Tag Archives: Plato

"An angel leading a soul into hell", Oil painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch

Why is there ‘Something Evil’ rather than ‘Nothing Evil’?

There is no more perplexing problem in the history of philosophy that the meaning of evil. Even the best philosophical minds have confessed to being stymied. One of the best philosophers of the 20th — or any other — Century, Hannah Arendt questioned the entire validity of the Western philosophical inquiry into moral evil. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Arendt wrote:

It is inherent in our entire [Western] philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive of a ‘radical evil’…

The problem here may well lie with St. Augustine, who sought to avoid defining evil by means of a brilliant conceptual twist. Evil can only be defined as the absence of the “good”. Evil instead is defined by its very indefinability. Augustine wrote:

For the Almighty God, who, as even the heathen acknowledge, has supreme power over all things, being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil. For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?

While this was, in part, an intellectual maneuver by a committed Christian trying to explain away evil — human depravity and ‘natural’ evils such as disease — by denying that a perfect God could ever create such phenomena, this argument is not necessarily a religious one that relies solely on belief in a theistic, creational God. Plotinus, not readily classifiable as a Christian thinker, identified evil as linked to an emanation from the Godhead. Think of light growing fainter as it is emitted from a source of purer, brighter light. That faint light is a negative, derivative existent, not an independent, substantive existent. Evil is like that diminished light—it is an absence. Evil is not specific and differentiated. It is a ‘lack-ness’, not a ‘what-ness.’ 

This roundabout way of approaching the meaning of evil is deeply unsatisfactory. There is no surprise that later thinkers, such as Kant (who was not committed to a Christian-Emanation metaphysics) have honestly confessed that the very concept of evil puzzled them. 

Once we take the inquiry out of this metaphysical context, where we are forced to defend ‘perfection’ by explaining away moral evil as privation only, then we can start to answer the question: why is there ‘something evil’ rather than ‘nothing evil’?

“There are more things in heaven and earth…”

Consider Shakespeare‘s sense of the weird and strange expressed in Hamlet’s challenge to the philosopher Horatio that serves as a useful foundation for a fresh inquiry into the meaning of evil:

    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Investigating a deeper evil means first acknowledging its actual, unique existence. Philosopher F.W.J. Schelling broke with the major Western philosophical tradition by rejecting Augustine’s ‘evil-as-privation-of-good’ thesis when he rejected  moral evil as a negative attribute –a ‘lack of’– a void without any existential reality. As Richard J. Bernstein observed in his study, Radical Evil: a philosophical investigation, Schelling is one of the few philosophers who refused to explain away evil as a “privation” or the “Absence of Good.”  

For Schelling evil does have deeper, substantive qualities — a “principle of darkness” that is “unruly,” always threatening, and which we can never wholly subdue or master. “Evil,” the 20th Century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (another one of the more edgy thinkers on the topic) observed “is an excess that cannot be integrated into our normal categories of understanding and reason.”  To try to fit evil into our quotidian categories of the every day fails according to this Evil-as- the-Diabolic-Outsider argument.  

“Nebuchadnezzar”, William Blake

Pop culture (and Nietzsche) to the rescue

Yet how is it possible to meaningfully construct human narratives about a moral evil that is seemingly beyond “normal categories of [human] understanding and reason”? Nietzsche’s definition of philosophy as “the seeking-out of everything strange and questionable in existence” is serviceable, which means, in our context, using unconventional ‘non-philosophical’ narratives—sci-fi, horror genres, the Theology of Undead, and pop culture analysis, as well as some more edgier philosophers, to give us some arguments and allegories that dramatically illustrate moral evil as a diabolical outsider.

The horror fantasy genre figuratively expresses Schelling’s insight about evil’s demonic dimension, its “unruly” and unmastered “principle of darkness” that always threatens us. Evil, as depicted in these stories, is diabolical, a uniquely invasive and alien quality which drives evildoers to commit crimes against humanity. Evildoers have no empathy with humans simply because these Others are firmly outside all homo sapien moral norms.

For example, theologian Jarrod Longbons, assessing the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, profiles vampires as “demonstrate[ing] radical evil because they parasite [on] the life of humans.” The difference between vampires and humans is stark: the latter have an ability to feel guilty, possess a conscience, and act through self-sacrifice, unlike their vampiric attackers. In an essay on the apocalyptic vampire film Priest, pop culture analyst Joseph Laycock describes the film’s vampire protagonists as having demonic depth—as being “not remotely human.” Grotesquely ugly, the vampires in this film are modeled on the horrific creatures in the Alien blockbuster series as a metaphorical way of driving home their complete otherness from humanity. 

