in prison. And risking that, and his obligation to his family, his moral obligation to be there for his family, for his wife and his children. That's a moral value as a father, as a husband, etc. So that value, in conflict, or in antagonistic and oppositional relationship with the claims of his conscience regarding justice in a wider sphere of love, to encompass the non-white South Africans, not just his family. Now, if the situation in South Africa at that time were such that there were two democratic parties vying for office for a period of time, and one could simply stand in the sense of allegiance to justice -- racial justice, or whatever, ethnic justice, social justice -- simply by walking to the polling station and casting your ballot, and one had a sense of, "Yeah, I can do that, and the success of that party that isn't trying to institutionalize racism is kind of very possible," that's a very different situation. And the situation then would not end up presenting an opposition, a choice between the virtues and the values of being a father, being there for my children as they grow up, supporting them, helping their life, supporting them with the livelihood that I earn, etc., with love, with contact. I wouldn't have to choose between that, that set of virtues and values, and the wider set demanded by my conscience, with regard to wider social justice.

So there was something very, very difficult, pressing -- and that's an understatement -- in the structure of that situation. But there are countless examples where our life just presents us with situations, where there's something in the situation where these two values are brought together, and I have to choose between them -- or several values, and I have to choose between them. And it's given by the situation. It's not inherently a problem in the values themselves.

But as we go into this -- and this is one of the things I was trying to say -- it's not often that the complexity of values is reflected upon so openly or carefully. [52:36] This is, again, one of the things that Hartmann stresses. And I want to pick up on this a little bit. There's a complexity not just from situations that we encounter in life, but also among and between values themselves, and in a value itself. They are more complex than we might at first realize. So at some point, Hartmann, in his big tome on ethics, is talking about some of the classical virtues, meaning the virtues that, for example, Aristotle would write about and talk about. So there are some Greek words here. You don't have to remember them, and I'm not even sure if I'm saying them right [laughs], but it doesn't matter. The point is a more general one. So he writes:

In juxtaposition to σωφροσύνη [sóphrosunè] stands άκολασία [akolasia] and άναισθησία [anaisthèsia].

So he's talking about the virtue of sóphrosunè, and he says, actually, you have to consider these other two disvalues, really, as being important constituent elements, somehow, of this value of sóphrosunè.

[So] only in contrast to the former [to akolasia] of these is it properly self-control.

So sóphrosunè usually gets translated as 'self-control.' He's saying, actually, it's only in regard to akolasia, which is something like being completely out of control.

In contrast to the latter [to anaisthèsia] it [sóphrosunè] is the fully developed capacity to react emotionally, to live in the affections.

Okay? So there's something in this virtue of sóphrosunè that's not just self-control. It's self-control, but within a fully developed capacity to react emotionally and to live in the affections. In other words, we have to draw into this consideration of this one virtue -- sóphrosunè, 'self-control' -- we have to draw in another virtue: aisthèsia, as opposed to anaisthèsia. And then he talks about another one.

Seen against όργιλότης [orgilotès -- again, pardon my Greek, I have no idea how to pronounce these words], πραότης [praotès] is mildness.

So he's talking about the virtue of praotès, the classical virtue of praotès, which often is translated as 'mildness' -- so mildness or gentleness.

But seen against άοργησία [aorgèsia] it is the capacity to be righteously indignant.

So this 'gentleness,' against orgilotès, is -- yeah, we can call it 'gentleness, mildness' -- against aorgèsia it is the capacity to be righteously indignant. And again, two points here. One is, what does that imply about our full ethical response to ethical situations, and also ethical situations like climate change, and like species extinction? And what also does it imply (actually, three points), what does it imply, then, about -- sometimes what we pick up from the tradition of Buddhadharma is this kind of one-sided prioritization of gentleness or equanimity, certainly in the classical texts, and to differing degrees in contemporary interpretations of it. But certainly in the classical texts, there's this emphasis on equanimity -- what we might call sóphrosunè, 'self-control' -- and equanimity, without really this supportive counter-weight, balancing emphasis on a fully developed capacity to react emotionally, to live in the affections, this aisthèsia. But the point, more pertinently right now, is that virtues considered singly may be problematical, and we actually have to look at constellations and kind of syntheses.

And perhaps virtues need counter-weights. So there's a way, for example, altruism -- what Hartmann calls 'brotherly love' -- was a virtue that kind of burst into consciousness historically with the emergence of Christianity, so very much emphasized by Jesus in his teachings, brotherly love, altruism. Who's near me? What do they need? Putting them before me. "If a centurion asks you to walk with him half a mile, walk with him 10 miles." I can't remember the exact quote -- that sort of thing. "Turning the other cheek" -- all these, the eruption into human consciousness of this domination, if you like, of this virtue of brotherly love, of altruism to those around one. That can be almost tyrannical and way out of balance if it doesn't have a counter-weight. So there's a counter-weight in just a sort of healthy egoism, a healthy self-sense.

Or something like loyalty: loyal to I don't know what, to my community, to my teacher, to my country, beyond considerations of my loyalty to, say, justice or whatever -- that would be deeply problematic. Or again, a loyalty to truthfulness where it's not really sensitive to other values and their demand for allegiance, that consideration. So there's a kind of tyranny, or a potential tyranny of some values. They can tend to -- or the human consciousness, or the soul, in its fervour, in its love, in its particular direction of soulmaking at any time, can set up one value and neglect others, and set up one value as the dominant or the main thrust and neglect others.

