Table of Contents
Euthyphro’s Horns [God and the Good]
Divine Voluntarism
Moral Independence
Register Inversion
Introduction
How does Metaphysics eventually elicit Ethics? We have an account of Being, but what about its relationship to Becoming?
Through Hume’s is/ought problem, Euthyphro’s dilemma, and the Nature of Evil, I will demonstrate that ethics must be understood not merely as obedience to commands, but as the alignment of conscious life with the Real.
Virtue, by this account, is the practical/descended form of metaphysical clarity: the path by which symbolic beings come to participate in, bear witness to, and enact the Good.
The Universe has never been morally neutral: all facts, interrogated at the appropriate register, have moral character. This recognition is what it means to re-sanctify Reality.
Finally, we will confront the source of Evil: not simply a privation of Goodness, but an obstruction of its disclosure, either by symbolic misalignment, or misapprehension.
Importantly, we are not here deriving the principal virtues that comprise our ethics itself, instead, we aim to rectify the philosophical status of the ideas that make ethical philosophy meaningful at all.
Only then will we be on firm enough ground to expound an Ethics.
In summary: moral claims necessitate metaphysical depth, the is-ought distinction emerges naturally from the register-inversion causing the flattening of Reality, Evil arises when contingent beings fail to disclose their Source, and Sin is the upshot of a wilful mismapping of disclosed Reality.
The Good is shown to be the Divine as cognisable by finite symbols bearing witness to Reality. Virtue is thus Reality’s failthful disclosure.
In later work, we will see how this root idea blooms into the good as it is commonly conceived at lower registers.
We will consider:
“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning … when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.” — Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature
What is the nature of Morality? How does Goodness relate to Being? In what sense is goodness real? Is it independent of conscious life?
We cognise Reality schismatically: on the one hand, apprehending Reality as objectively and descriptively as we can, as a collection of facts, and on the other hand, are involved deeply in a world that constantly makes moral demands on us and of which we demand moral rights. How do we make sense of this?“Is the Good good because it is what God commanded, or was it commanded because it is good?” — Socrates to Euthyphro
In what sense is God good? Does the question even make sense? Is it possible for God to command evil? That is: is God’s goodness arbitrary? If not, then does that assert a morality that exists independently of the Divine, regardless of whether or not He is held to it?
For these questions to make sense, we must confront our own moral standards: namely, to what extent can we trust our moral intuitions? How do we come to know moral facts? How do these moral facts relate to the substance of Revelation?“If He is both willing and able, from what source then are evils?” — Epicurus
What is the nature of Evil? How does it manifest? How does the Divine relate morally to Creation? Is this distinct from his affordance of Being? What is the ontological ground of Sin?
Now, in each of:
We shed light on the telos of conscious life, namely, to bear Witness, to apprehend the Divine, to achieve Enlightenment. This is, however, construed at a dizzyingly high register, and in order to expound an Ethics, we require a conception of Virtue at registers amenable firstly to ideological conception, to intent formation, and finally, to physical action.
If Virtue is clarity of symbols to the Real from the perspective of the Divine itself, then, what is the nature of Virtue from the perspective of the symbol?
We spy the Summit, but what is the nature of the Path there?
In Is, there is Ought
The Is-Ought Distinction denotes the apparent impossibility of deriving what ought to be from what simply is.
Hume notes curiously that when reasoning, we often speak for some time in descriptive terms: this is the case, this is not the case, human beings desire this, societies necessitate that, nature is as follows. This is.
However, we then see an abrupt but subtle shift to normative claims: we must, you should, I ought. Here, we are no longer simply describing the world, but judging, commanding, exhorting, praising, and condemning.
Something has changed. The question is: why?
Reason necessitates that every valid inference must preserve the content of its premises. If the premises are strictly descriptive, then conclusions cannot contain normative claims unless some ethical principle has been distinctly invoked. For instance, from “human beings seek pleasure”, we cannot say “pleasure ought to be sought” without invoking the principle that what human beings seek ought to be sought.
This problem is not solved by the introduction of new facts: descriptions as they are demonstrate structure, consequences, causality, pattern, requirements, and properties, but cannot by themselves, interpreted in this way, generate moral commitments.
