Surfing the Tao
After rereading the entries, I'm starting to wonder if chasing objective morality might lead us down the wrong path. It conjures up notions of rules, with Kant requiring conformance, and Mill demanding a balancing act. We seem to agree that neither scheme works. As Foot's trolley game tell us, we'll go for the greater good of the greater many as long as we've got no skin in the game, but once there is, we choose what matters to us.
Perhaps like Murdoch we ought to ask - is there a way we can restructure naturally selfish human energy such that when it encounters a choice, it will act rightly? From her perspective, ethics will move away from simply rules to something more like a process that becomes motivation for Plato called the search for the “good” life.
Surfing the Tao is a concept used among Lutheran and Catholic theologians, and has be embraced by Jordan Peterson. He has I think something useful to say about morality.
Many people translate the Tao Te Ching as the “way of integrity,” and understand it as a treatise on how to live the “good” life while in this world. It seems however to view itself as transcendental, that its strictures are not fully realizable in our world. They can however be approached by the serious believer using multiple reincarnations.
“The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
The following abstract appears to embrace a description of what might be called the factory setting for a human being fully made in the image of God. Following that, it records progressive human degeneration into sinfulness, beginning at perfection, then to virtuous being, to a rule-based morality, and finally to nothing more what is considered “nice” by that society.
“When the Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual. Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos.”
Peterson starts by insisting on a knowledge of history, but seen from the viewpoint of the perpetrator. The lesson of history (and social psychology) is that we are not in fact Schindler, or even one of the Jews, but if placed in that situation, most of us would cheerfully be Nazis. That by the way explains his antipathy to identity politics. In his view, to hold yourself out as a victim is to risk denying you might be a perpetrator, and so to lack the needed humility and honesty to grow into a moral person.
Next comes the Hegelian dialectic. To this point, is there really a law of history that will see thesis generate antithesis, both combining to become synthesis, and that be the thesis for the next round of development? On one hand, this fits well if not always completely in science and technology. For example, Newtonian mechanics were certainly exposed by Clerk Maxwell's findings, prompting Einstein's needed revisions, and this synthesis led to positive developments, though without actually invalidating the original thesis (Newton's laws of motion). On the other hand, Hegel and Marx both made a mess of applying the dialectic to society, and he who ignores history is doomed to relive it. When it comes to human affairs, there may or may not be a synthesis, and even if there is, there's absolutely no guarantee this synthesis is improvement. That is something we learned from the post-Modernists.
With that in mind, Peterson takes the dialectic in a different direction, and limits it to the individual's history. Eden for him is a walled garden, a place of safety, order and security. The serpent represents the outside crossing its walls, becoming an invitation to expand personal horizons, but that in the process dismantles order (the thesis) and engendes chaos (the antithesis). For Peterson, the human condition is a struggle between order and chaos, and the successful synthesis is personal meaning.
Meaning however is so entirely personal, it is useless in itself as an objective statement. After all, what matters to me may seem trivial to you. Still, its presence does seem critical to human survival. As Neitzsche pointed out, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” and Frankel's history of the camps shows that personal meaning was in fact the secret to survival. Holding an attitude towards your fate was the ultimate, irreducible freedom, and the meaning of life is more strictly about what you mean to it.
Still, while Peterson knows he cannot make a general statement about what meaning will emerge from that person integrating order and chaos, he does describe an objective opinion about the process of making personal meaning.
Plato (and Augustine and Aquinas) espoused the four cardinal virtues, what the Tao referred to as “goodness,” as being the keys to living the “good” life. These virtues are prudence (roughly meaning discernment), fortitude (guts), justice (fairness) and temperance (discretion). What is missing from this list, so added by Peterson is a ruthless honesty, as much about ourseleves as about our place in the world. What he takes from the list is courage.
In his view, the person who is genuinely honest, and who has the courage to be so, will consistently exhibit ethical behaviours. In the course of the process, this person will climb the ladder of goodness, as described in the Tao and as captured by the cardinal virtues of Greek (and Christian) morality. The choices made will of course be person specific, but this process is universal so has the makings of an objective morality.
That is what is meant by Surfing the Tao.