Dictionary of the History of Ideas    PROBLEM OF EVILThe idea of evil and the problems which it has pre-sented to thinkers throughout history have expressedincisively the great divide in men's outlooks on natureand on human experience: the fundamental philo-sophical distinction between a natural-scientific and aspiritual-religious attitude. Scientific naturalism hasbeen concerned with description and explanation andon principle has been neutral to any basic evaluation.But religion, men's deepest response to the Highest,has been essentially and thoroughly evaluative. Goingbeyond the domain of description and explanation itsjudgments have been verdicts either of worship orof condemnation.In a religious perspective the idea of reality has beencompletely imbued with the idea of perfection: ensrealissimum ens perfectissimum. First and last, religionhas set out with a primal and ultimate recognition ofconsummate perfection in all its aspects. Men haveexalted their conviction of the essential supremacy oftheir ideals and have proclaimed them as divine inorigin, sanction, and final justification. The maturingdevelopment of men's ideas of God has been due toman's progress in evaluative insight and vision.The very growth in spiritual intelligence has em-phasized the radical problem of evil. In its devoutconviction religion has declared: “Great is truth and Page 162, Volume 2it will prevail”—and likewise for the other supremevalues. But do the facts of life really and finally sustainthis belief in man's status in the universe? Is externalnature really attuned to our highest values, or is itneutral to them, or even, in a sort of counter-religiousdemonic outlook, is it actually malign? The confirma-tion of religious assurance hangs upon the settlementof these issues. The actuality of evils demands recon-ciliation with the prevailing reality of the Divine. Theproblem of evil is imposed by our experienced frustra-tion of values, by the clash between what ought tobe and what actually is. Religious reflection has notbeen able to shirk this problem. Even a brief consid-eration of its treatment in the ancient religions woulddisclose its abysmal character. Modern philosophy andliterature have expressed the persistent embroilmentof secular thought in the issues of the traditionaltheodicies. The words of Charles Bernard Renouvierare brought to our attention: “Life can concern athinker only as he seeks to resolve the problem of evil”(Lasbax, p. 1).Religious thought in India, Brahmanic and Buddhist,set out with a firm conviction of the evil in the wholeworld of finite existence, but these two religions enter-tained different explanations of evil and differentprospects of deliverance. Brahmanic pantheism con-templated the world and ourselves in it as manifesta-tions of the Infinite Brahman. Everything whatever,in its inmost reality or soul, Atman, is one with theInfinite; but considered in their apparent multiplicity,things and persons are corrupt and illusory. Man's onlyhope is in his eventual saintly deliverance from theveil of illusion and the cycle of rebirth, in his absorp-tion in Brahman. The Brahmanic sages were reluctantto confront resolutely the basic questions which em-broiled their theodicy: Why should Brahman be mani-fested in this world of delusion and evil? Does not thispropensity towards finite existence stain the perfectionof the Infinite?Buddhist reflection followed the more radical courseof avoiding the pitfalls of theodicy by a fundamentalatheism. It rejected all substantial existence as illusory,Brahman and Atman alike, infinite or finite. There areno real substances; there are only processes, but allof them are processes operating in strict retribution,Karma. The course of human existence is a wretchedround of evils and miseries. This universal woe is dueto men's deluded and futile attachment to the lusts andinterests of their imagined soul or self. The deliverancefrom this evil state is possible only through the extinc-tion of self-engrossment. To these three cardinal truthsor convictions the Buddha added a fourth: his programof a life of progressive liberation from egoism, leadingtowards the utterly selfless blessedness of Nirvana. To Zarathustra (Zoroaster) in ancient Iran the basicfact of existence, and thus the first principle of cosmicinterpretation, was the universal opposition of goodand evil. This radical conflict, evident throughout na-ture and in human life, indicated a cleavage reachingto the very roots of being, a fundamental dualism. Inthe Zoroastrian theology the perfect creation by God,(or Ohrmazd), Ahura-Mazdā was countered at eachturn by Ahriman's evil work: darkness against light,corruption and banes against all purity and health andlife. The daily conflicts between good and evil in ourcharacter and careers are only incidents in the univer-sal war between the two creative cosmic powers. Truereligion is in man's loyal cowarriorship with the Lord,Ahura-Mazdā, in every thought and word and deedthat resist and defeat and destroy Ahriman's evil crea-tion: in industrious and productive labor, in pure con-duct, truthful speech, saintly thought. This world con-flict, though immemorial, was regarded by Zarathustraas destined to end in the final overthrow and fierydestruction of Ahriman's entire evil creation. Thus theinitial and basic dualism of good and evil in Zoroastriantheology reached its climax, not merely in an assuredmeliorism, but in the conviction of a finally perfectworld order.Unlike the sages of India, Greek