The base and crude naturalistic arguments found in modern fields like evolutionary psychology do not help us here. It is evolutionarily adaptive to trust our neighbours, be pro-social, to maintain informationally efficient social norms, to have deep emotive commitments to your brethren. None of these explain why we must do these things, simply that they are done, and that may help explain why we are, biologically speaking, here. Describing the mechanics of a piano does not tell you anything about music. By this token, Reality is flat, simply mechanism and process.
The opposite error is as severe, namely: a dualism that severs morality from Reality. This takes two forms: either the position that morality is real but formless and ghostly, values that are to be “imposed” on facts, duties and rights that descend to us from either “beyond”1, or that morality is unreal and simply a projection of conscious life on Reality, either an expression of emotion or ultimately a meaningless and mutable social construction. People here will often point to changing moral standards over history and the social effects on morality as evidence of morality’s mutability and contingency on material and cultural facts.2
In the first case, morality maintains some meaning, but concedes the profanity of Reality, one upon which morality is imposed: this is moral supernaturalism. In the second case, morality is once again conceived descriptively as simply the set of desirable outcomes of society inferable from the set of human beings’ revealed preferences: this is moral anti-realism or even constructivism. Again, in this worldview, Reality is flat: the good is not real.
The thrust of the is-ought distinction is not that moral language is meaningless, but that it cannot be deployed carelessly without incoherence. A fact does not yet compel. That something occurs does not mean it is good or bad, that something is natural does not yet mean that it is noble, that something is desired does not mean it is desirable.
At least: not until we clarify what these words actually mean. Until then, we are left with an inadequate account of the grounds of morality.
Notice that in all the cases above, there exist two modes of failure:
a flattening of Reality that identifies essence with form, and which reduces moral claims to contingency on either emotive/psychological/cultural facts, or to material/biological facts
a schism in the nature of Reality that presupposes an independence of morality from it
The principal claim is that the is-ought distinction is at its core a Register Collapse. We are guilty of invoking principles and ideas in a fashion inappropriate to their own nature, mutilating them and rendering them incoherent. (Itself deeply sinful from our perspective, by definition.)
The first thing to recognise is that as soon as we invoke morality, we necessarily invoke the symbol as addressable: capable of forming judgments, acting intentionally, and possessing Free Will. We have therefore necessarily already descended from the register of Intelligibility (where things are said to truly be and not be) and into the register of Determination (where things ought to become or not become). For more, see The Hierarchy of Being.
Ethics fundamentally belongs to the realm of Becoming, not Being.
To speak of Being or the Real is to speak from within the register of Intelligibility. Here, the notion of Free Will is illusory, subordinated to the principle of Fate: things do not “ought” to be or not be, they simply are. This is to say that once we do invoke morality, we are already necessarily pre-supposing the world’s intelligibility in some fashion.
At the Register of Being (Intelligibility), things simply are: at the Register of Becoming, things are under obligation to become what they are meant to be.
Ethics is only meaningful in the distance between what a thing manifests of itself, and what it is meant to become.
Moral pronouncements are ultimately predicated on comparisons of the world as observed and understood by us, with the world as it is ideally conceived. It is precisely this contrast between the world as we see it manifest relative to the world as we see it, in principle, i.e. as ideal, that elicits a moral claim. Every moral claim implicitly discloses, therefore, a claim about what Reality both currently manifests and also could manifest.
All ethics, therefore, viewed “from above” is indistinguishable from the apprehension and the intelligibility of the Real.
What about “from below”? i.e. from the point-of-view of the symbol?
Bear in mind, that this is a phenomenological question. Reading Sacred Law, or understanding the mechanics of pair-bonding and pro-social trust is insufficient insofar as it does not "compel” oneself to right a wrong or to even make a judgement about whether or not things are right or wrong.
This is analogous to the objective “View from Nowhere” critiqued in Not Objectivity but Annihilation relative to the participatory “View from Everywhere” which recognises the self as inextricably involved in Reality. In a sense, this is the missing piece that incorporates the internal experience of somebody who cognises Reality and makes judgements about it all at once. Higher knowledge is the correction of misapprehensions about one’s cognition of Reality, and therefore, one’s moral judgements of it.