These imaginative representations function as symbols of radical moral evil as not just the absence of good, but as a real existence –horrific and threatening to the human race — insights all in the spirit of Schelling.

Zombies a.k.a. the Undead, which have invaded pop culture via television, video games, cinema, and novels, (while also inviting the attention of contemporary philosophers and theologians), are another example of pop culture’s useful focus on this demonic dimension as an alternative to the banality of evil/privation of good thesis. But again these zombie tales are not bizarre flights of fancy, but have philosophical respectability. Indeed, Plato took zombies – and the substantive nature of evil in general – very seriously.

Plato meets the Zombie

Plato was not shy about confronting the demonic dimensions of evil. In fact, using a tale of the Undead, he crafted a Nietzschean-style project to search for “everything strange and questionable in existence” by dramatizing evil as a diabolical outsider always restless, never at peace, and linked to some overweening desire that can never be satisfied—much like the real world serial killers, profiled by Joyce Carol Oates in her powerful 1994 New York Review of Books essay

Plato conjures up in the Phaedo a dark imaginative vision of the dead as zombie-like evil beings, ‘alive’ only in a technical sense, that “hover…about tombs and graveyards.” The evil are the Undead destined forever to wander in an effort to satisfy their relentless physical desires which have corrupted them due to a dissolute life:

[T]hese must be souls, not of the good, but of the evil, which are compelled to wander about [experiencing a] craving for the corporeal which never leaves them…

Plato’s reflections in his dialogues Timaeus and Laws depict evil more formally but yet reiterate the ‘zombie-wandering’ theme: material reality is the site of the Wandering Cause, a disorderly element which being unpredictable disrupts our everyday expectation of rational order. As philosopher Mary Midgley and others have noted, this disruptive factor is considered by Plato to be the source of evil. One scholar even dubbed this vision of evil “Plato’s Devil.” 

“The Temptation of Christ”, Félix-Joseph Barrias

‘Something evil’ abides within the ordinary?

Some theories claim moral evil as exclusively a natural, human phenomenon, while if we follow the more imaginative, metaphysical path (horror stories, sci-fi tales, the Theology of the Undead, Schelling, Levinas, Plato) we go beyond the human-all-too-human categories of conventional thought to rediscover the demonic dimension as more than an absence, or ‘privation of the good.’ Can these two visions of the meaning of evil be reconciled?  The inhuman and alien that are yet embedded within, but masked by, the ordinary and human—the monstrous cohabitating within the ‘normal’?

Moral evil as the co-existence of the inhuman inhabiting the normal was suggested by Robert Louis Stevenson‘s classic horror fable of human depravity: a precursor to the modern serial killers, the diabolical, zombie-like Mr. Hyde is a night stalker and murderer, who commits his crimes without any remorse, yet cohabitating within the same self is the conventional, law-abiding Dr. Jekyll. If the phenomena of evil as portrayed by Robert Louis Stevenson is correct then it is terrifying and monstrous one minute, conventional and ‘normal’ the next. But of this there is no doubt: the evil of Mr. Hyde is not just the “privation of the good.”

In the history of philosophy, there is a minority report on the meaning of evil, which identifies it as an existent embedded as a ‘given’ in our concrete, ordinary material reality, not as a non-substantive, vapour-like product emanating top-down from –or created by –a perfect Godly source-entity. Plato, though considered the father of top-down metaphysics, was wise enough to understand that evil has a special status that cannot be explained away, as Augustine does, by a ‘vertical’ metaphysical framework. 

Once we dispense with the post-Plato, Christian-Emanation vision of reality, we understand at the logical level, what we have always understood at the empathetic-intuitive level: whether it is the depravity imagined in fictional horror genres, the barbaric history of the Holocaust, or the facts of unspeakable serial killings, moral evil’s existential reality cannot be lightly dismissed as ‘privations’ even if previous philosophers muddled the original inquiries.

Thomas White is a Wiley-Blackwell journal author, and previous contributor to Undercurrent Philosophy, Aeon, The Philosopher’s Eye, and other journals. He is also  a poet and speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in print and online in Australia, Canada, United States, and Great Britain.

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'Vom Winde verweht', Margret Hofheinz-Döring

What has philosophy done for us?

