Magick/Alchemy/Thelema and Virtue Ethics

[fr.novumorganum]

I've been doing some curriculum development here at work, revolving around the questions of "what is the well lived/good life" and "what is the good society" in American Literature. Leaving the lit part aside (Franklin and Thoreau mainly) I've been working with the model of Virtue Ethics:

Approach to ethics that takes the notion of virtue (http://www.answers.com/topic/virtue) (often conceived as excellence) as fundamental. Virtue ethics is primarily concerned with traits of character that are essential to human flourishing, not with the enumeration of duties. It falls somewhat outside the traditional dichotomy between deontological ethics (http://www.answers.com/topic/deontological-ethics) and consequentialism (http://www.answers.com/topic/consequentialism): It agrees with consequentialism that the criterion of an action's being morally right or wrong lies in its relation to an end that has intrinsic value, but more closely resembles deontological ethics in its view that morally right actions are constitutive of the end itself and not mere instrumental means to the end. See also eudaemonism (http://www.answers.com/topic/eudaimonism).VE 1 (http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/TEth/TEthCafa.htm)
VE 2 (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/)

Traditional, or normative ethics usually deal either with the concept of duty, as in what is the right thing to do, or with normed behavior, as in what tradition or society says is the right thing to do. Virtue ethics on the other hand deal with personal excellence and questions of the good life, as in 'what is the best way to live this life, or what is right or wrong based on my excellence'. Virtues are those qualities which make a person a good person and more likely to succeed in characteristic human endeavors.

I'm sure some of you can intuit where I'm heading with this; as I was researching this it struck me that much of what we are attempting to do in magick/ the occult is like this model. We are specifically attempting to bring ourselves to excel (please don't automatically think of this in capitalistic terms) and create/ invoke within ourselves the 'best possible life'. And many of us now live by the 'codes' we have learned from practicing.

Hoping this sparks some discussion...

[Kuroyagi]

can you give a practical example? your definition seems very teleological ("I want to do the moral action for a good end that cannot be sperated from it"), but does it also have the inner side? (kant etc.) ("something is good cause it is my innermost conviction that it is?")

if its in your paper, then sorry, got no time now but will look into it later.

your very trendy btw, ethics is very en vogue in various academic fieldss since the middle of the 90s: also ethics-commisions abound everywhere! (cf. medicine ect.) lol...thanks its a cool discussion, I'll came back to it! :)

[m1thr0s]

drat...yet another exclusive vocabulary to master...I'm starting to run out of brain cells I think...

I don't get deontological ethics (http://www.answers.com/topic/deontological-ethics) other than the fact that it's got a 25-dollar word going for it. I get the basic description...I just don't get how anybody manages to defend it from day to day in real life situations etc...

At the same time, consequentialism (http://www.answers.com/topic/consequentialism) smacks of sociopathy to me somehow and is just a tad too utilitarian for my taste, assuming I am reading this all correctly...

I'm probably roughly somewhere in the middle...if not outside these boxes altogether...

I think I will never understand good vs bad if I live to be a thousand. The whole conversation just goes straight to black hole in my brain. I am entirely motivated by the notion of *completion*...so poisoned am I by the light of eastern metaphysics. It is wholeness, not goodness that interests me and not according to any standard of goodness. I cannot weigh that good nor accurately assess the bad according to its omission. So it's not about any of this for me. It is, however, about *wholeness* as I can grasp it one page at a time, and is rooted in a sense (at least) of Necessity...of what is essential to survival itself, without regard to end results which remain a complete and utter mystery to me anyway.

So I don't know if this makes me some sort of ethical dullard or if I may in fact have evolved to a whole other rung of ethical reflection. The universe is alive...that is its first and foremost successful characteristic. Against all apparent odds it survives and this is its most persistent *good* so far as I can determine. Everything else is just so much gravy really but the core of its success lies in its being and in its continuance. I can match it tit-for-tat at the level of being but when the matter turns to continuance it's got me beat dead to rights. So for me the message is actually fairly clear. To achieve this much and this much alone, one must root out the knowledge of *wholeness* to establish this self-same standard of *completion*. If this cannot be accomplished, I have no reason to imagine that anything else very much matters thereafter.

I do realize that this conversation is not about me of course. I am simply trying to sort myself out in relation to this language.