A symbol does not “contain” its telos: instead, it desires disclosure, it is its tendency towards it, the reed crying for the reed-bed, as Rumi sagely notes. The fact that our nature compels us, then, is not a “external” but the same yearning suffered from the inside: the "ought" is what the distance between what we are and what we are meant to be feels like.
This is why insufficient participation in our telos grips us feverishly and obsessively rather than merely suggests itself: to see part of the path to one's Source is to be drawn along it. To refuse is not simply to disobey an external decree but to blind oneself: the will that turns from its nature is the nature deforming itself. And because that nature is itself an edge from the Absolute, we see the identification of obedience (seen from the outside) and autonomy (felt from the inside). The desire of the symbol and the command of the Source are one emanation, simply seen in opposite directions.
This has the absolutely fundamental implication that the purpose of Poles, either Revelation or Prophecy, is not to force us to submit, but rather to reorder ourselves. It is to help us see what we really are.
When we truly know what we are meant to be, we submit to it without question. This is the nature of Submission and what Islam really means.
These are not new ideas: Plato specifies, in his Republic, that the Good is not merely a thing among other things but the very light by which things become intelligible. Aristotle roots his ethics in telos: to know a thing is to know the good proper to its form and purpose.
As we have come to appreciate, these views are harmonised when mindful of the register at which they’re expressed: after all, to determine a thing’s telos is to “see it”, to “recognise it”, to render it “intelligible”. Recognise that this itself takes the form of initially an act of Mercy, an opening of possibility: what could this be?, and then finally, an act of Wrath, a closing to determination: what is this meant to be?
The fact that Wisdom is both descriptive as well as normative should clarify the moral and ethical structure implicit in the apprehension of Reality itself. Reality is not morally neutral in precisely the same way we are not. We are extensions of it, contiguous with it, inextricable from it. This is why Socrates holds Wisdom to be the root of all virtue.
Viewed in this deep sense, within the Register of Determination: all facts, understood within the Register of Determination, are moral facts. Goodness is not a mental projection imposed on Reality in accordance with our moods and feelings: it is inalienably inferred from Reality. It is interpreted.
Conversely, descriptive statements of a register below the Register of Determination, do not elicit normativity, but are instead what normativity acts on or which depend on morality. For instance: “the chair has four legs”, or “the sky is blue”, or “I am starving”, but even more so, the chair and its legs, the sky and its blueness, and me and my hunger are the objects of ethics, contingent on principles that we could call ethical at the level of determination to derive meaning: for instance, that the chair has four legs makes it stable, that the sky is blue makes it beautiful, that I am starving implies I am not thinking clearly.
The is-ought distinction is therefore not really an error itself; instead, it is better conceived of as a warning contra Register Confusion. At the Register of Mechanism or Actuality, no oughts follow from ises. We would be entirely correct to dismiss crude attempts to moralise from these low-register descriptions. If Reality is conceived of entirely in this flat way, purely horizontally, as mechanism and matter without meaning, then there is no ethics that can be recovered from it.
This is, however, simply the poverty of an understanding of Reality that remains purely mechanistic or material: this is not the unreality of the Good.
Once we digest this, we recognise that even descriptive statements have an esoteric moral character: this is the nature of the delight the Sage feels in the banal. That the brook babbles, cotton is white, and water is wet are themselves invariably sources of delight, for in these symbols’ alignment, they become well-formed disclosures of the Divine. This is what it means to sanctify the world.
In each thing, there is Everything.
Euthyphro’s Horns
“Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved?” — Socrates to Euthyphro
It is a simple question: is the Good good because it is what God commanded, or was it commanded because it is good?
These are the two horns of Euthyphro’s dilemma.
The first is more widely known as Divine Voluntarism or more narrowly as Divine Command Theory.
In this frame, the Good is good because God wills it: moral obligation is not “discovered” with reference to some standard independent of the Divine, but is itself a corollary of the Divine Will itself.
Duties are demanded of us by the Divine, and rights are afforded to us from Him. Morality is an element of Creation applicable solely to the rest of Creation: the Divine is not subject to morality but transcends it. Morality is identifiable with Divine Sovereignty over His Dominion.
Interpreted simplistically, this seems bizarre. Morality here appears arbitrary, purely an outcrop of sheer power, the Good is underwritten purely as a result of Hobbesian might. “If God were to command murder, then it would be righteous, and if God were to forbid charity, then it would be sinful.” Voluntarism, interpreted in this way, appears indistinct from tyranny: Goodness contingent on Omnipotence, as if worship were strict submission to a will greater than ours.
