THE MORALITY OF BEING

1. Am I being moral? Or, rather, what is moral being? Is it love or pride or pleasure or joy? - Yes, it is each of these qualities or, rather, essences, because they are states of positive being, and morality is always positive, never negative!

2. Hence I am being moral when my being is positive, whether the being in question be metachemical (love), chemical (pride), physical (pleasure), or metaphysical (joy) - that is, whether my being is noumenally objective, phenomenally objective, phenomenally subjective, or noumenally subjective, associated, in other words, with fire, water, vegetation (earth), or with air.

3. Thus although I am being moral in all four elemental contexts provided the nature of my being is positive, I am not being equally moral in them; for there is a considerable difference between metachemical being at one end of the elemental spectrum, so to speak, and metaphysical being at the other end - all the difference, in fact, between positive manifestations of Hell and Heaven.

4. In point of fact, in terms of a scale of being from fourth- to first-rates via third- and second-rates, it will transpire that love is a fourth-rate order of being, that pride is third-rate, pleasure second-rate, and joy alone a first-rate order of being - nothing short, in truth, than the being-of-beings.

5. Thus compared to positive metaphysical being, which is the most beingful order of being, positive physical being is more (relative to most) beingful, positive chemical being less (relative to least) beingful, and positive metachemical being least beingful, the beingfulness of a noumenally objective disposition which, with its fiery correlation, smacks of Hell.

6. Thus Hell, like Heaven, can be moral, since morality is ever positive, and love is no less positive (in a manner of speaking) than joy or, for that matter, the intermediate states of pride (chemical) and pleasure (physical), the former attaching, in religious terms, to that which is purgatorial, and the latter to whatever is earthly, and hence closer to vegetation than to water.

7. But if moral being can be hellish, purgatorial, earthly, or heavenly, then so can immoral being, or the condition of being immoral, except that one will be into being negatively in one of four different ways, viz. hatefully, humbly, painfully, or woefully, with hatred corresponding to that which is most negative, humility corresponding to that which is more (relative to most) negative, pain corresponding to that which is less (relative to least) negative, and woe corresponding, in its noumenal subjectivity, to that which is least negative, the negativity of a sort of Antiheaven, or negative Heaven, which is no less metaphysical, in its peculiar way, than the joy of Heaven. But, of course, being negative it is immoral, even if of a first-rate order of immoral being.

8. Thus metaphysical being is first-rate being, whether it is positive or negative; for being corresponds to the essence of things, and air, the metaphysical element, is the most essential, being neither apparent (like fire), quantitative (like water), nor qualitative (like vegetation). Being is essence, and the essence of being is soul, which, as we have seen, can be metachemical and fourth-rate, chemical and third-rate, physical and second-rate, or metaphysical and first-rate, corresponding not to love, pride, or pleasure, but to joy, the condition of being when it is most essential and therefore associated with air, whether externally in aural relation to the airwaves or internally in respiratory relation to the breath, the former sensual, the latter sensible.

9. Thus not only is being most essential when metaphysical, it is most moral when positively metaphysical and, conversely, least immoral when negatively metaphysical, the difference, in short, between joy and woe, Heaven and, for want of a better term, Antiheaven. Either way, the order of being is first-rate; for the elemental context in which metaphysical being takes place, viz. air (oxygen), is the only element with an essential correspondence to soul, the only element, that is, whose nature is such that being can attain to its most essential manifestation in what amounts to the quintessence of soul. Essence begets essence, and the being that results from air, being metaphysical, is the ne plus ultra of soul, the soulful per se in both positive (supreme) and negative (primal) contexts. Only positive being, however, which is rightly to be associated with supremacy, can be moral. For it attaches to the organic, and the organic is no less moral, in whatever element, than the inorganic is immoral, the primal backdrop or source from which everything organic, and hence moral, supremely springs.

10. There is no connection between inorganic primacy and morality; on the contrary, morality is only possible on the basis of or, rather, in positive relation to organic supremacy. It is for this reason that concepts of God(head) rooted in the Cosmos, the source of inorganic primacy, are fundamentally immoral, and hence false or, at any rate, merely negative. Morality begins, by contrast, in the most fundamental manifestation of the organic and culminates in its most transcendental manifestation, as germane to positive metaphysics.