Tag Archives: Schelling

"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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