The Voluntarist would object: God is not simply a being among other beings, a creature whose capacities exceed ours. He is the ultimate fount of Being itself, upon whom all intelligibility, possibility, causality, and normativity depend. If the Divine is truly Divine, then there cannot possibly exist some moral order above or independent of Him by which He Himself is evaluated.
The fundamental premise of voluntarism is Divine Aseity (causal independence).
Voluntarism therefore considers the second horn of Euthyphro blasphemous, for it implies that God’s “goodness” indicates God’s subservience to a standard that He did not originate and upon which He Himself is subject to. The Divine therefore, even if morally perfect, is no longer absolute.
Within Voluntarism, the Good cannot be external to God, because nothing can be. To suggest that God commands the Good because it is good makes an idol of goodness: serene, abstract, sovereign over the Sovereign.
Voluntarism further draws attention to the nature of morality: it obliges. Obligations possess the structure of address or command. Moral obligation is not merely the perception of value, but a claim on intent and activity.
The weight of moral injunctions are not exhausted by noting that generosity is noble, that cruelty is ugly, that envy is destructive, or that temperance is wise. The weight of moral obligation arises from the grip, the bind that it has upon us within Creation.
But, the Voluntarist further argues, we are not bound to reified abstractions like “humanity” or “society” or “our ancestors” or even the “self”. The obligation is a personal command: the Divine is personally commanding us. This is what it means to say “one ought”.
It is not for nothing that Voluntarism looms so large within the Abrahamic traditions. The Abrahamic God, popularly conceived, is an intensely personal God, alive and active. To the Voluntarist, Moses did not discourse with the Divine on Sinai: he received Commandments.
Voluntarism is richly discussed within Islamic Asharism, and Christian Scotism: goodness is dismissed as independently accessible to reason in favour of the Word of God itself. In this worldview, God is neither good nor wicked: the terms don’t even apply to Him, they are simply a measure of Creation’s accordance with His Will.3
In its most sophisticated forms, Voluntarism clarifies that God’s will is not arbitrary because God Himself is not arbitrary. Divine Will is not an eruption of mere preference: it is the will of the One who is definitionally all-wise, personal, living, and perfect.
The intuition here is that, far from simply being legalistic scaffolding, morality is a declaration of allegiance.
The Voluntarist would go further: moral life is not inhabited neutrally. It is intimately phenomenological and experiential. Determining whether or not something is good or evil feels different to determining the truth or falsity of a description. Morality feels juridical, covenantal, and deeply personal.
Reality is not mute, here: it imposes upon us. Our consciences are simply the Divine Will pressing upon ours. This is why Voluntarists view autonomy or “liberty” with disdain: to self-legislate is to repudiate the normative structure of Reality itself, and to erect the idols of ourselves in its place.
Voluntarism is, prima facie, the study of obedience. There is but one thing to obey: the Living, Personal God.
The second horn is known more widely as Independent Moral Realism.
The claim is that the Good is not good because God commands it, but that God commands it because it is good. The Divine Will does not originate morality but reveals and expresses it.
Again, interpreted simplistically, we appear here to subordinate the Divine to something beyond Himself, as if, there was a metaphysical constitution prior to the Creator, an impersonal Goodness before which even God must submit. The Divine here is the ultimate moral agent, but not the source of morality itself.
The Moral Realist (technically imprecise, but shorthand for independent moral realist) would object here: the point is not rebellion or the diminishment of the Divine, but the intelligibility of all praise to Him, and allegiance to Him.
When you say that “God is good”, you do not often mean: “God wills what He wills” as Voluntarism seems to imply, instead: you assert the worthiness of the Divine of worship. You identify His Mercy with Mercy, His Justice with Justice, and His Wisdom with Wisdom: these virtues already mean something, and when we assert the Divine Expression of these qualities, they must mean even more since it is precisely that identification that underpins all devotion to the Sacred: if goodness is simply “that which He wills”, then we are told nothing about the moral character of His Will.
The Moral Realist here continues that moral language is not only not exhausted when referring to the Divine, but that it is actualised. We do not call God just because whatever He does is Justice by definition: instead, we determine that in God’s will, Justice is perfectly realised.