thinkers were athome in this world and did not seek deliverance fromevil through escape from finite existence. Beginningwith the sixth century, philosophical reflection turnedaway from the traditional polytheistic mythology to-wards the ideal of ultimate divine unity, contemplatedas perfect and sovereign Reason. Most emphaticallyin Platonism, this rationalism was decisive in the theoryof knowledge, in ethics, in metaphysics. Truth andperfection and abiding reality are all rational. Errorand evil and unstable multiplicity are in the materialworld and in processes of sense-impressions, desires,and impulses. Our human nature is a tangle of appetitesand a dynamic drive of energies, but it also possessesintelligence and should be controlled and directed byrational judgment. In the words of Socrates, the unex-amined, unintelligent life is not worth living. Platoportrayed the process of rational mastery, aristocracy(dominance of the best), as the right fulfillment andself-realization of personality. This positive HigherNaturalism of the Platonic philosophy of life did notquite silence the tragic note in his theodicy, but itwould not yield to final negation. In human life andin finite reality there was always the drag of corruptmatter. Plato was no docile optimist; he declared:“Evils can never pass away; for there must alwaysremain something which is antagonistic to good”(Theaetetus 176; trans. B. Jowett). But he resolutelyrejected any cosmic despair: God desired that all things Page 163, Volume 2should be good and nothing bad “as far as this wasattainable.” God alone is absolutely perfect; any finiteworld would of necessity have its strains of imperfec-tion. So corruption and evils are actual: to be recog-nized and confronted and, within the range of ourrational powers, to be overcome. In Greek ethics, thisis the problem of reason and the passions; in Greekphilosophy of religion, we may note here a trend intheodicy which is to find its concluding classical ex-pression in the Enneads of Plotinus.Between Plato and Plotinus, Greek philosopherswith one notable exception exalted reason as the markof the supreme and perfect reality. The exception isthe Epicurean materialistic view of the world processand human existence as a scrambling and unscramblingof atomic configurations and motions. So-called goodand evil alike are in the mechanical contacts and reac-tions of our sense organs, in pleasure and pain.Against this atomism, the Stoic sages of Greece andRome contemplated the material world itself as mani-festing a hierarchical order, from the most rudimentarydust to the highest rational perfection of God. In thiscosmic scale of being, men may yield to the drag oflower desires and passions or, resisting all evil lures,the sage would follow the lead of rational intelligence,in apathy, the passionless life of godlike serenity whichalone is virtuous and truly good.Before Epicurus and the Stoics, Aristotle pursued thecourse of realistic rationalism. He contemplated natureas a cosmic process of the hierarchical realization ofpotentialities: each type of existence is the Form orfulfillment of capacities of a lower order and in turnhas the potential capacity to serve as the Matter ofa higher order of being. Aristotle's God is Pure Formor creative reason in eternal self-contemplation. Inhuman nature and experience, the curve of perfectionascends from Matter, bodily desires, and inordinatepassions towards the realized Form and harmoniousfulfillment of our humanity in balanced rational ex-pression. This Aristotelian distinction of the evil andgood aspects or stages of human experience was posi-tive but also coolly objective, without the tragic over-tones of reflection that mark any ecclesiastical demandfor a theodicy.Philosophical theodicy finds its classical version, bothits consummation and its self-criticism, in the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. The Plotinian cosmology con-templated the entire course of nature as the self-manifestation of God. The thorny problem, why or howperfect Deity should be manifested in such an imper-fect world, was not evaded by Plotinus. He met it bya reinterpretation of the process of self-manifestation.God alone is absolutely perfect; the divine perfectionradiates or emanates in nature, through the zones of Reason and Soul, to the outermost rim of least self-manifestation, in the world of Matter. These are alldegrees of perfection, but, being emanations, they arenot and cannot be consummately perfect. They are lessand less luminous as they radiate towards the outerdarkness or the abyss of material existence and itscorruptions and evils. Our human career is a contentionbetween the urge godward and the evil drag of sen-suality. Plotinus resists any cosmic pessimism: eachlevel or zone of emanation has its appropriate perfec-tion, but what is appropriate to animal or plant orother material existence is not befitting the life andcareer of men. Our true fulfillment is in turninggodward, towards the life of reason, and even beyondreason, towards the mystical ascent in ecstasy.The intensified gravity of the problem of evil inmonotheistic worship is evidenced strikingly in theHebrew religious development. The prophetic refor-mation, starting in the eighth century B.C., advancedfrom the tribal monolatry of the popular cults towardsethical monotheism and personal worship. The fullerattainment of this religious maturity by the prophetJeremiah, in the days of the siege and destruction ofJerusalem and