Building the Perceived Reality (Part II): Finding the One, Order

In the BBC thriller The Capture, video “correction” is used to manufacture evidence to convict a potential suspect for a crime he did not commit, or has not yet committed. The drama raises an unsettled question: the relation between procedural correctness and substantive justice. Here, I want to present my thought process for unifying these two seemingly opposed goals, and why I think there is a need for such unification.

The concept of “order” is useful here. In Eastern philosophy, this is often discussed as 先后. Order can mean temporal order and, at a higher level, causal relation. Understanding order is one way to determine which goal is justified. Following this line of thought, substantive justice is the fruit (后) of procedural correctness, while procedural correctness is the root (先). If the purpose of procedural correctness is substantive justice, then it may be justified to correct the procedure if preserving the fruit requires giving up, or reshaping, the root.

In a broader sense, discerning order is a viable approach for defining “good” and “bad.” But how do we know the “good” order? To avoid circular reasoning, we need a moral sense, a human-centered and subjective perspective (人道), which often evolves through experience and understanding.

What is the relationship between this subjective moral sense and universal law, or the human-understandable reality (i.e., 天道; see its definition in Building the Perceived Reality (Part I))? Human-understandable reality is the result of our effort to approach objective reality, the one we assume to exist and to remain constant across time and space. It may also evolve along other dimensions, including dimensions beyond time and space. These are less urgent and less feasible to discuss in human language, because human minds operate within a lower-dimensional manifold based on time and space. Through ongoing efforts such as research, human-understandable reality evolves to become more generalizable, balancing interpretability and explanatory power. As human-understandable reality evolves, conflict may arise between subjective moral sense and this human-understandable reality. In this case, finding the one means recalibrating both senses so that they align: subjective moral sense becomes the branch that the root of human-understandable reality was meant to bear. The process of ensuring integrity, where inside and outside, earlier and later, root and fruit are not in conflict, is finding the one (way).

These concepts are like newly sprouted plants in my garden. They grow as I interact with people who have different life trajectories and work in different fields. These concepts make my garden alive, but it pains me to prune and organize them into an aesthetic garden. Leaving these growing thoughts unattended risks blocking the sunlight needed by others. Over time, the garden becomes withered.

Painful as it is, I am taking the time to reorganize these thoughts and articulate my way of tending the garden. In brief, the tending process starts by asking why I need to tend it. The reason may be a societal need, a response to a troubling social circumstance or dilemma, or an attempt to align one’s emotions. It is often a search for the being of humans: to live with an aligned purpose, a property of human life. It is too early and egocentric to conclude that this property, living lively, differentiates humans from other natural beings, such as bacteria. I used to be cynical and condescending about irrational human behaviors, meaning behaviors that seem to conflict with universal law, such as taking time to work for external recognition. I later realized that these behaviors might be a critical point in a dynamical system aiming for a net collective gain. The process then continues by retrieving or developing the methodology (epistemology) for tending the garden, that is, the way of finding the one. One example is: “Sincerity is the universal law; becoming sincere is the Way of humanity.” (诚者，天之道也；诚之者，人之道也). This process ends by exploring alternative methodologies and needs, then reiterating the process for new concepts. I note this process as circular, which aligns with the concept of 轮回 as a universal mechanism often referenced in cultivation novels, which I intend to cover in a later post.

By the end of this post, I want to show the applications and interpretation of these concepts: order (先后) and finding the one (1).

Preface: the question

The conflict identified earlier is justice as a legitimate process versus justice as a correct outcome. I further present cases in which human ethical order and the universal law by which reality is intelligible conflict. I explore the possibility that human ethical order is a branch (后) of the universal law. I note that both human ethical order and universal law are human-language approximations of a deeper objective reality or universe.

Finding the one serves the purpose of living. Being naive is another way of living, and although it is often smeared, it can be an efficient way of finding the one. The “1” has no parts in itself. Understanding order is one approach to finding the one. For humans, the 1 that is to be known and lived by finite beings often manifests as an ordered sequence: root, then branch.

Ancient philosophy describes the one less directly, perhaps because the one is close to objective law and therefore lies at the boundary of human language. Humans who found the one may have intentionally left later humans unguided, because language can become a mold that restricts the search space to something finite, thereby severing the way of finding the one. Therefore, this essay presents the idea of finding the one without describing what the one is.