The Moral Realist here centres and refuses to sacrifice the meaning of virtue in Divine Will.
Without some intelligible moral grammar, Revelation and Prophecy themselves lose all value and meaning. It is precisely with reference to this moral grammar that we are able to discern the weight of Divine Will, and be compelled by it. We encounter Revelation, discover that it focuses and clarifies the moral grammar we innately intuit, and only then afford it our obedience.
The Moral Realist continues: obedience without this reference to Goodness is no more than the abasement of a fool, easily led astray by self-interest, power, and fear.
In this vein, Independent Moral Realism would assert that morality precedes the recognition of the Divine Will as truly Divine.
This view is asserted predominantly by the rationalist strains within every tradition, from the Mutazilis in Islam, to the Hellenic Stoics, through Leibniz, Kant, and the rest of the Enlightenment.
In sum, the first horn of Euthyphro reasons from the ultimate transcendence of the Divine, and the second preserves the meaning of Divine Goodness.
The trouble with Voluntarism is that it absolutises Command. In its unbridled reverence of Divine Transcendence, it inverts the relationship between Divine Will and Divine Nature.
If the Good is simply that which is willed, and that which is willed is Good, then “God’s goodness”, a statement about His Nature is meaningless: precisely what Moral Realism rejects.
There’s a causal error here; a subtle but deep register inversion: God’s Will does not result in His Nature (what we would subsequently call the Good): it simply expresses it. His Nature, Essence is what makes His Will possible, not the other way round.
The Divine Nature exists at the register of Intelligibility (from the perspective of the Divine Himself) and prefigures the Divine Will, which exists at the register of Determination. We are, and only then do we intend.
Technical Note: Again, these are within Higher Registers applicable solely to the Real, insofar as the Divine Will existing at the Register of Determination from the perspective of the Divine still exceeds most essences/teloi/natures of created things at the level of their Intelligibility.
Comparably, the trouble with Independent Moral Realism is that it absolutises Goodness at too low a register, that is, in forms cognisable to conscious beings, either grounded in our consciences, ill-defined abstract virtues, duties and obligations ultimately contingent on circumstance or metrics of physical utility4.
If the Good is independent of the Divine, then the Divine really isn’t absolute, contesting Divine aseity and uniqueness, as noted above.
The intelligibility of the Good is neither the intelligibility of moral independence, nor is it the independence of moral intelligibility. That the mind can come to know the Good (however imperfectly) without necessary recourse to Revelation or Prophecy does not mean that it is ontologically prior to Being itself.
Additionally, there is the phenomenological void, insofar as the recognition of Goodness does not constitute the sense of obligation or willingness to attend to it.5 Morality is deeply personal, covenantal, intimate.
What are we to conclude, then, about the nature of Goodness?
Stated simply: Goodness, conceived in the absolute, in its totality, in its essence, is identifiable with Being itself, with the Real, with the Truth.
Neither is the Good good because it is commanded, nor is it commanded because it is good: rather, the Divine commands the Good because God is the Good.
The Divine Nature is the Good disclosed at the Register of Intelligibility, whereas the Divine Will is the Good disclosed at the Register of Determination.
Divine Command is simply the descent or emanation of Divine Nature. (Satisfyingly, what passes for will for the Divine, an emanation of His Nature within the Higher Register of Determination from the perspective of the Real, constitutes fate for Creation, received from His Nature within the Register of Intelligibility from the perspective of Creation.)
Interpreted at the Register of Determination, we feel the personal, self-involving, covenantal music of morality. This is Divine Command, which is not to be identified with what Goodness is. It is instead what Goodness manifests.
The Good in its essence is Being itself: what we cognise as morality or goodness is its disclosure at the level of Determination or Intentionality. This is most clearly recognisable when we consider the notion of Intent or Will.
More clearly, the Good as we cognise it, is the emanation of Being in its essence, to the Register of Determination: this is the Divine Will, which is distinct from the Good as it is.
There is no such thing as morally vacuous Will. As soon as choices are made, as intentions form, we recognise immediately and implicitly that they contain moral content.
This moral content is simply the extent to which Being itself, the Good, the Divine, the Real is determined as a result of that choice, that specification, that intent.
