THREE ETHICAL DIMENSIONS

The first ethical dimension pertains to an active relationship to a Gend: mastering it, participating in its essence and transforming it.  The wager of immoralism is that there is no other criterion for ethics, but this is not so - there are two more.

 

The second ethical dimension, which we will call Gnostic, pertains to accurate and exhaustive knowledge of the Good itself (through critical knowledge of history and capitalism and scientific knowledge of mind and world).  This knowledge creates the power to articulate a concrete vision for humanity and reconfigures desire so as to be motivated by such a vision.  Not all Gends are created equal - there are better, higher gends which depend on gnosis for their attainment.  Immoralist ethics can only lead to the intensification of capitalist desire, the destruction of human culture, or both.   Gnostic ethics is required to rise above.  

 

But there is a third aspect of ethics: Divine ethics, which involves a religious suspension of the ethical as such and an immediacy of lived faith and communion.  This ethics is more difficult to describe, and its legitimacy has an inherently undecidable quality (there’s no criterion for distinguishing it from terrorism).  However, it is surely the missing link between immoralist ethics and gnostic ethics, their unification in difference.