But like K..I think I will need to take this in a few bites at least...

m1thr0s

[Radiant Star]

I have been dipping into thinking about this for the last three hours and at its very basic level it seems to be a discussion about materialism versus spiritual desires, though even using the word spiritual could take us off on a tangent to the moon.

One of my thoughts is that one cannot totally embrace a separate life into the segments we aspire to and will always have to be duty-bound somewhere along the line.

Anyway, this needs a whole lot more consideration, but I really just wanted to indicate that I find the topic interesting and worthwhile.

[fr.novumorganum]

Off the bat, I'm sorry if I used too much of a disciplinary lexicon to start---one of my bad habits is not switching gears from academic prose to more practical prose. Not that that implies any superiority/inferiorty or elitism dichotomy, its just the terms...plus the audience here on this board is probably smarter than any gaggle of philopsophers and theorists so I don't even think twice about changing or using high-level terms here.

I think all of your initial thoughts grasp what I was getting at: normative (tradition bound) or pure duty ethics (what one supposedly must do for others and how one must form oneself out of standards meant to be of service to the other (the hint of Kant) are not ethics best prone for allowing full human development and allow change only in regards to a slow evolutionary model, (think of Nietzsche's herd morality) and not the more dynamic/tao like dialectic change of newness.

Ultimately, I was thinking Thelema and Satanism, at least as they are understood here at AF, (as well as daoism and high Theurgy) are an ethic of excellence and fullness (and what could be more fully excellent than a :sunny:).

You are very right M1thr0s that life/the universe exists, and virtue ethics which aims at and asks what is necessary to live a fully developed existence is am ethics of affirmation and not good or evil. It is an ethic of open-endedness and optimism. "Man's capacities have never been measured, nor our we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried" Thoreau, Walden.

The term ethic and virtue here are slightly different than modern usage, which is wound around with theology and morality. It is the virtue of the ancients, which is another connection to us...

Boiled down, I argue that real magickal work (encompassing all our disciplines there) is the ultimate virtue ethic; the great work is the ultimate affirmation, the ultimate YES screamed into the abyss; the ultimate ethic of embracing real change to transform ourselves into more than society or tradition says we can be.

I honestly think I more fully understand that image of the hawk eating up old jesus' eyes now

[Naomi]

I think it's really simple, you just follow your heart, listen to your inner voice and live life without regret.

[fr.novumorganum]

well, yes NC, but the question remains:

is your inner voice already there, or are we creating it; in a way that is the crux of this issue.

[Radiant Star]

More thoughts as a triangle formed in my mind last night…

As individuals, we operate in relation to everything and everyone else. We develop and integrate as we progress or we have achieved nothing and become an isolate or so submerged in duties and others expectations that we cease to be individuals, in fact, we become like automatons in a sense.

It seems to me that we need to have the strength of an equilateral triangle which has all points in balance, if we can achieve that then we will not be too removed at ‘x’, from the expectations and responsibilities of the world nor even be too integrated into it at ‘y’, so that we lose touch with our core being. Nor too isolated at ‘z’, because that seems to be that we would exist without purpose.

As you have pointed out in your linked examples, looking to a result that just has happiness as an outcome or fulfilling all duties etc is probably unrealistic. One cannot pin down a result as an indicator since that necessarily pulls one into one of the isolate or integrate modes.

[m1thr0s]

wow. nice work Ricci. I would agree with that assessment very much...

m1thr0s

[Naomi]

well, yes NC, but the question remains:

is your inner voice already there, or are we creating it; in a way that is the crux of this issue.

Both, actually. All emerges from the eternal absolute which resides within all illusion of mind. Pure consciousness reveals itself through the inner voice. All we can do is clear the way for this to filter through with as little obstruction as possible.

It is already there - maya (that means you and I) creates or allows obstruction and distortion. At the highest level, the inner voice will not tell you to reject, it will not tell you to try and attain something. It only allows you to observe as pure consciousness. Divine inspiration comes from a source descending from the absolute. Your own mind or another's mind - human or otherwise. Purpose and function are for various artistic works, on a massive scale - universal, or a tiny scale - galactic, solar system, planet, forest.

"In the equanimity of the Absolute, there is nothing to renounce or attain."

- Niguma


Very nice Ricci.

[phronesis]

I very much like this thread and welcome further discussion on the topic. I have grappled with these issues for a long time now and have vacillated between the internal 'deontological' approach found in Kant and the external 'logic of appropriateness' style of reasoning behind much theorising on ethics, norms, rights, and duties in modern society.