This essay is a consideration of philosophy as a remarkable workshop of conceptual innovation that has contributed immeasurably to human knowledge, including practical knowledge. It is about the real impact of philosophy.

One area in particular where philosophy has offered powerful beneficial insights concerns the status, and rights of women. By questioning the historic denigration of women, philosophers, via their powerful arguments, have done a lot for both men and women.

Freeing Women from Male Subjugation

In their analysis of the ontological and social status of women, philosophers Simon de Beauvoir and Plato frame the issues around what philosophers have come to call the fact/value distinction. It is the fallacy of deriving the “ought” (values) from the “is” (facts) known as the Naturalistic Fallacy. This philosophical point is especially helpful in refuting male prejudices towards women.

Considering historical views of women as filtered through the male consciousness, de Beauvoir notes the traditional tendency of men to conflate the existence of women’s body (facts) with opinions about women’s abilities and identities (meanings). “Her body”, de Beauvoir writes, “is not enough to define her.” The facts of biology do not carry meaning. “Physiology cannot,” de Beauvoir further asserts, “ground values.”  

Instead, values are conferred on the biological data—by, of course, men, who have used physical differences between men and women to dominate women (e.g. the physical facts of menstruation has been used as an excuse by men for shunting women away from the public world, conferring on this biological fact the pejorative value of ‘weakness’). However, women are, in truth, not prisoners of their bodies. Her body does not define her because “[w]omen is not a fixed reality, but a becoming”. In sum women like men can confer value on their own existence; they are not merely closed systems, physical/biological entities, but have the freedom to transcend their immediate situation qua body, and find a future identity not grounded in their physicality—an argument contrary to the historical biological determinism of sexist men who have drawn fallacious inferences about the ontological meaning of women from the latter’s physiology.

Plato also questions the use of women’s bodies qua bodies as an ontological criterion for validating their rights and roles in society.  The woman’s body as endowed with a ‘female’ gender does not make the fundamental difference, but rather the excellence of the soul. If women are exclusively defined by their bodies, the distribution of social roles between men and women becomes – as it was in Plato’s Greece – sharply demarcated between public and private, relegating women to inferior and subordinate roles, as mothers and child bearers.

In his essay on Plato and women, French scholar Luc Brisson writes:

‘For Plato, the fact of being of the male or female sex has no more relevance for the attribution of such-and-such a task than does the fact of having lots of hair or of being bald.’

Plato, applying his own version of the fact/value distinction, distinguishes between the woman’s body and the woman’s soul/mind just as he applies the same distinction to the bodies and souls of males. Plato’s Dualism, a metaphysical doctrine based on sexual equality and anti-reductionism, is also politically radical. Plato’s vision of women was, as Brisson writes, a “merciless criticism of Athenian citizenship, which took only men, that is, males, into consideration.”

Instead, in an ideal state women and men would be equal. A woman who demonstrates the values of courage – an attribute of the soul – is equally qualified to be a “guardian” (warrior) in Plato’s hypothetical state on par with a man who demonstrates the same values. The biological facts about a woman’s body are separate from her attributes of courage and valor, and indeed have no relevance to her ability to assume a warrior’s duties. As for de Beauvoir, so for Plato: biology is not destiny.

In the Republic, Plato asserts:

‘But if it’s apparent that they differ only in this respect, that the females bear children while the males beget them, we’ll say that there has been no kind of proof that women are different from men with respect to what we’re talking about, and we’ll continue to believe that our guardians and their wives must have the same way of life.’ (Rep. V, 454d-e, transl. Grube rev. by Reeve).

Women are likewise intellectually equal to men. Because philosopher-leaders are chosen amongst the guardians as a function of the ability of their soul to devote itself to higher studies, it follows that women will have access to the same course of studies described in Book VI of the Republic, inclusive of  mathematics and dialectic, taught to male philosopher-leaders. Nor was this mere theory on the part of Plato. Diogenes cites the fact that Plato admitted women to his own school for philosophers, the Academy.

How these Arguments Showcase Philosophy’s Strengths

Rigorous objectivity, logical precision, commitment to knowledge (contra public opinion), rejection of partisanship, and a willingness to ‘follow the argument’ (both logical and empirical) are fundamental skills used in the philosopher’s workshop.  And they are all showcased in Simone de Beauvoir’s and Plato’s arguments. Both vigorously follow their arguments by using reason to question conventional opinions of their day about the putative inferiority of women in order to find real knowledge that refutes received prejudices. Further, they refuse to show partisanship toward other (bad) arguments simply because they were offered by earlier prestigious philosophers. De Beauvoir strongly criticized the male prejudices that crept into Aristotle’s discussion of women as mere passive ‘matter’, while Plato’s defense of the equality of women directly opposed philosopher Pythagoras’ sexist metaphysical claims that a “bad principle …created chaos, darkness, and women” in comparison to man created by a “good principle.”(Nor was Plato a partisan supporter of the sarcastic, sexist Athenian ‘good old boy’ political network of his day).