the Babylonian exile of the people ofJudah, raised grave perplexities in the traditional doc-trine of men's covenant or contractual relation to God:of God's justice in rewarding the righteous man withprosperity and other blessings and punishing thewicked for their evils. Against the confident recital ofthe first Psalm were the tragic facts of Hebrew life.Bad men as well as good escaped the horrors of thenational ruin; and what multitudes of choice wor-shipers of Yahweh were driven into exile by the godlessBabylonians!This predicament and quandary of religious thinkersprovided the setting for the Book of Job: the probingof the problem of evil as evidenced in the underservedmisery and ruin of righteous men. The nameless poetof the Hebrew dramatic masterpiece proposes insearching dialogue alternative answers to the questionswhich perplex theodicy. He portrays an outstandingrighteous and prosperous Job, who is laid low andstricken with ills, a mass of sores on the trash heapof the countryside. The longest dialogues consider thetraditional doctrine, expounded by Job's prosperousfriends, that God brings evil to men justly, as punish-ment for their sins, and that Job must therefore confesshis hidden misdeeds and repent. Against their orthodoxpronouncements stands God's own recorded praise ofJob as his choicest worshiper. Are we, then, to followSatan, the Adversary in God's cabinet, and regard Job'ssufferings as a testing of his righteousness, as gold istested by fire? But Job's firm loyalty has already beendeclared by omniscient Deity. Or are the tribulations Page 164, Volume 2of the righteous a mystery in the vast universe ofmysteries? The poet of the drama has no formulatedsolution of the abysmal problem, but he does portraythe right way in which men should confront it—inforthright integrity.The Book of Ecclesiastes is a sardonic reflection ofanother side of the problem of evil: not the unmeritedsufferings of righteous men but the final futility andvanity of all so-called attainments and satisfactions ofhuman life. They are all vanity of vanities, a strivingafter wind. Good men and evil, winners and losers, allof them “go unto one place; all are of the dust, andall turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:20). This is thedour and sour negation of any abiding worth: valueskepticism.Christianity was fundamentally a gospel of salvationof sinful men. The conviction of sin, the vilest evil inexistence, and of man's own utter incapacity to sur-mount it set the conditions of any orthodox Christiantheodicy. Any depreciation of the radical depravity andany moral self-reliance were impious insults to thesolemnity of Divine Grace. In thus concentrating itsview of evil on sin, Christian theology depreciatedother ills, to be endured or even welcomed by therepentant and saintly soul, ready to suffer and bepersecuted for righteousness' sake. In this radicaltransvaluation and spiritualizing of all worth, theproblem of evil became a problem of interpreting sin:its essential nature, its origin and ground in God'sperfect creation, the blessed redemption from it fora saintly minority, and the everlasting damnation ofcountless unsaved multitudes.According to Saint Paul, the essential evil, sin, isin man's straying from the straight path of right-eousness into the erring ways of the flesh. Paul's initialeducation was classical, but we are not to regard hiscontrast of the spiritual and the carnal as a mererephrasing of the Greek dualism of reason and matter.Nor are we justified in interpreting the Christian ideal,the contempt of this world for the love of Christ, aplicitly ascetic. The sinful life in detail is worldlyand carnal, but sin essentially is man's perverse scornof God's will.The radical depravity vitiates even that which, inits right measure, is good, when it is set above its betterand higher values. “He that loveth father and mothermore than me is not worthy of me.” While asceticsaintliness did become exalted in Christian monasti-cism, the basic Christian idea was not a stark antithesisof the spirit and the flesh. The antithesis was directionaland gradational; the good was always in the upwardreach, the evil in the downward drag. Nowise assertingthis as a rigid formula, we may yet recognize that,while asceticism did gain ascendency in traditional Christian devotion, the fundamental Christian idea wasnot a reduction of the evil to the carnal. Whethermanifested in sensuality or in vain pride or ambition,the basic evil, sin, is always in the depraved strayingof man's will from the higher to the lower. So we findit affirmed by the two pillars of orthodoxy. SaintAquinas declared: sin is essentially aversio, man's turn-ing or straying from the immutable Good to somemutable good. And more than eight centuries beforehim, Saint Augustine, in his City of God, had giventhe finest expression of this Christian conviction:“When the will abandons the higher, and turns to whatis lower, it becomes evil—not because that is evil towhich it turns, but because the turning is perverse (sedquia perversa est ipsa conversio).”The recognition of the fundamental nature of evil,of man's sinful bondage, and of his only hope of re-demption through Divine Grace, accentuated the otherdemand of Christian theodicy, to explain this evildepravity of man as nowise compromising the absoluteperfection of man's Creator. Augustine's version oforthodoxy reflected his strong reaction against theManichaean heresy, to which he had been attachedfor some ten years prior