This recognition of moral content to Will as a measure of Reality’s self-disclosure is the very same intelligibility that moral realists assert when they reference goodness as a standard by which to make sense of the Divine Will.
Similarly, Voluntarists are correct to note that the Divine, the Real transcends and ultimately elicits notions of goodness at the Register of Determination, but its subsequent manifestations at the Registers of Mechanism (for instance, a social norm or a law) or Actuality (for instance, a concrete act of kindness).
It is as if Moral Realism moves upwards and outwards, locating Goodness transcendentally, thereby precluding the absolutisation of lower level symbols like the Law or Norms. Without the impulse to independent moral reference, it is easy for the exoteric to simply solidify. It is critical not to do this.
Contrarily, Voluntarism moves downwards and outwards, locating Goodness immanently, thereby preserving God’s transcendence and His ultimate aseity. Without the impulse to voluntarism, it is all too easy to project our shadows onto Reality and mistake obfuscation for Disclosure.
Both impulses should make perfectly clear that, on reflection, there remains a resistance both upward and downward to the flattening of the moral order.
The solution, of-course, is to locate the moral order correctly (within the Register of Determination, contingent on Free Will at the level of Creation) and its implications at the appropriate registers where they facilitate the maximal disclosure of both themselves and all those symbols which participate in them.
Above all, the Good, now recognised as the Real, seeks self-disclosure. And Goodness or Morality of a symbol is thus its clarity to the Real: the humility with which it discloses the Real, and the clarity with which it does so.
This completes our understanding of Virtue defined in the Grammar of Disclosure.
From Light, Shadow
Contrarily, recall that we defined Vice in the Grammar of Disclosure as the opposite of Virtue. It is the obfuscation of a symbol’s relationship with its underlying principle, and a disalignment of it to its purpose.
Additionally, consider the re-interpretation of Heidegger’s Ready-to-hand-ness and Present-at-hand-ness made in Behold! Bear Witness, and how the instrumentalisation of beings (rather than the apprehension of their true natures) is elicited by the introduction of false contingency, with respect solely to Becoming rather than with respect to its Being.
We will now deepen and contextualise both these ideas with reference to a fairly transparent, illustrative representation. (This is a map, and must be treated as such.)
The Cosmic Graph
Observe that Reality is a well-founded order of ontological dependence: it is a set of nodes (symbols) and directed edges (B depends on or participates in A for its being but not the other way round). All nodes (symbols) are ultimately rooted in a terminal or ground truth, a single node on which all others stem from. This is the Absolute, the Real, the Divine.
In this frame, if A is connected to B by a directed edge, then B participates in and is a manifestation/symbol of A. A causes B, in the vertical, ultimate (rather than efficient or material) sense.
To be more precise, the directed edges are:
Strictly Asymmetric: that A causes B does not imply that B causes A
Irreflexive: A cannot cause itself (follows from 1, actually)
Transitive: if A causes B, and B causes C, then A causes C
That the graph is well-founded means that every chain of causality ultimately terminates (no infinite regress).
We assert further, that each chain of edges terminates with a unique root element (the Absolute). (This is the statement of Shahadah/monotheism).
Additionally, the notion of cause applied to the Divine is purely unidirectional: nothing causes the Divine, not even Himself, for causation requires register distinction between the source and the symbol being caused.
Mercy and Wrath are hereby conceivable as operators by which the directed edge that springs forth from a node first becomes possible, and then becomes determinate, resulting in a downstream node. Both are needed for the creation of each new edge. Mercy causes an edge’s extension and Wrath causes an edge’s termination in another symbol.
Technical Note: Note that Mercy and Wrath are both “primordial”, high-register nodes (as principles), but themselves the “means” by which new nodes downstream are instantiated.
The creation of edges distinguishes symbols at a certain register from those at lower ones. The creation of edges represents Emanation.
To engage with Reality is to cognise (with verticality and horizontality) and bear witness to this cosmic graph. This elicits a critical distinction: the Territory, which is the cosmic graph of Reality itself, and the Map, which is each symbol’s recognition of or understanding of this graph.
The former is ontological (noumenal), whereas the latter is epistemological (phenomenal).
Reality itself is error-free. It simply is. Error can only possibly result in a symbol’s cognition of the graph itself.