Philosophy’s historic contribution to changing the conversation about the rights and status of women is directly linked to its ability to find knowledge by framing objective arguments based on logic and facts unbiased by irrational opinion. Where philosophy has failed women it is not the fault of its basic core strengths, but of regrettable sexist prejudices which have historically infiltrated philosophy as they have other modes of inquiries such as science and literature.

Thomas White is a Wiley-Blackwell journal author, and previous contributor to Undercurrent Philosophy, Aeon, The Philosopher’s Eye, and other journals. He is also  a poet and speculative fiction writer whose work has appeared in print and online in Australia, Canada, United States, and Great Britain. 

How about you, do you think philosophy has made a positive contribution to the rights of women and men?

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Large-scale structure of light distribution in the universe. Andrew Pontzen and Fabio Governato.

Did Plato Discover That Reality is Computer Simulated (including Viruses and Malware)?

Recent claims by prominent leaders and gurus in the Information Technology community, such as Elon Musk, that we could very well be living inside a computer simulated reality suggest that our apparently physical world may at its heart be a vast set of mathematical computations.

The film The Matrix — which philosopher William Irwin saw as an updated version of Plato’s Cave re-envisioned in the parlance of computer technology — has now been converted from fantasy into a real hypothesis for further investigations. We will dub this the Musk-Matrix Hypothesis (MMH).

So what’s Plato got to add here? The notable scientist, Werner Heisenberg, asserted that Plato was right to define physical reality as mathematical:

‘I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or—in Plato’s sense—Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics’

The Wikipedia entry sums up this Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH):

‘Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. That is, the physical universe is mathematics in a well-defined sense…’

Related to this is Computationalism, which suggests that our powers of cognition are at bottom mathematical (an idea explored eloquently by roboticist Hans Moravec in his discussion of mathematical realism; also known as Mathematical Platonism). Since humans are born, according to Plato, with innate ideas of mathematical structures, then our minds — once we receive the proper education — can grasp reality’s underlying mathematical structure; a kind of ghostly skeleton that lurks behind the apparently robust, but actually illusory, world of ephemeral empirical experience. Alternatively put, reality analogous to the ‘software’, mathematical structure, the ‘hardware.’

However, as Plato argued, because we are prisoners in the cave of ordinary daily life we confuse those ephemeral shadows and images with the truth. What we naively label ‘real-time’ is actually virtual reality. Researchers investigating a putative computer simulated reality, are trying to drag us out of this Cave/Matrix. We are like Neo waiting for our Socrates/Morpheus, but played now by Elon Musk.

Yet, along with his mathematical ideas, Plato’s psychology investigated gaps and irregularities in human thinking and behaviour. Could the MMH be tweaked to explain such anomalies?

In his dialogues, Plato depicts humans plagued by a species of Attention Deficit Disorders, which includes a lack of focus, as Jeffrey Edward Green observed. For Plato, people are restless, fail to concentrate, lose their attention span, and then fall asleep.

Though Plato adduced these examples to support his theory of knowledge and critique of democracy, the MMH suggests another possible explanation.  If our reality is one vast computer simulation, then perhaps these irregularities are evidence of viruses or malware ‘attacking’ our simulated reality. A wandering attention span sounds remarkably like the restless behaviour of a computer infected with malware, which redirects the system’s focus to other websites. And could virus attacks be responsible for forgetfulness and, in general, muddled thinking; our version of data loss, system shutdown, and corrupted files?

While these speculations may sound farfetched, they are no more absurd than the original MMH, which once was a cinematic fantasy, but is now the stuff of serious debate.

Thomas White is a Wiley Journal Author, who has published essays, poetry and fiction, digital and print, in the United States, Canada, and Australia. He is the founder and former facilitator of the Maryland Socrates Cafe in Takoma Park, Maryland (USA), and is writing a book on the meaning of moral evil.

How about you, dear reader, do you think Plato discovered that reality is a simulation? Would this simulated universe be susceptible to viruses?

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