In everyday use, ethics is understood almost always as rule-morality: a catalogue of actions one should or shouldn’t do, measured against an external standard. Whoever keeps to it counts as ethical; whoever deviates, offends. This view is embedded in catalogues of virtue, in duty-ethics, in social convention. And yet it doesn’t explain why someone who has kept every rule still afterward carries something within that gives them no rest — something not written in the rule, but active nonetheless. This is exactly where a different ethics begins: not one that classifies actions, but one that perceives what remains open inside.
#What a Loop Is
The central term of this ethics is the open loop. What is meant is an unfinished movement in the emotional or mental body — a process that was begun and did not come to an end. A relationship that broke apart uncleanly, in which nothing was said that needed to be said. A conflict set aside without being resolved. A shaming that was never named. One’s own action that one has not yet faced. Such loops do not disappear. They bind energy, resurface elsewhere as pressure, and steer one’s own behaviour below the threshold of awareness.
The formulation is Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s own, and it takes up an observation from Gestalt therapy: the unfinished Gestalt, which keeps working as an unborn thing until it finds its form. In her lecture on ethics (30 April 2026), she sharpened the point: what we regard as ethical is, in truth, nothing other than the practice of closed loops — bringing relationships to a peaceful and complete conclusion, carrying no residue in the substance closest to conscience, not dragging open wounds around, even when digital culture suggests the opposite.
Ethics in this sense is therefore not a catalogue but a practice of perception. It does not ask: did I keep the rule? It asks: which loop remains open in you after your action, and how do you close it?
#Remote-Controlled in Every Open Loop
From this follows a hard diagnosis. In every open loop, you are remote-controlled. Loops are opened especially in interpersonal contexts, including when someone else opens a loop toward you. We are not so far separated from one another that this would be a matter of indifference; what others think or feel can affect you, unless you stay extraordinarily grounded in yourself.
The ethical question is therefore not a moral one but a question of sovereignty. Whoever does not close loops hands the steering over to them. A relationship that was never inwardly concluded goes looking, later, for a second one in which the unfinished business repeats itself. A shaming that was never worked through later surfaces as aggression against someone who had nothing to do with it. Anger is often the second movement of a first one that was suspended.
#Humility, Humiliation, and the Brotherhoods
One form in which the open-loop dynamic congeals socially is described by Gwendolin Kirchhoff in her lecture with particular sharpness. Practically all power-holding institutions, she argues, are organised as brotherhoods — from boarding schools and fraternities to the military and the police. Such networks distribute benefits only to the loyal, and access works differently than in meritocratic organisations. Instead of proving competence, one has to be willing to humiliate one’s own self-respect, integrity, and anchor of truth for the group, up to the limit of physical and psychological injury. These hazing rituals produce a false identity: one is afterward no longer primarily oneself, but part of this fraternity, and defends it against every perceived threat.
Here the distinction between humility and humiliation is constitutive. Humility, as it appears in the Sura of Yusuf or in Jesus’s answer before Pontius Pilate (“only because it was given to you”), is the calm acceptance that power goes where it goes: a movement of surrender that does not touch the inner person. Humiliation, by contrast, breaks the person; it installs the submissiveness that secures loyalty even when what is demanded is unethical. The two movements look superficially similar. They are opposites. Whoever cannot tell them apart mistakes their own self-surrender for a virtue.
#Self-Respect as the Outcome of a Unilateral Stance
What closes loops? Not appeasement, and not retroactively conceding the other person was right. Loops close through one’s own conduct in the matter itself. A unilateral stance — behaving precisely not the way the other has behaved toward you, even where you would be in the right — builds, contrary to what one might expect, a deep inner sense of self-worth. This strength makes one stable against the mechanisms by which the system forces loyalty.
Self-respect, in this ethics, is not a precondition but a result. Whoever measures themselves against how the other behaved inevitably falls into an open loop, because the measure lies outside. Whoever measures themselves against what they themselves can answer for closes the loop. From this arises a good standing with oneself — the only kind that really holds. The language of self-soothing is not enough here; a story that cosmetically smooths over one’s own conduct is not a closed loop, but a lacquered-over open one.
#Confucian Shame as an Earlier Form
This ethics does not stand alone. It has an earlier form in the Confucian tradition. Mengzi (4th c. BCE) counts the feeling of shame among the four innate moral dispositions of the human being: “Without the feeling of shame and dislike, one is not human. […] The feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness” (cf. Mengzi, Mengzi, Book VI). This is not a shame culture but an anthropology: the human being has an organ that signals limits before they are crossed. Whoever does not train this organ is, for Mengzi, “a thief against himself” (cf. Mengzi, Mengzi, Book VI). The feeling of shame is the perception of whether a loop is currently opening, and the sense of duty is the practice of closing it before it sets.
Confucius himself put it sharply: “All disorder in the state arises from confusion in concepts” (cf. Confucius, Lunyu, c. 5th c. BCE). Whoever confuses humility and humiliation, whoever mistakes self-surrender for loyalty, whoever mistakes appeasement for peace, lives in a language that produces loops instead of closing them. Clarifying concepts is a basic ethical practice, not an academic hobby.
#Buddhism, Pre-Birth, and the Way Out
The second point of reference lies in Buddhism. The classical Buddhist question asks how one breaks out of the cycle of rebirths. In the lecture on ethics, it is translated: how do you break out of the cycle of pre-births that you keep falling back into — out of shame, guilt, unfinished relationships, fragmented processes? Each of these cycles is a renewed egoic isolation, a new container one has to pass through. Meditation alone, on this view, would actually be enough to calm these cycles. But the main point of ethics is that it is an awareness of what, in oneself, triggers pre-births. It is the phenomenological counterpart to meditation — not the inner stilling, but the trained perception of which outward behaviour opens which inner loops.
Here, too, the connection to shame and to de-shaming becomes visible. What is held back in shame remains an open loop. What can be spoken before a witness closes it. Closing does not mean forgetting. It means bringing something into form so that the movement can come to its end.
#Wisdom as Insight Into the Life Cycle
The final layer of this ethics is wisdom — quite concretely, as the capacity to think through the life cycle of a given movement, once, from beginning to end. To see the root of a movement and its end. Experience and enough time show what usually becomes of certain patterns; hence the old term elder-wise. An action that will open a loop is, at the moment of acting, often recognisable only to the practised. Whoever knows the course such movements take can close them early, before the shape of the pre-birth even sets.
The ethics of closed loops is thus no private matter. It is the foundation that lets you stay with yourself in relationships, in conflicts, in power-holding structures — instead of being remote-controlled by unfinished movements, whether someone else’s or your own. What the therapeutic vocabulary calls healing, and the systemic vocabulary calls resolution, has here its ethical name: the closing of the loop. And the measure is disarmingly simple. If you feel a residue afterward that occupies you, the loop is open, regardless of what the rule says. If you feel none, the action had something to do with ethics, regardless of whether it was conventional or not.
#Sources
- Confucius. Lunyu (Analects) (c. 5th c. BCE).
- Mengzi. Mengzi.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Lecture on Ethics, 30 April 2026 (Parts 1 + 2).
Pre-Birth · Wisdom · Closed Loops · Shame · De-Shaming · Self-Soothing Is Not Healing