The Supreme Self and Real Ethics
In Aristotle’s typification of science (dianoia) and wisdom into the three divisions of theoretical, practical, and poetical, the first pertains to the macrocosm and objective world, while the second and third pertain to the microcosm and subjective world of humanity. To simplify, only the first two divisions are considered and the third, poetical wisdom, is subsumed in the second, practical wisdom. In traditional or sacred philosophy such divisions are neither separative nor equal and the classification of wisdom is always informed by unity and hierarchy. As such, theoretical wisdom is superordinate to practical wisdom and the subdivisions of both— metaphysics, mathematics, and physics in the case of the former, and ethics, domestics, and civics pertaining to the latter—are in turn hierarchically ordered. The principle and essence of the highest theoretical wisdom, metaphysics, is the Absolute—in particular Its ipseity, or the Supreme Self. The prime reality of the highest practical wisdom, ethics, is the perfected human soul, or the centred self. The fact that this latter subjective self is nothing but a manifestation or radiation of the objective supreme Self, immediately unites the multifarious divisions of wisdom into a singular totality and ensures their validity as well as their efficacy. Modernity's reduction and compartmentalization of science and knowledge ruptures the totality and endangers the higher sciences such that both metaphysics and ethics are left without substantive content and are open to a disabling relativism cum destructive nihilism.
Keywords : Aristotle’s division of science, metaphysics and ethics, philosophy of ethics, ethical relativism, supreme Self, real ethics.