So this consideration led Aristotle, when he was considering the virtues, to consider, well, actually, maybe a virtue is a synthesis of different values rather than a single value. So going back to all those funny Greek words -- that sóphrosunè, proper self-control, is actually a synthesis, yes, we might call 'self-control,' but also synthesized with this capacity to react emotionally, fully developed capacity to react emotionally, to live in the affections. And again, praotès is 'gentleness,' but includes the virtue of the capacity to be righteously indignant -- or 'mildness,' but it includes the capacity to be righteously indignant. So that Aristotle said maybe a virtue is actually a synthesis, and any of these individual, what seem like virtues, are actually problematic, potentially. So all this gets -- well, potentially quite interesting. Again, I'll read a passage from Hartmann about all this:

In this sense it may be said that every moral value has a point in it, not indeed in itself but for [human beings], where it becomes a danger; there is a limit beyond which its dominance in consciousness ceases to be of value.

Yeah? Just imagine. Take any one single virtue, like I said, like altruism, like loyalty, like truthfulness, like courage, even. If it's not balanced, if it has not given a counter-weight, if it dominates too much the consciousness and the moral kind of sight and sensibility, there are problems, and it actually stops being a value. It becomes a disvalue. So as I said, he considers Aristotle, and that idea that possibly a virtue is really a synthesis of several values.

Only a sense of justice which is at the same time loving, only a brotherly love [a love of those who I encounter in my life, who are immediately around me] which also considers the far distant, only a pride which would likewise be humble, could be valid as an ideal of moral conduct.... [So] every value [reaches] true fulfilment only in its synthesis with others -- and indeed finally only in Idea, only in its synthesis with all.

So again, there's this kind of intuitive sense that there's some possible synthesis, in the ideational realm, of all these virtues, which seem to need each other and sometimes pull in different directions. But that intuitive sense of it is out of reach. It's elusive, the sense of that synthesis.

Every single value first attains its own full character through its axiological counter-weight in the synthesis.

'Axiological' just means 'to do with values,' actually. Every single value first attains its own full character through its counter-weight in the synthesis, through its axiological counter-weight in the synthesis.

Even in itself it is incomplete; it is even threatened in its valuational character, without its counter-weight. Whether this consists ... in a single, specific counter-value, or ... in a larger series of values, makes no great difference. The synthesis, the understanding of which is under question [it's like, "What is the synthesis?"], may have any degree of complexity.

So I'm just going into it very briefly, and we'll touch on it a little bit more, actually, in the next part. But if you reflect on this, it really becomes quite interesting. When we hear this kind of thing, we can have all kinds of responses in our soul. One of the responses is almost like not much of a response. It's like, "Yeah, well, everyone knows that. Yeah, well, you know, moderation in all things, eh?" And there's a kind of flaccidity of the mind, of the heart, of the soul, in relation to this complexity and also problem, or problematic in relation to values. "Yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah." You can hear the lack of vigour, the lack of vitality, the lack of attunement and readiness and poise and energization and wrestling with this problematic. But that's one response: "Too much of anything is not a good thing." But it just becomes a kind of truism, and really, all it's doing is not disturbing us. All we're doing is adopting a posture, or a kind of non-posture of flaccidity, of non-vigour, of non-vitality, non-keenness in our moral sensibility so as to remain undisturbed, so as to remain a little bit asleep, the soul not on fire, not churning with the difficulties and the challenges of the soulmaking, the process of the eros, of the breaking of vessels, of the questioning, etc. But that would be one response. Maybe -- I don't know -- it's sort of most people's response. I'm not sure. [1:04:42]

Another response to all that, and this complexity there, and this sort of pulling in different directions of different values, would be the kind of postmodern insistence on and relishing of our finitude, our fragmentation, stressing the futility of trying to understand values or trying to propose any kind of higher anchoring of the moral values and of our ethical sense: "Well, see?" But again, the question I would have, or one question I would have, if that's the kind of outlook with regard to this particular problem, is why? Why are you relishing that picture of our fragmentation, our existential fragmentation, our impossibility, our finitude, the futility of nobility? Why do you emphasize that? What's going on there psychologically?

Or another possible reaction or stance in relation to this problematic is with some even dimly intuited sense of a beyond of values, the beyond of the realm of ideas, of the sphere of ideal existence, impossible as it is to instantiate -- as we've said with the mathematical analogies -- exactly, fully, completely, just as images are impossible to fully, completely instantiate, but also impossible as it might be to come up with a kind of logically coherent, discursive, rational definition of what that synthesis in the beyond might be. So yes, our finitude; yes, our fragmentation; but there can be with that finitude not a kind of futility or flaccidity -- not this kind of hanging on to a certain limitation and blocking of our opening in nobility, but a finitude that kind of gazes also to the horizon, looking at the horizon, almost groping, feeling what might be beyond that horizon, over the horizon. And there are other possible reactions as well.

Let's pause there for now before I go into some more about the complexities and antinomies, oppositions, contradictions between values.

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1. Nicolai Hartmann, Ethics, ii: Moral Values (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 188--9. ↩︎

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 187. ↩︎

3. Rob Burbea, "Eyes Wide Open: Seeing Causes and Conditions," Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising (Devon: Hermes Amāra, 2014), 97--106. ↩︎

4. Rob Burbea, "Ending Blame" (9 Feb. 2011), https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/12514/, accessed 4 April 2021. ↩︎

5. Hartmann, Ethics, 144--5, 171--2, 350, 414, 424--5. ↩︎