Against morality

[Dionysus]

From a forthcoming essay I intend to publish on the independent circuits:

In the old - that is to say moral, for everything which once was once moral is today extinct - conception of things, men took it for granted that each thing possessed an inner essence, a spirit or soul or other such metaphysical substratum, which held innate characteristics of the object in question. Thus a stone might be evil - or cursed, or bewitched - or good - sacred, divine - and so might it also be within the individual himself. This soul-belief was called 'deep', and even the ugly and wretched could find relief in it through an appeal to ‘inner’ beauty. The dedicated psychological archaeologist encounters traces of this zealous faith in essence even today in the unlikeliest of places, e.g. our prima donna teenaged egoists who sing high the hymns of the individual without ever grasping precisely what constitutes the individual as such. The king's crown, the national flag, the crucifix, and the fetish each become a manifestation of such an essence in this particular worldview.

In particular, instruments such as tools, weapons, and ceremonial objects were considered imbued with such properties. Even the sun and the moon, which for men are judged on the basis of their utility, were accorded certain essences, feminine or masculine, according to the biases of their observers and for the benefit of the poetic spirit. Such properties were in no wise specific to the instrument in question, but could, as in, for example, transubstantiation or transfiguration, be passed from one thing or entity to another, as if each thing were but a cell upon the skin of existence, subject to the process of osmosis and the laws governing thereof. The most delightfully archaic rituals, exorcism and communion, which predate all the sciences, always involve such a process of essence-supplantation, which first requires the assignment of agency to the object of consideration. This essence-supplantation I shall term consanguinity.

This is the logic - the instru-mentality - of all morality: the object, whose purpose is within itself, possesses within that purpose a metaphysical ‘presence’ which is either Good or Evil and which survives the object long after its eventual destruction. This belief is the kernel of all ritualistic activity, and serves as the Archimedean point upon which the entire religious weltanschauung stands. It is also the foundational crack by which this edifice will fall.

For this logical manouever constitutes a reductio ad absurdum in the most literal sense: it posits an in-itself where no such thing exists, and appeals to an inner plane which is nothing but absence. If, for instance, we say that "such-and-such uses a pen", we do not ascribe to the pen itself any particular moral qualities, good or bad, but only the purpose to which it is put to use - the 'moral' element in this action rests entirely upon the such-and-such and not the so-and-so. And yet, if we were to carry this thought to its fullest conclusion, we would discover quite soon that there is no final doer; that every doing is itself the product of another doing; also, it would become readily apparent thereby that transcendental morality is an impossibility. Even the moral instru-mentality itself leads one to this conclusion: when the criminal invokes the name of the Adversary to justify his crime, he does nothing but appeal to the consanguineous element of the moral worldview to justify his action; he makes himself a tool of the Devil...

And what's more - the criminal is the Devil; the Devil does Evil because he is Evil, and is Evil because he does such.

Such is tautology, an abomination to the introspective man, and a belief to be abolished.

[QED]

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