In my early intellectual formation I was struck with Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in which he confronts the notion of sin and the damnation of hell. Raised an atheist with a strong familial norm of Calvinistic hard work (and a certain amount of parent induced guilt), I found these passages harrowing to the say the least.

The book resolved many of those worries for me and I was happy to pursue the notion that I was the perfect example of an enlghtened modern 'unencumbered' individual who had developed his own moral compass through the application of reason. This happy state of affairs continued until reading Macintyre's After Virtue in which he argues that modern moral and political philosophy lacked foundations and in many ways represented a large building of archives that had been partially destroyed. For him Aristotle holds the key.

I struggled again to look for my own foundations as a first generation American from an atheist background. I did find appeal in the Kantian ideal and it continues to inform much of my academic work, but I continue my quest for deeper meaning and have been ploughing through the esoteric literature, which I ignored until recently. There are fascinating insights in Agrippa, Dee, Regardie, and Tyson that have so many overlaps with the issues and debates in liberal 'enlightenment' philosophy as well as its many predecessors.

This is an exciting time of study and reading for me and this forum offers an interesting vehicle for furthering my quest.

[Kuroyagi]

Hi I hope that its not too off topic but your post and your mention of Aristotle somehow made me want to suggest to you this book by Paul Feyerabend (Conquest of Abundance)...do you know it...? I read it maybe two years ago and it was quite good IMO.
Amazon.com: Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being: Paul Feyerabend, Bert Terpstra: Books

I myself though a child of my age and a de nomine athetist, probably- could somehow never believe in the "truth" or practicality of atheism itself- it somehow doesnt work for me, it takes something away from my human experience...though I must admit that I cant pinpoint it exactly-and may somtimes call it "art" etc instead of God; it also could be merely some form of "atavism" (and if thats the case and the humans should develop in that "atheist" direction, Im fine with that too I guess..)

[phronesis]

Thanks. I know his Against Method but not the book you mention. The putative atheism in our family has not really stood the test of time as each of us has sought the solace of the unseen world...for me that quest is moving through Enlightenment philosophical ideas and esoteric systems...and my current readings are directed at uncovering the lineages of alternative belief systems.

[Kuroyagi]

Theres really a lot out there. When I began looking into "occultism" a couple of years ago I was just in a phase when I was very interested in philosophy [I also studied various academic fields before] and basically thought that if I at least read all prominent philosphers I would find out something no one else had about nature/being- the world (I still havent given up on that though have forgotten this thought in the interim)- then I read some books by Crowley and Spare and grandely thought "cheap rip offs of Nietzsche" etc...but I also tried out various practices (basic stuff like LiberMMM or the 5 Tibetans: available everywhere on the net)- at first they were (in my view) like practical philosophical (esp. Skeptic and Stoic) and psychological (NLP etc) as well as smaller physcial exercises but this all somehow grew on me- with time I started to enjoy the "poetics" of it/and of such texts instead of trying to weed out errors not in accord with modern science (errors that I still very well "can" see today- but parallel to somehting else); at some time some kind of new "layer" of meaning that was now available to me began to surface...and of course there was much more...till now it was a crazy ride for me...but all in all Im glad that I didnt "discover" the occult as a teen like so many others for the reason that I could make immense shortcuts [e.g. never joined any cult or "Order" which I probably would have otherwise]..eventually I encountered the "sys." here on this page (which is purely "technical" in its presentation btw- theres no spiritual or cultic affiliation involved here) and I must say its on a very high level [in fact I always had studied these things also with the following thought in the back of my mind: what is behind it and if there is whats "good"]...of course Im still interested in many other things- and quite mundane ones still- but I wouldnt want to miss that additional "layer", that additional angle of view on the world that these studies have given me (and Im not talking about anything classically religious, the god-question is somehow merely accidental to the practitioner, it seems- some believe this others believe that...I mean also: "truly believe"- yet there is maybe that active practical understanding as well that those who have experienced certain things do share)...

[phronesis]

Thanks for sharing this....Iam really enjoying Agrippa and Regardie at the moment, and I love th e discussion of correspondences. Jung has also been fruitful as has Yates. If you want a great read, check out Catherine Albanese's Republic of Mind and Spirit...an amazing social history of metaphysical religion in America...I also like Weed's Wisdom of the Mystic Masters