to his conversion. Manichae-ism, fusing the Zoroastrian antithesis of good and evilwith the Greek dualism of reason and matter, ascribedthe evil strains in human life to man's inherently cor-rupt bodily nature. Against Manichaeism, Augustineupheld the Christian truth that God is the sole creatorof all existence, creator of the material world, and thateverything in nature, as the above quoted passagemaintains, is essentially good in its place and role increation. Evil is in the will's perverse misdirection ofchoice. But Augustine rejected also the oppositePelagian heresy, that our will, though inclined to sin,has also the capacity to choose the good. Between thesetwo counter-fallacies, Augustinian theodicy pointed tothe source of evil in Adam's original disobedience toGod's will. The possibility of Adam's evil choice wasallowed by God, else it would have lacked the qualityof a free and morally responsible act. But that choice,when once made, that original sin involved in its direconsequences all of us, tainted children of Adam. Leftto its own resources, our will is bound to sin and toits ruinous retribution. Our only possible refuge, whollyunmerited, is in God's grace.Augustinian theodicy has largely set the directionof later Christian doctrine but has also aroused muchcriticism and controversy. It has been restated morerigidly, e.g., in Calvinism, or it has been revised soas to allow some semi-Pelagian implications. Au-gustine's critics have pressed the point that Adam'sfateful choice, while freely his own, was yet repre-sentative of his character, and they have raised the Page 165, Volume 2question whether God could not have created an Adamthat would have freely made a good choice, as he didactually create an Adam that freely chose evil. Fur-thermore, how are the rest of us, countless multitudes,justly punishable through all eternity for our sinfulwills, sinful through no decisive choice of ours but dueto our evil inheritance as children of Adam?Ethical theories have been distinguished by theiralternative views of the Highest Good. Religious tradi-tion adoring all supreme perfection as Divine, hascontemplated with dismay its demonic counterparts ofutter evil. Embattled against the blessed angelic andarchangelic host are the wicked cohorts of the Lordsof Darkness. Kinships as well as differences in thevarious faiths have found expression in their views ofthe Evil One. The extensive study of them wouldcomprise an important part of the history of religions.Mara the Tempter tried to dissuade the Buddha fromhis holy mission, even as Jesus was tempted by theDevil in the wilderness. Most terrifying in evil majestywas the Zoroastrian Ahriman, and it has been con-jectured that the grim dualism of the Zendavesta mayhave had some influence on Jewish and Christiandemonological speculation.Popular superstition and folklore, hagiography andsolemn theology teem with stories of demonic incur-sion. With their protean and tireless wiles the countlessdevils hold in bondage the unregenerate multitude, andthey are ever ready to invade the cells of devout monksand nuns, to assume priestly vestment and desecratethe eucharist itself. Most of these stories are medieval.Modern Christian piety has been engrossed in its strug-gle with definite evils to be overcome and vicioustendencies to be curbed, but it has shown a steadydecline of interest in the traditional demonology. Theidea of the Devil, however, has stirred the imaginationof great poets to dramatic expression of the problemof evil. Three outstanding works of genius should benoted here, however, briefly: Milton's Paradise Lost,Byron's drama, Cain, and Goethe's Faust.Milton's Satan is an archangel fallen and depraved.The noble qualities of his erstwhile supernal characterare not extinct, but they have been perverted bymisdirection to evil ends and have made his spiritualdownfall the more abysmal. The firm courage, heroicdevotion, and pure loyalty of an archangelic characterhave been corrupted into desperate temerity and re-bellious unyielding arrogance, a resolution indomitablymalign. In Milton's moral philosophy good and evilare determined by opposite directions of the will:towards devotion to high ideals which mark the trulyintelligent spirit, or in the downward sweep of lustsand perverse drives.The most significant difference between Byron's Lucifer and Milton's Satan is in the evaluation of theircharacters. Byron seems to praise what Milton stigma-tizes. Satan's rebellious disdain appears in Byron'sLucifer as indomitable pride; furious violence is ro-mantically exalted as heroic ardor. Byron's tragedy alsoexpresses the forthright, though futile, refusal to wor-ship mere omnipotence. It ends on a note of final moralchaos, when Cain's revolt against a God who demandscruel animal sacrifice sweeps him to blind fury in whichhe slays his own brother Abel.The philosophy of life in Goethe's Faust defies anycursory formulation, but the poet's guiding idea of goodand evil can be recognized clearly. Goethe portraysman as seeking a finality of achievement and satis-faction which no experience in life can yield. It is thissense of eventual frustration which leads Faust tobarter his soul's salvation to the devil for one momentof supreme and consummate bliss. But the dramaticcareer through which Mephistopheles leads himteaches Faust in the end that the true value of lifeis not in the ardor of gratified desires or in any seem-ingly final achievement, but rather in the creativepursuit itself, in high endeavor