On Good and Evil

Let me preface this article by saying I’ll be avoiding arbitrating morals to good and evil along a grayscale, that our focus is instead testing the weight of these ideas as principles fundamental to reality, and the classical philosophical conventions of the two. Let’s run through a few of these philosophical traditions now to get an idea of how good and evil has been conceived in the field of metaphysics and religion. In Zoroastrianism, which is generally monotheistic and pantheistic, there is held to be a cosmological duality between good and evil and even a direct opposition to the religion’s sole God, Ahura Mazda, this antagonist was called Angra Mainyu. In the Neoplatonic traditions rooted in the Pythagorean traditions and even the Hermetic philosophy, good is essentially taken as to mean immutable, and evil mutable, implying that God or the One alone is immutable and good. Of course, this dichotomizes and juxtaposes the fleeting sensible world against the One.

These positions have problems, which may be rooted in the indirectness of the philosophers who came up with the positions, but regardless the ideas by lack of clarity have developed severe inconsistencies and contradictions. For instance if a God is Absolute, as is implied of any supreme deity, there can be no privation of that God, no lack of that God, which would mean that there could be no being principally opposed to or existent beyond that God. All such dualities suggesting that could be so would be utterly impossible if the Absolute is indeed absolute. Neoplatonism, donning the mantle of western monistic metaphysics from Plato and Pythagoras before him, has a similar issue. Again, there can be no privation of the Absolute; One/Monad, in the manifest world. In a monistic metaphysic especially, the manifest world must be wholly permeated by the wholeness, or pleroma, of the Absolute. That is to say that the world as we experience it is the literal manifestation and expression of that Absolute. Though the intended meaning was definitely: the unmanifest Absolute which is immutable, is good, and the manifest expression of that Absolute which is mutable, is evil. We do seem to experience change and mutability, but can we actually change into something beyond the Absolute? Definitely not. Moreover, does the Absolute exist? Yes. So is there any ultimate mutability in the nature of reality or God? Certainly not. 

This necessitates a tract on change, because it certainly appears to us as though we experience it. In reality, all we experience is manifestation dynamics, a dynamic between manifestation/resistance to inertia, unmanifestation/assistance to inertia, and continued development of the prior manifestation with reference to the contents of inertia, which is to say that memorization occurs alongside unmanifestation. Were there no unmanifestation, there would be no development of the manifestation, reality would exist as a freeze frame. Time is a direct observation of this dynamic and little more. This dynamic exists to perpetually develop the self image of the Absolute, it is a perpetual process of self-definition. However, there will be nothing actualized beyond what exists in the potentiality of the Absolute, because of course, there is nothing that exists beyond the Absolute. That being said, because the apparently mutable world is in fact an expression of the immutable Absolute, dichotomizing these two into morals is not only principally weak, but regardless of intended meaning, it ripens into dualism.

So then, to what capacity are the general philosophical conventions of good and evil accurate or even useful and fundamental to reality? As Gnosis and Agnosis, as wisdom and ignorance. This especially requires elaboration, because Agnosis is the necessary primordial condition of the Absolute. Why is that? Because the primordial unmanifest Absolute is undefined, without definition one couldn’t possibly know oneself, and is therefore agnostic. Remember, manifestation is the manifestation of definition, manifest reality is the definition of God, it is God’s defined being. Ironically, manifest reality and definition is prerequisite to Gnosis, one knows oneself through defining oneself, knowing and defining are in essence the same. If the primordial condition of the Absolute is Agnosis, and we’re suggesting good and evil are only useful insofar as their implications are similar to those of the consequences of Gnosis and Agnosis respectively, then you might assume I’m suggesting God is evil, of course, that would be nonsense. What I’m really suggesting is that good and evil be replaced in regards to principles fundamental to reality by Gnosis and Agnosis. Given the primordial Agnosis of the Absolute, the self image of the Absolute will reference this ignorance, of course, neither Gnosis or Agnosis are things in themselves, rather attributes, and as such are not bound to recursive manifestation due to the self-referentiality of reality, which is to say that reality isn’t necessarily doomed to ignorance. In referencing this ignorance in manifest reality, you might equate the result to being terrified of your own reflection, ignorant of its nature. 

This initial ignorance rooted in primordial Agnosis lends itself to a less than savory self image at times, one might say the evil we see in the world is due to the Agnosis of the causal agent and determinant to realities manifestation, which is the Absolute. As that Absolute develops Gnosis, or knowledge of itself, especially as the causal agent in the development of its self definition, which is the manifest reality we experience as of right now, the unfolding of that self definition can be consciously determined. In Agnosis, I find it likely that what we consider good and evil and everything in between made manifest in essence to define reality by contrast, though that wasn’t an intention so much as a consequence of the nature of definition, things are defined by opposites, emotional highs are defined by emotional lows, courage is little without fear, happiness is little without sadness, what we delineate as good can hardly be good without the possibility of evil. That being said, the delineation of morals is an inevitable consequence of definition, because as reality is defined, relativity and apparent opposition makes manifest. However, back to the mirror analogy, as God begins to recognize his self-image and know himself, that initial terror born of ignorance, can fade. The peak dramatization of anticosmicism and the evilness of manifest reality is surely found in gnosticism, it truly exemplifies the motif of an ignorant Monad giving way to emanations of evil, of course the metaphysics of gnosticism are awful, and implicate a principle distinction between the reality of the Monad and the Demiurge, which is impossible, but the general motif of gnosticism unwittingly dramatizes my overarching point.

To reiterate, there is no ultimately real good nor evil, as there is no privation; lack of the Absolute. The practical conceptions of good and evil, which are valid in their own right, can and should be understood as consequences of either wisdom or ignorance. Wisdom is understanding the nature of oneself, which extends to the nature of nature, and the nature of reality, ignorance is ignorance thereof. Only thanks to this manifest reality can one understand his union in identity with the sole causal agent, or Absolute, in truly understanding this, that ignorance gives way to wisdom, and that causal power can be consciously exercised, and a stereotypical bright and beautiful world, manifested from the developed positive nature of the causal agent, becomes a necessary expression of that agent. It is my suggestion, to anyone who wishes to become such an agent, as to express within the reality you experience that which you deem positive, the direction in which you think manifest reality; the self-definition of God should unfold, that you understand the relationship between you and the Absolute well, then cultivate an acceptable internal nature, one that would satisfy you were it constantly externalized in manifest reality, which, unbeknownst to you, it always has. This is not only wisdom, but the consequences of wisdom, the exercise of wisdom in conscious self-definition.