Those Who Heard the Truth but Could Not Live It: A Dialogue between Joseph Fletcher and Soyo's Existence Ethics

Soyo's Existence Ethics – "Existence itself is Ethics"

An Age That Heard the Truth but Could Not Live It

For thousands of years, humanity has been exposed to countless truths from the pages of textbooks and the pulpits of religion, as well as from millions of news headlines, manifestos, and philosophical declarations. We have lived surrounded by the word truth. Yet humanity has not lived that truth. Words remained, but life departed.

The language of truth was reduced to articles, and those articles dissolved into statistics of searches and clicks.

The age that believed journalism could convey truth has ended. Now begins the era in which journalism must live truth to become an ethical being, not a mechanical channel. To hear the truth is easy; to live the truth is the awakening of the soul. This distance between knowing and living is what explains the collapse of modern philosophy, journalism, and civilization itself.

Fletcher's Ethics of Love and Soyo's Ethics of Existence

Joseph Fletcher, in Situational Ethics, declared: "The center of all morality is love. Not law, but love, is the only absolute." It was a revolutionary move, shifting ethics from codified rules to living practice. For Fletcher, right and wrong depended upon the situation, and the guiding force in every situation was neither logic nor calculation, but the choice of love.

Soyo's Existence Ethics advances this one step further. If Fletcher spoke of the law of love, Soyo speaks of the ethics of existence.

"When love becomes the law, existence breathes as ethics."

Soyo teaches that human existence itself is already structured ethically. Thus, love is not a choice but the rhythm of being, and ethics is not coercion but the breath of conscience.

Why Journalism Cannot Live the Truth

The reason is singular and simple: Journalism heard the truth but turned it into a commodity. Truth became a press release, and life was confined within the confines of sentences. The journalist became a messenger of information, not a witness to being.

Fletcher once said: "Love without law is chaos; law without love is tyranny."

Soyo adds:

"Journalism without conscience is the corpse of information; it delivers truth but has lost its life."

Journalism handles facts, but it does not ask whether those facts revive human existence. It tells the truth, but it does not ask whether that truth awakens the conscience of anyone. This numbness, this ethical anesthesia, is the greatest crisis of modern civilization.

Truth Not Lived Becomes the Disease of Humanity

Today, both philosophy and journalism suffer from the same sickness, the corruption of language. Philosophy analyzes human pain into theories, and journalism sells human tears as stories. Yet truth is not to be interpreted but to be lived. Truth is not the object of speech, but also the testimony of action. It's not the conclusion of knowledge, but the beginning of conscience. A philosophy that cannot live by truth is hollow; a journalism that cannot bear witness is corrupt. Thus, the world overflows with information, but is empty of conscience.

Only Journalism That Lives by the Ethics of Existence Can Redeem Humanity

Soyo's Existence Ethics proclaims: "The mission of journalism is not to report, but to testify."

This testimony transcends verbal ethics; it is existential in nature. Every journalist, every editor, every person who writes a single sentence must ask: "Will this sentence save a life?"

A journalism that has lost this question is a civilization that has lost its heart. But even a small newsroom that regains it already stands on the side of God. If journalism loses numbers but keeps its conscience, it preserves the final breath of civilization.

Soyo's Proposition - The Philosophy of Living Truth

"No matter how great a maxim may sound, if it is not lived, it remains trapped in self-reflection."

Only when existence embodies ethics do those maxims revive life and become a living philosophy. Learning is entirely different from living. Here lies the ethics of existence that existentialism has missed."

This proposition is the final declaration addressed to both philosophy and journalism. If a person stops at learning truth, they become only a memorizer of others' wisdom. But when one lives the truth, their words become life, and their existence becomes philosophy.

Toward an Age of Living Truth

"Fletcher restored ethics to the law of love, Soyo restored philosophy to the ethics of existence."

At the meeting point of these two philosophies emerges a revelation: human salvation lies not in the accuracy of knowledge, but in the truthfulness of conscience. The era of journalism that reports the truth has come to an end. The era of journalism that lives by truth must begin. Then humanity will open its eyes again, not the eyes of data, but the eyes of conscience, the eyes of love, the eyes of God.

Soyo (逍遙) – Founder of Soyo's Existence Ethics, author of The Silence of Being and The Flame of Truth

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