and noble hazard:Of life and freedom only he's deservingWho daily must win them anew(Part II, Act V, Scene vi).Against this heroic dynamism of Goethe's ideal of thegood we have his portrayal of radical evil in the moralnihilism of Mephistopheles, who recognizes no degreesof worth:Step down here! I could also say: Step up!'Twere all the same(Part II, Act I, Scene v).Within but also beyond the theological demand,insistent in religions of salvation, to reconcile the evilsand the sinful corruption of creation with the infiniteperfection of the Creator, philosophical thinkers havesought a basic evaluation of existence. The alternativeappraisals, optimism and pessimism, have been enter-tained in their literal meaning, to signify views of theworld as the best or the worst possible, but moregenerally they have expressed a fundamentally ap-proving or a condemnatory evaluation. Philosophicalreflection has rarely proceeded to unqualified eulogyor stark malediction, but the intensity of poetic speechhas not stopped short of either extreme. Examples ofboth are not lacking; the following two may suffice.On the one hand, Pope's firm complacency:All nature is but art unknown to thee;All chance, direction which thou canst not see;All discord, harmony not understood;All partial evil, universal good;And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. Page 166, Volume 2On the other hand are black pages of utter despair,as by Giacomo Leopardi:Nought is worthyThine agonies, earth merits not thy sighing.Mere bitterness and tediumIs life, nought else; the world is dust and ashes.... Scorn all, for all is infinitely vain.The cloudless noon of philosophical optimism wasthe early eighteenth century. Its leaders were Leibnizand Shaftesbury; the latter comes close to unqualifiedlaudation of all existence. In contrast to them was thedarkening outlook on life which marked later eight-eenth-century thought and the systematic pessimismof some nineteenth-century philosophers, Schopen-hauer and Hartmann, and most desolate of all, JuliusBahnsen.Shaftesbury's optimism led him from the particularapparent evils and woes of daily life to the universalsystem in which they are all transcended as elementsin the cosmic perfection. Evils and woes are like theshadows that set off the light and beauty of the wholepicture or like the discords which swell the fullerharmony of the composer's masterpiece.Leibniz is less rhapsodic but no less assured in hisphilosophical theodicy, which he would justify on ra-tional grounds. He distinguishes three principal kindsof evil: physical evil, or suffering; moral evil, sin; andwhat he calls metaphysical evil, that is, the imperfec-tion which is inevitable in finite existence. He depreci-ates the gravity of bodily aches and woes as less com-mon and severe than grumblers aver, as largelyavoidable or due to intemperance or other vices, tomoral evil. The problem of moral evil involves Leibniz'theodicy. He cannot regard moral evil as an imperfec-tion staining the Creator's own activity, and he prefersto interpret it as due to metaphysical evil, the imper-fection characteristic of all finite existence. Leibniz'appeal here is to his principle of the “compossibility”of God's attributes. God in His omniscience recognizeswhat we ourselves must understand, that any createdworld would have some imperfection. In His infinitegoodness he has chosen the least imperfect world, andby his omnipotence he has created it, “the best of allpossible worlds.”Leibniz' theodicy was judged as precarious in itstheological implications. If our woes and sins are basi-cally due to our essential imperfections as God's crea-tures, we cannot complain of the Creator; but canHe then rightly condemn us for being such as He hascreated us? Leibniz' reduction of the moral antithesis,good-evil, to a metaphysical one, infinite-finite, hasbeen criticized as compromising ethical judgment andall basic valuation, human or divine. And has Leibniz' optimistic intention been realized? Voltaire's irony maybe recalled here: “If this is the best of all possibleworlds, what must the others be like?”The outstanding systematic doctrine of pessimism inthe nineteenth century was Schopenhauer's philosophy.In sharp opposition to all rationalism, Schopenhauerregarded nature as reasonless at the core, as a blinddrive or urge or craving which he called the Will-to-live. It is manifested at every level of existence. Inhuman life it is active as insatiate desire. All our ex-perience is a form of craving concerned with attackor defence; our intelligence is a tool of the Will-to-live;it is analogous to the dog's keen scent or even to thesnake's venom. In all his greeds and lusts man is everwanting, insatiate and ungratified. The distress of un-satisfied desires may occasionally be allayed by thepleasure of some fulfilled want, but only to be re-aroused by a new greed. Thus our life is a continualround of frustration: selfish, ruthless, wretched, andfutile, a bankrupt enterprise.Schopenhauer's pessimism is not absolute. Hepointed out two ways of escape from the wretchedtangle of will-driven existence. One of them is in thedisinterested contemplation of aesthetic experience. Increating or in beholding art, intelligence regards orreveals things as they are and not as objects of ourdesires. This artistic emancipation from selfish craving,however, is transitory. A more radical denial of theWill-to-live is achieved in the morality of compassion.Evil conduct is most usually due to selfishness. Lesscommon