What survives?
In the crucial moment when one is faced with the hardest decision, two stances can be taken: 1) “I will survive this at all costs.” 2) “I will serve the higher good at all costs.”
“I” might be an individual, or “I” might be an organization. Whether an individual or an organization says it, the moral significance is identical.
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Unfalse
Most of us think that the higher good is something that is not oneself. This negatively stated truth is not false, but it is also not really true. It is more unfalse. It is like asking what color an apple is, and getting the answer “not blue” or “not the sound of a flute”.
True – false – unfalse
Alive – dead – undead
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Self-sacrifice: What is sacrificed to what?
It is generally acknowledged that an individual who knows no good higher than his own individual being is despicable.
An equally important, but less acknowledged fact is that an organization who knows no good higher than its own collective being is despicable.
Only that which can self-sacrifice is worthy of self-sacrifice.
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Anatta
When someone has recognized that what sustains him as a “self” vastly exceeds the sphere of individuality… and he recognizes this sustaining being as more essential to his being than “himself” (as he and the world takes him), he will sacrifice what is less essential to what he experiences as more essential. This is neither altruism nor selfishness, but something beyond the antithesis and incomprehensible from within it.
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The circular dance of techne
The altruism vs selfishness debate is identical in form to the atheism vs fundamentalism debate.
The antithetical sides disagree on the truth of an impoverished assertion that neither side recognizes as impoverished. Their agreement runs deeper than their disagreement, and their common ground is in fact their common error. Neither side actually wants to find agreement, because to find agreement is to dissolve the ground upon which both sides have taken their stand. The sides seek each other out for argument.
But the agreement is not an agreement of fact. The agreement is practical.
They argue according to methods derived from their shared presuppositions and through adhering to the methods, preserve their joint-illusion regarding the horizon of reality by never moving outside of them.
In this movement there is an unconscious purely practical agreement to disagree, preserved in how the argument is conducted.
The argument is a sort of dyssynetic dance whose technique moves the partners in a tight, invisible circle. The dance of techne is a circle dance.
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When the unseen common ground of a disagreement is a common error, the disagreement cannot be resolved except through dialectic.