19. Derive Ethics from Relationships
‘Compassion is the working out of our interconnectedness; it is the praxis of interconnectedness.’
Hildegard of Bingen
Compassion is often now taken to simply mean mercy — and mercy is something of a sentimental thing. It can be a condescension to people in need, which whilst sometimes very welcome, nonetheless maintains the ‘power over’ dynamic that is so insidious in our culture. In this work, put simply, compassion is taken to mean justice and celebration, and this is in relation to the oneness of all life.
Because of its aspiration to transcendence, spirituality tends to view compassion, justice and love as ideals. They are seen as timeless qualities that exist outside the realm of human interaction and which we simply appropriate or fail to appropriate. Almost unwittingly, metaphysics becomes the primary concern. Instead of: ‘How should we live?’ — the first question becomes: ‘What is the world like?’ What is compassion as an ideal — in the abstract? The result is that truth, knowledge and belief far outweigh relationship in terms of trying to become more compassionate and to act more justly. It is suggested here and throughout this work that this is not a good approach. It is something that occurs because of a long-standing bias toward objectivity and abstract truth - particularly in Western culture. Erich Fromm contrasts the notion of being with that of becoming:
‘… the idea that being implies change, ie. that being is becoming, has its two greatest and most uncompromising representatives at the beginning and at the zenith of western philosophy: in Heraclitus and in Hegel.
‘The position that being is a permanent, timeless, and unchangeable substance and the opposite of becoming, as expressed by Parmenides, Plato, and the scholastic ‘realists’, makes sense only on the basis of the idealistic notion that thought (idea) is the ultimate reality. If the idea of love (in Plato’s sense) is more real than the experience of loving, one can say that love as an idea is permanent and unchangeable. But when we start out with the reality of human beings existing, loving, hating, suffering, then there is no being that is not at the same time becoming and changing. Living structures can be only if they become; they can exist only if they change. Change and growth are inherent qualities of the life process.’
Erich Fromm — To Have or to Be? (Author’s emphases.)
This quote very much echoes Grace Jantzen’s concept of ‘natals’ (as opposed to mortals) and her ideas on becoming expressed in her book ‘Becoming Divine’. Looking at Emmanuel Levinas’ critique of morality in western philosophy, Jantzen comments:
‘The disastrous consequences of such an onto-theological system in which knowledge is itself violence are only too apparent, not least in how ethics is conceived within such a framework. If ethics is held to follow from being… this effectively subordinates ethics to ontology. But this means ethics itself is founded in violence — that is, in the unethical.’
Jantzen goes on to quote directly from Levinas:
‘To affirm the priority of being over existents is to already decide the essence of philosophy; it is to subordinate the relation with someone who is an existent, (the ethical relation) to a relation with the being of existents, which, impersonal, permits the apprehension, the domination of existents (a relationship of knowing), subordinates justice to freedom.’
The solution proposed by Levinas (and supported by Jantzen) is simply to know another person as a unique individual, in their ‘radical otherness’. To treat others simply as examples of a universal or as members of a category is already to do violence to them. To treat others as individuals is to celebrate their particular manifestation as embodied persons, (or as Maurice Merleau-Ponty might describe us — ‘body-subjects’).
Levinas again:
‘This is the question of meaning not being: not the ontology of the understanding of that extraordinary verb, but the ethics of its justice. The question par excellence of the question of philosophy. Not “why being rather than nothing?”, but how being justifies itself.’
All quotes from Grace Jantzen — Becoming Divine
It is important to stress though, as with the opening quote of this chapter, that we are already fully connected as embodied persons. The oneness of life makes this something we cannot avoid — even if we may want to sometimes! Also, when we set up right and wrong as absolutes, we turn them into something else. This ceases to be ethics in the sense of relationship and becomes instead a bureaucracy.
From an ‘eternal’ perspective our souls ‘just are’. The idea of change is meaningless until some boundary is set within which a measure can be taken. Depending on the boundary, or the description or economy that we adopt, it could be said perhaps that the soul changes over the course of a human lifespan. Whether that change is for better or for worse again depends on how we set up our economy. If we choose to look at how the soul accommodates the life of her host to the particular mores and customs in which she finds herself, then we could perhaps stipulate an improvement or a decline. But from an eternal perspective, the soul is perfect.
The criticism of Western philosophy from Jantzen and others then is that truth is paramount! Value is only realisable through ideals, so morality is seen in terms of relating to something that is fixed and external. Even where morality is rejected, or considered to be ‘relative’ it is actually just a rebellion against this particular interpretation of what value really is. The underlying assumption is that of a fixed truth, and knowledge in terms of justified true belief is never questioned. This in turn means that value that arises from within the human economy, as an ongoing interaction between embodied persons, is disregarded. There is however one underlying truth that validates this notion and that is nonduality or interbeing, or simply the oneness of all things. As embodied persons, we are nonetheless already connected. We cannot choose to opt out of this and be value-free. All choices we make necessarily add to, or detract from, compassion.
To summarise then: I am just me — not good or bad in myself. However, I am also a person set within a context - some kind of human culture or community. It is in that context that I might be viewed as either good or bad and my individual
acts can be judged to be one or the other. (It is in this context that ‘becoming’ over ‘being’ takes on its true significance.) There is always a balance to be struck between how much accommodation I am willing or able to make. Likewise, in dealing with others, there is a sense in which the real person stands outside any judgement of goodness or badness. Within the context of the human economy however, we can assign a measure of responsibility to act rightly and a measure of blame if the values of the human economy fail to be upheld. Within the economy of grace, we step back from this and see the person just as a person — beautiful in essence aside from any right or wrong. Deserving always our compassionate response. This is surely our toughest decision. For if the soul is perfect and the character of a person is all that it ever needs to be, then at what point does evil enter into the equation? Is it nothing more that a particular culture’s interpretation of right and wrong? This is the question often posed of religion — how could a good God allow evil? — but it is bringing it home to individuals. How can a perfect soul commit evil? The only alternative I can see is to accept the universe as random and then the problem of evil vanishes (although not, of course, evil itself). But with a random universe, in place of the question of evil there are the questions of where did all this complexity and order come from and how has consciousness come about? An intermediate position might be to say that consciousness has evolved with the universe and it must try to discern what is for the best just from the development of life. Then, souls are not perfect and individual character might not be all it could be and genuine evil becomes a distinct possibility. But the question of order — and where consciousness came from in the first place — still remains.
Those who have had a ‘mountain-top experience’ — seen the world as serene, inter-connected and beautiful in itself — along with the mystical tradition generally, are testifying to a universe that is perfect in itself. As such, I prefer to stay with this vision of the world as seen from the mountain-top. I accept evil as a reality but see it as an unexplained paradox from within our limited human view of things.