but more wicked is malice, which is notmerely callous to the woes of others but actually gloatsover them. Virtue and good conduct can only be inthe curbing of these vices: in justice which is willing-ness to bear our own burdens, and in humane loving-kindness which moves us to relieve the woes of others.But in this benevolent sympathy the moral saint is ledto recognize the fundamental evil in life, the will-driven craving itself. So he may proceed to asceticnegation of all desires and ambitions, to the selflestinction of the Will-to-live, Nirvana.This proposed aesthetic, moral, ascetic deliverancehas been criticized as inconsistent with Schopenhauer'smetaphysics. If the ultimate reality is the Will-to-live,how is the alleged desireless contemplation possiblein art? If man is by nature a tissue of selfish and ruthlessdesires, how can he ever act with genuine compassion?How can the ultimate Will-to-live be denied, in asceticsaintliness? Schopenhauer's successors have had tograpple with the fundamental discrepancy of the twosides of his pessimism.In the most distinguished revision of the philosophyof the Will-to-live, Eduard von Hartmann maintainedthat neither the irrationalism of Schopenhauer's meta- Page 167, Volume 2physics nor the rationalism of Hegel explain adequatelythe complexity of nature, which is unconscious urgewith the capacity for conscious and intelligent mani-festation. So in interpreting human nature we shouldrecognize the tangle of will-driven greeds but also thepositive values attainable by our intelligence: logical,aesthetic, moral, religious values, genuine and maturingin our development. Thus Hartmann described himselfas an evolutionary optimist, but the dark pessimistictone prevailed in his account of the human quest forhappiness—a deluded and futile misdirection. He dis-tinguished three stages of Man's Great Illusion. Inclassical antiquity men sought happiness in their ownlives on earth. Disenchanted in this vain pursuit, menturned to the Christian gospel of immortality. Themodern advance of knowledge disabused this baselesslonging for personal happiness after death. Then menpinned their faith on a new ideal of social progressand well-being in the future. But the course of historyis once more undeceiving men. We are bound to facethe grim truth; while we may and should promote thevalues of civilization, riper intelligence should lead usto abandon the delusion of attainable happiness, torecognize the essentially tragic course of human exist-ence. Hartmann even entertained the ideal—today weregard it as a constant menace—of man's eventualuniversal self-extinction.Most dreary of all pessimists, Julius Bahnsen rejectedall gospels of deliverance as weak palliatives. He wouldnot yield to any optimistic concessions and held firmlyto his desolate outlook: there is no way out. Our life,and nature altogether, are hopeless tangles of self-rending activities, ruling out any rational direction ororganization. For Bahnsen, Macbeth's dismal soliloquyclosed the entire argument:Life's but a walking shadow...... it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing(Act V, Scene 5).As has been noted in our brief survey of the thoughtof classical antiquy, the basic ideas of good and evilhave been expressed in various theories of ethics.Ethical reflection has tended to concentrate on theproblems of the moral standard and the Highest Good,and any review of the principal alternative theorieswould take us to other articles. But one doctrine ofwidespread modern development that should be notedhas given a seemingly plain account of good and evil:a critical revision of the old Epicurean hedonism.Reaffirming the reduction of good and evil to pleasureor happiness and pain or displeasure, modern utilitari-anism answered the old question, whose pleasure?, byan altruistic answer: the greatest happiness of the greatest number. There was disagreement regardingthe other disturbing question, what kind of pleasureor pain? Jeremy Bentham was concerned with quantita-tive valuation and proposed a hedonistic calculus ofpleasures and pains as a guide in moral deliberationand choice. But John Stuart Mill emphasized the im-portance of distinguishing the quality of pleasures andpains in evaluating the good and evil in various pro-posed actions or experiences: “Better to be a Socratesdissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” This radical revisionaffected the entire basis of strictly hedonistic valuation,for as Mill recognized, the qualitative appraisal de-pended on intelligent judgment.The issue between optimism and pessimism whichsignalizes the fateful importance of the right choiceof values, and thus of the basic role of intelligence invaluation, leads us to recognize a related and moregeneral issue which has affected our basic ideas of goodand evil. The history of thought manifests repeatedlya correlation of optimism with rationalism, and ofpessimism with irrationalism and skepticism. This cor-relation is not hard to explain. One side of the argu-ment is expressed in Hegel's magisterial pronounce-ment, “The Real is the Rational, and the Rational isthe Real.” But doubting Thomases may still press thedecisive question, whether our intelligence does havethis alleged rational capacity to comprehend Reality.If we recall the first sentence in Aristotle's Metaphysics,“All men by nature desire to know,” and if we recog-nize the urge for understanding as man's distinctivecharacteristic, then any denial or doubt regarding