Friedrich Nietzsche begged us to look beyond the traditional dichotomy and prejudice of good and evil. Our traditional means of viewing the world involve arbitrary splits; creating them and us.

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so. aphorism 138

Out of a desire for moral coherence and convenience we retrospectively and proactively justify our subjective truths my making them into universals.

Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality. aphorism 143

In short, systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions. aphorism 187

And so he is led to say:

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. aphorism 153

The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart similarly taught that the just man does just deeds, but the doing of just deeds does not make a just man.

Whoever loves justice remains so fully established in it that what he loves becomes his own essence. Justi vivent in aeturnum

The just man does not seek support elsewhere, he does not let his acts be determined by external precepts. When you conform with exterior laws, your acts are merely legal. The just man who acts out of intimate assimilation with Justice “is”.

The path, Meister Eckhart preaches, is detachment, or releasement from distinctions, names, oppositions.

Whatever bears a name can be juxtaposed or be compared with something that has another name.

Indeed, before there were creatures, God was not yet God, but he was what he was. But when creatures came to be and recieved their created being, then God was no longer God in himself, rather he was God in the creatures…

Thus we say that man must be so poor that he is not and has no place wherein God could act. Where man still preserves some place in himself, he preserves distinction. This iswhy I pray God to rid me of God, for my essential being is above God insofar as we comprehend God as the principle of creatures. Blessed are the Poor

Thus Eckhart asks us to live life without a why, to go beyond good and evil, beyond the distinctions of creator and created.

If you seek God for the sake of a foundation, Eckhart says, if you look for God even for the sake of God himself then ‘you behave as though you transformed God into a candle in order to find something with it; and when one has found what one looks for one throws away the candle’ Reiner Schurmann quoting Eckhart’s Omne datum Optimum.

So Nietzsche and Eckhart in terms of a moral discourse both point towards detachment or releasement, the living without a why, the going beyond good and evil, the loss of the prejudices of Binary Opposition.

Those who seek something with their works, those who act for a why, are serfs and mercenaries. Eckhart, Justus in perpetuam vivet.

It is interesting to note that this wisdom of letting-be is to be found across the continents and the ages, in the context of Nietzsche’s post-christian paradigm, Eckharts via negativa, and also in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu’s book of the way. The second ideogram of the Tao is remerkable in its resemblance both to the teachings of the above masters and the analysis of Jacques Derrida and the Post-Structuralists.

When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything. Things arise and he lets them come; things disappear and he lets them go. He has but doesn’t posess, acts but doesn’t expect. When his work is done, he forgets it. That is why it lasts forever. Tao Te Ching ~ 2