1. The conflict

Evolutionary fitness seems to demand survival, so sacrifice appears to violate nature. A procedural rule can produce a result that feels unfair, so substantive justice appears to stand against procedure.

The school of thought based on “order” holds that conflict arises when we flatten a vertical order into a horizontal either/or. Earlier phases serve later ones; later phases fulfill earlier ones. The apparent opposition is often an illusion produced by forgetting the order of root and branch.

2. Order: the priority principle

I like the saying from The Great Learning: 物有本末，事有终始，知所先后，则近道矣。

Things have roots and branches; affairs have endings and beginnings. To know what comes first and what comes last is to draw near to the 1.

The root is the necessary foundation. It must be established first because it generates the branch. The branch is the developed expression or fruition. It comes later, but it may reveal what the root was for. Order therefore names temporal sequence, existential priority, and, in science, causality.

One example is that procedure is the root, while a just outcome is the branch. Findings from research are the root; moral sense is the conscious branch of that pattern.

A further application, though not the focus of this post, is that evil is often the reversal of this order. Goodness is often the alignment that respects it.

So the “good” is not determined only by content, such as “love is good” or “punishment is bad.” It is also determined by order. A good thing placed in the wrong position can become harmful. Punishment restricts freedom, but it may be good only if it follows evidence. A natural question is: what is a “wrong” position? In my perspective, the process of understanding the “wrong” is to find the one.

Even though I have the concept of universal law, it remains an object of thought. However, as the lived reality of my own person, I still experience myself as a fragmented being: pulled by desire, confused about priorities, and divided between duty and survival, between procedure and outcome. I see finding the one as serving the purpose of living. To be the one may be beyond living lively.

To be or not to be the one is my working project.

3. A concept that I want to repeat: the Universal Law

If “Universal Law” means reality-in-itself, the total law by which all things exist and unfold, then humans cannot fully possess it. Any statement of it is already translated into human language. If finding the one equals accessing reality-in-itself, then finding it is chasing after the wind. If the one is the universal law, does finding the one mean transcending humanity?

My response is that the 1 is the very nature of humanity. Finding it is like a person with amnesia slowly remembering their own name. This is built upon the premise that humans are metaphysically unified and embedded with universal law, but existentially divided. One way of finding the one is understanding order, so as to realize alignment.

In this sense, finding the one is not transcending humanity, but uniting from fragmentation: aligning human-understandable universal law with the objective-in-itself, and bringing subjective moral sense to its full stature as the conscious completion of universal law. That means, as a lived being, acting in the world such that my act is a continuation of universal law. As I put it earlier, being naive (the very beginning of humanity) and aligning thoughts (the convergence of humanity) are both ways to find the one. It is tempting to imagine whether your one is the same as my one.

My take is that the one is manifested as diversity. In nature, it appears as interdependent life. In law, it appears as procedure, evidence, proportionality, and judgment. In research, it appears as diverse models that have their most useful scenarios.

4. Applications: order

A. Survival vs. sacrifice

Survival and sacrifice are mortal enemies. Under the order principle, physical life is the root, and righteousness or fulfilled love is the fruit. The root’s purpose is to grow into the fruit. Normally, we preserve the root and enjoy the fruit: we live and act rightly. But what happens when the only way to keep the fruit is to give the root?

Life is what I desire; righteousness is also what I desire. If I cannot have both, I give up life and take righteousness.

Sacrifice is not good simply because it is costly. It is good only when the loss serves a rightly ordered relation: love without possession, duty without vanity, and righteousness without cruelty.

B. Procedural justice vs. substantive justice

Sometimes, getting the right result demands bending the rules.

Under the order principle, procedure is the root and substantive justice is the fruit. A well-designed procedure is not an empty shell. It is substantive justice in the form of trustable steps. It slows emotion, distributes power, records reasons, and prevents private will from pretending to be justice.

But procedure is not the whole of justice. A perfectly followed procedure can still produce an unjust result if the law itself is corrupt, if evidence is structurally unavailable, or if the procedure is designed to exclude the powerless.

Following this view, if a procedure cannot ensure substantive justice, the procedure needs to be corrected, but not replaced with just any procedure.