theattainability of this fundamental value would signalizehuman life as a losing venture. Skepticism exposes theradical evil of irrational and meaningless existence,especially when it results in the annihilation of values.More dismally than any philosophical formulation,poetic outburst has expressed this “sense more tragicthan defeat and blight,” as in James Thomson's Cityof Dreadful Night:The sense that every struggle brings defeatBecause Fate holds no prize to crown success;That all the oracles are dumb or cheatBecause they have no secret to express;That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertainBecause there is no light behind the curtain;That all is vanity and nothingness.Men's reactions towards this skeptical outlook havevaried. Some minds have recognized our inconclusiveand downright incompetent thinking but have refusedto be tragic about it. Montaigne was explicit but alsogenial about his motto, Que sçais-je? (“What do Iknow?”). Disavowing any claims to real understanding,he was content to tread the twilit alleys of human Page 168, Volume 2experience, an aimless pilgrimage but most interestingwithal. Life and the world offer us no ground of reli-ance, but no reason for fear or complaint either. Wetake things as they come, serene in fortuitousness.Genial skepticism was intolerable to minds commit-ted to the demand for understanding. So Pascal, whileassured about the valid theorems of the geometricmethod, recognized the incapacity of reason to answerreliably the ultimate questions which most concern us:about the existence of God, about man's moral careerand final destiny. “When I consider the short span ofmy life,... I am dismayed to find myself here ratherthan there;... Who has put me here? By whose orderand direction has this place and time been allotted tome?” (Pensées, No. 205). Pascal admitted this, his basicincertitude, but he refused to accept it. His attitudetowards his tragic skepticism varied. He sought deliv-erance from the doubts of the intellect in the insistentdemands of the heart. “The heart has its reasons whichreason does not know at all.” In his tragic perplexity,confronted with the dual hazards of belief and unbelief,his will inclined him to wager on the problematicalbut infinitely momentous alternatives of faith. Butagain, his searching reason would refuse to surrenderits quest: “All our dignity... lies in our thought....Let us therefore strive to think well: such is the foun-dation of moral life.”In our day existentialism has reaffirmed the quanda-ries of rational intelligence, but in its search for alter-natives to it has followed different paths. Against allrationalistic reliance on theology, dogmatic or philo-sophical, Kierkegaard had emphasized an existentialdialectic, a living truth expressed in the unique realityof his own spiritual crisis, which he did not merelyknow, which possessed him in consecration, in life anddeath. He would thus face God in self-penetratingencounter, and would not merely be doctrinally con-versant about God.This surrender of rational proof to the demands ofliving conviction has been reaffirmed as repossessionof orthodox verities by the pious fiat of unquestioningdevotion, itself due not to any wisdom or merit of oursbut to the working of God's grace in us. Thus, accord-ing to Karl Barth, we are raised from the evil vanityof rational self-reliance to the godly refuge of faithand consecration.But the existential dialectic may proceed in an op-posite direction. Disavowing all faith in God or in anysupreme values as unwarranted, Sartre, starting withexplicit atheism, begins with the primal existentialreality, oneself. I am myself, I am what I choose andbecome. That is my freedom and my engagement inthis world of reasonless and unprincipled process. Itis a nauseating bewilderment, but it is also a responsibility without contrition. If I am judged, it is by acourt of my own self, of my own continually self-propelled career. Without any moral corpus juris ofgenuinely positive and negative values, good or evil,we have here only one's own continual self-assertionand self-attestation, the freedom to which one is alwayscondemning and entrusting oneself.The idea of evil has been expressed forcibly in thecounter-appraisals of the historical process: the affir-mation or the denial of social progress. The cult ofprogress has been called the modern man's religion,or the new superstition. The citing of evidence on theopposite sides of the controversy has been an assess-ment of modern ideas of the positive and negativevalues of life, good and evil in social perspectives.The optimist's inventory emphasizes modern tech-nological improvements in every field of the socialeconomy. We hear, as it were, modern versions of thegreat soliloquy of Prometheus. Past ages were crampedand crude in their isolation and short-fingered indi-gence. But modern knowledge, expanded research, andperfected technical mastery have unlocked boundlessresources in nature for our advantage and well-being.We have shrunk the barriers of space and time andachieved instant communication on earth and beyondearth. The advance in curative and preventive med-icine has eliminated one burden after another and haslengthened man's life span. Our public education, al-ready universal in the West, is radiating its enlighten-ment and bringing the gifts of trained intelligence tovast areas of formerly dark ignorance.Against this technological eulogy of the modern age,social-historical pessimists have cited our glaring