Note that each symbol itself has a register that governs the registers that it is able to cognise and make sense of. (Analogous to the Sufi notion of the Maqaam.)
Neither is everybody, nor can everybody be the Pole, to whom the graph itself is clear and there is identification between epistemology and ontology.
Stated once again, explicitly, as we demonstrated In Anything, there is Everything, there are two structures now under consideration:
Ontological: the cosmic graph, which is the single, error-free order of dependence rooted in the Absolute that comprises Reality. Its layers are the global registers. This is the Territory.
Epistemological: in each conscious symbol, there is an interior fourfold of Registers, its own Intelligibility, Determination, Mechanism, and Actuality.
This is where error can take place. The symbol’s Intelligibility is the Map.
The Modes of Failure
Ergo, the privative modes that foundationally result in Evil, namely, a misapprehension of Reality can thus be read off naturally as the various ways in which we can mis-read this cosmic graph:
Absolutisation: the deletion of the edge between a symbol and its underlying principle, thereby asserting its own necessity. In the extremal case, it is the assertion of false independence from Being itself. This is the process of idolisation, by which the map is taken for the territory, and is the most fundamental failure mode since, even if the other modes result in an apprehension of Reality that is distorted, the assertion of false independence or hard distinctions in Reality cripples the apprehension itself. This is the death of a sincere engagement with Reality.
Instrumentalisation: asserting a false edge between two points that does not really exist, thereby subserviating a thing to an end it does not depend on, resulting in the thing becoming a means in some other thing’s Becoming rather than the thing’s simple Being itself. This is the introduction of false contingency.
Occlusion: to not observe a true edge between two symbols, thereby misapprehending a symbol’s essence, its underlying principles, and therefore, its purpose. This is the failure of interpretation.
Confusion: to observe a true edge, but to misrecognise one of the nodes, resulting in confusion about its nature and ultimately the aspect of Reality it seeks to disclose. This is a failure of understanding.
Inversion: to observe a true edge, to recognise its connecting nodes, but to misread the directionality of their dependence. This is to falsely privilege means over ends, procedure over justice, matter over form, instrumentality over ultimacy, and Becoming over Being.
The Register Confusion that elicits Euthyphro’s Dilemma or the Is-Ought Distinction or even the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness is ultimately downstream of some combination of these effects.
The Nature of Idolatry
Notice that with instrumentalisation, occlusion, confusion, and inversion, even if there exists profound misapprehension, there remains a thread, wayward and distorted though it may be, by which the symbols can trace some kind of causal link to the Real itself, while Absolutisation is irreducible insofar as, by the solidification of a contingent symbol as self-subsisting, it severs its connection to the Divine itself.
This is the basis of shirk, the mistaking of essence for form, and why it is considered the ultimate sin in the Islamic Tradition, for instance.
The Islamic Shahadah, “There is no god but God” is more precisely interpreted as the recognition that the Root of the whole graph not only exists but is unique.
Technical Note: Note that nobody does not have a metaphysics. There is no such thing as an “atheist” in the sense of somebody who denies Being itself or that there are ultimately causal and fundamental things. The issue is to deny their uniqueness. There is precisely one foundation for Reality: to make distinctions here is to create idols, to absolutise, to commit shirk. The cardinal sin is never the denial of a foundation but its misplacement, its pluralisation, its fragmentation.
There is a subtle distinction between Occlusion and Absolutisation. Both do not see extant edges, but the first is less fundamental than the second insofar as Occlusion is the lack of discovery of an edge despite the attempt or will to do so, whereas Absolutisation is to forsake the search entirely past a point. Occlusion leaves an edge unrecognised: the question is open, waiting for discovery by verticality. Absolutisation closes the question entirely: it is not missing an edge, it is asserting that there is none.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Asserting this is what makes Occlusion into Absolutisation.
Similarly, Inversion iterated globally becomes Absolutisation by enthroning matter over form, culminating in a rooting of the graph at the bottom, lowest register, in physical matter, in the particular and contingent, instead.
This is the precise nature of what Guenon refers to as the Reign of Quantity, the Kali Yuga: the enthronement of the lowest register symbols as absolute.
Comparably, each of the other failure modes, taken to extreme, additionally result in Absolutisation, the terminal deformation towards which all extreme and unrepentant misreading culminates.
