Asian Moral Methaphysics vs Western Metaphysics of Morals

Discussion

Jeffrey Bishop:

"By making the human the measure of all things and the master and possessor of nature, we can see the foundation of the various humanisms that have peppered the various European philosophical empires; at least, this is how I would extend the claims made by Iris Murdoch in her book, The Sovereignty of the Good.

Murdoch points to the problems that arose in the mainstream moral theories of her day, problems that I don’t think we have overcome. Murdoch’s three essays, taken together, claim that modern moral philosophy—whether in its analytic, existentialist, or utilitarian forms—turns our attention to superficial publicly accessible acts found on the surface of human behavior (behaviorism and utilitarianism) or finds its source of decision to be a thin, deflated self that wills to act from nothing substantive (existentialism). With their insistence on truth, the various moral philosophical systems lose sight of the good, for the good is too subtle for the crass work of scientific and philosophical analysis. The good, the true, and the beautiful exist in the world, and the moral life is the life that prepares a self to receive its bearings from outside the humanist self.

Put differently, Murdoch notes that the moral life is the life of work and practice; you might say, one has to engage in a moral technics to do and to know the good. We humans are not the tool-bearing, masters and possessors of nature; rather the humans find themselves in a moral universe, upon which they are dependent and to which they have to accommodate themselves so as to not overstep her bounds. The virtues are the tools by which one comes to be able to see the good of the world, the truth of the world, and the beauty of the world. It is through these intellectual and moral techniques that they participate in molding themselves into its likeness.

Yuk Hui comes to a very similar conclusion in his gem of a book, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Hui explores what the various Western approaches to technology have wrought on the world, and how Asian philosophy—especially Chinese philosophy—has appropriated Western science and technology. He also explores the various attempts of Chinese and Japanese philosophers to overcome Western modern and postmodern philosophy (Modern philosophy inevitably morphs into postmodern philosophy).[3]

Without a hint of romanticism, Hui turns to what he claims to be a more ancient rendering of Chinese philosophy that places the human in a world that is already moral, the world that is Dao-Qi. The Dao is the governing principle of the universe, the way or the method by which the cosmos is organized. Yet, Dao is already the moral way of reality. Qi is the vessel, or the tool or device through which Dao is mediated. The Dao-Qi pairing appears in one of the most ancient books of Chinese writing, I Ching, and Hui argues that this fundamental metaphysics in Chinese philosophy is a moral metaphysics (not a metaphysics of morals). Dao—what the world is—is already moral. Qi are the technics through which there is a mediation of the ought-is of Dao.[4] Chinese ritual practice (Li) are the habits that put one in proper disposition to take up with Dao-Qi. Li—the ritual practice—mediates through a technics, the proper disposition of the human actor.

There is some question among Chinese philosophers as to whether Hui’s reading of Daoist philosophy is historically accurate.[5] Yet, Hui nonetheless understands that the Western proclivity to set the human apart from nature is part of the problem; separating the metaphysical from the moral is the problem. The binaries of nature-human, or nature-culture, or is-ought is the fundamental problem at the heart of modern technology, including its appropriation in China, according to Hui.

Cassirer, the neo-Kantian philosopher, comes close to something akin to Hui’s rendering of the Chinese moral metaphysics, but Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism gets in the way. As noted, in Cassirer’s philosophy, the is awaits the human to add the moral duties in a religious idiom. In my estimation, Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism gets in the way of his Judaism. For in the ancient Hebrew mytho-religion the truth of the world is the goodness of the world, no is-ought rupture. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that light was good” (Gen 1:3-4). The duties—the oughts—are not added after the mythology of what is. In the Hebrew cosmogony, the being of creation is inseparable from its goodness. The ancient Hebrew rendering of creation is that it is already good in its coming into being.

The central character in the techno-mytho-religion of the late modern West is the human actor—the master and possessor of nature through technical action. This human actor masters the power of her tools by building into the machines its own morality as if it is just one more mechanical component to be added to the power of the machine.[6] If the modern human is to design its morality into things, we must first understand; and to understand things, there is a central act of ritualized violence, for example in the animal sacrifices of the modern biotechnological laboratory.

We do not see the ritualized action in the modern techno-mytho-religion of Western technics. Yet, millions of animals are manufactured for the medical technoscientific enterprise. In the biotechnological world, these animals are sacrificed in service to some notion of a god-like posthuman creature that is invincible to disease and possibly even death (if we are to accept some transhumanist thinkers and biogerontologists). And lest you think I am being hyperbolic, the term used for the killing of these animals is indeed “sacrifice.”

On the contrary, in the Hebrew creation myth, the human, created in the image and likeness of God (and who is thus “very good”) must have practices and rituals that mediate the moral metaphysics (not the metaphysics of morals). The beings of creation are already good in a moral universe, and the human must position itself in relation to these goods. There is no is-ought distinction in Judaism and, likewise, there is no is-ought distinction in the Christian inheritance of the Hebrew mytho-religion."

(https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/toward-a-liturgical-cosmotechnics/?)