Note that, as operators, both Mercy and Wrath are necessary for the existence of any edge (causal relationship) between two nodes. However, the recognition of Wrath where there is Mercy and vice versa as we discussed in the Grammar of Disclosure is a case of Confusion at a very high register. It is to not recognise what the nature of a symbol is.
Kufr, the root of the term “Kafir” is naively interpreted as “infidelity”; interpreted more rigorously, it is often conceived of as wilful disbelief, particularly within the Ashari and classical traditions. Notwithstanding the assumption of a nigh-incoherent doxastic voluntarism implicit here, we now see that there is something deeper at play, namely, that kufr’s etymology implies that its fundamental meaning is that of “concealment” or “shadow”.
Firstly, that the sin in disbelief is contingent on wilfulness: cementing the notion that it exists at the Register of Determination. More importantly, however, it is conceivable now as the failure to trace a node’s edges up the chain of Causality, ascending the Registers, unto the Absolute, the foundational root of the whole cosmological graph.
It is the wilful concealment of or misrecognition of provenance. It is the wilful refusal to permit the flight of the alone (each symbol) to the Alone (the Absolute).
For a symbol, Sin is wilful insofar as it is the gap between the graph as it is disclosed to that symbol and the graph as they cognise it. The will’s withdrawal of attention results in a worse map than your station (the register of you as a symbol) i.e. maqaam, permits.
The subsequent determination or activity that results from this mismapping is precisely what Sin is. It is noetic misalignment that results in intentional misalignment, and subsequently, mechanistic and finally, material misalignment, as it flows down through the Registers.
Kufr is an issue of attention, not a simple act of belief.
It is critical to remember that, while Sin is seated at Determination, it does so at the symbols’s own internal one, not ontological or cosmic Determination.
The maqaam illustrates the confluence of the internal and cosmic registers: the maqaam of a symbol is the highest ontological register that its interior intelligibility can faithfully reach. It is how far up the Territory the maps possibly drawable by this symbol can represent.
Failure for a symbol of a given maqaam or station to make sense of other symbols at higher registers is not sinful: there is simply no possibility of mapping them. Sin arises from a symbol’s refusal to faithfully map symbols within and below its maqaam/register.
This also deeply explains what it means for a being to be judged in accordance with its worth and opportunities.
Finally, it appears as if there is reverse causality here going on: Intelligibility is error-free, but Evil or Sin takes place at the level of Determination, but which must result from a misalignment at the register of Intelligibility, resulting in contradiction. This is also a register confusion.
Within a symbol’s internal registers, its intelligibility grounds its determination: you can only will as you see. This is structural, processive, instant. However, across time or space, each determination affects both the world and the self in such fashion so as to culminate in the next state of the symbol’s intelligibility: each misaligned act of will or attention results in a subsequently worse map to read. This is diachronic, cumulative, reversive.
There is a feedback loop internal to the symbol itself.
The interaction between a symbol’s own intelligibility and determination is not a circle but a spiral, where multiplicity/engagement with other symbols (including itself) either in imagination or space or time or whatever is the axis along which the spiral ascends (or descends).
Good maps result in good deeds, which perfect the map. Bad maps result in sin, which deform the map.
This is what Aristotle means when he discusses hexis: we are what we repeatedly do. This is what the Quran refers to when it discusses the heart being dulled or polished in accordance with what was earned.
We are what we do, we do what we habituate, we habituate what we will, and we will what we believe.
This is how the root of Evil is imperfect understanding.
This is how Truth is the highest virtue.
This is the nature of Sin.
Consider how Sacred Law is often discussed as an imposition of an order without need for justification on a profane world that has no intrinsic connection to it.
This is evidently an extreme bastardisation, not of morality itself, but of ourselves and our understanding of morality. That our views of what is good changes does not mean that morality changes (in fact, even the claim begs the question). It simply means that our view of morality has changed. This obviously, is itself, an act with moral consequences.
Ghazali, Luther, Calvin are other notable voluntarists.
Virtue Ethics, Deontology, and Utilitarianism, respectively.
There are far deeper issues with the temptation to identify that which we are willing to attend to with that which is Good: this is obvious every time anybody thinks they have done something they shouldn’t have. This is everybody.