spir-itual barrenness, the vulgarity and corruption, theinequity and violence of modern life, the disastrousturns in our contemporary crisis which threaten notonly the well-being but the very existence of humanity.The disdain and despair of civilization as a corrupt-ing process were expressed with romantic fervor twocenturies ago by Jean Jacques Rousseau. He floutedthe cultivation of the arts and sciences as panderingto the luxury and idle curiosity of the rich, who thriveon the miserable toil of the masses. The entire socialsystem, with its governments that sustain exploitationand oppression, was denounced by Rousseau as awicked fraud.Of more recent memory is Tolstoy's condemnationof our social system as un-Christian and wicked. Ourcivilization does not unite men in true Christianbrotherhood. We exalt self-gratification and self-aggrandizement. We not only condone sensuality butpander to it in our art and literature. We profess aconcern for peace but gird ourselves for war and taxourselves to build the most destructive armaments. We Page 169, Volume 2not only accept but also support and promote an eco-nomic system which exploits the masses for the enrich-ment of the few. This unjust system has entangled usall, so that even the few of us who aspire to a betterway of life are made willy-nilly participants in mani-fold social evils. In all this advocacy of a radical socialreform and reconstruction, Tolstoy was appealing tothe teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. In his sternverdict on our civilization he was also criticizing him-self. His refusal to participate in the evils of our socialsystem marked the thoroughgoing change in his ownlater course of life.The world crisis in our time has aggravated theconfusion in our social outlook. On all sides we hearthe warnings and the ominous blasts of the prophetsof doom. Two disastrous wars and the postwar pilingup of defensive and offensive armament have pouredout our treasure that, rightly spent, might already haveserved to wipe out poverty and revitalize and raiseculture throughout the world. As it is, aggressivenationalism and racial or religious hostility are vio-lently ranging nations and social classes against eachother. Ironically, the very advances of knowledge andtechnology are aggravating some of our social prob-lems. The population explosion which menaces us withglobal starvation is partly due to the reduction of infantmortality and the improvement in sanitation achievedby modern medical science.Between placid optimism and the pessimistic doom,the ongoing historical course, from primitive andbarbaric stages to the widening scope of civilization,has been recognized as an expanding range of the fieldsin which human values may be pursued and realized,or frustrated. Spreading civilization shows how muchhigher and higher men can rise, or how much lowerand lower they might sink, each depending on the wiseor misdirected choice of values. Our present nuclearage sets out these alternatives of good and evil withcrucial momentous clarity. We have split the atom,but we have not united men in a humane social order.Our present atomic technology can enable us toachieve a civilization of unimagined progress, but wemight also blow ourselves to ashes.The evaluation of the principal versions of the ideaof evil inclines us to a gradational view. Value judg-ments are seen as forming a hierarchy which consistsof choices which are not on a par but are lower orhigher. In its choice between them, good and evil arerightly conceived as directional, and at every level ofexperience men may contemplate the prospect of ahigher attainment, but also face the hazard of degrada-tion. In philosophy and literature this idea of the issuebetween good and evil has found reasoned or imagina-tive utterance. Religious meditation has no better expression of this conviction than the passage from SaintAugustine's City of God cited above, which may wellbe recalled here: “When the will abandons the higher,and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil—not be-cause that is evil to which it turns, but because theturning itself is perverse.”BIBLIOGRAPHYE. M. Caro, Le pessimisme au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1876).Paul Claudel, et al., Le mal est parmi nous (Paris, 1948).Paul Haberlin, Das Böse (Bern, 1960). Eduard von Hart-mann, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. E. C.Coupland, new ed. (London, 1931); idem, Zur Geschichteund Begründung des Pessimismus (Leipzig, 1891). WilliamKing, An Essay on the Origin of Evil (Cambridge, 1739).Émile Lasbax, Le problème du mal (Paris, 1919). G. W.Leibniz, La théodicée (1710), in Leibnitii Opera, ed. J. E.Erdmann (Berlin, 1840). Ernest Naville, Le problème du mal(Geneva, 1868). Plato, Dialogues of Plato, trans. BenjaminJowett, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1892). Josiah Royce, Studies in Goodand Evil (New York, 1898). Arthur Schopenhauer, The Worldas Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 6thed., 3 vols. (London, 1907); idem, The Basis of Morality,trans. A. B. Bullock (London, 1903); idem, Studies in Pes-simism, trans. T. B. Saunders, 4th ed. (London, 1893). A. G.Sertillanges, Le problème du mal, 2 vols. (Paris, 1948-51).Paul Siwek, The Philosophy of Evil (New York, 1951). JamesSully, Pessimism (London, 1871). Radoslav A. Tsanoff, TheNature of Evil (New York, 1931; 1971). R. M. Wenley, Aspectsof Pessimism (Edinburgh and London, 1894). CharlesWerner, Le problème du mal dans la pensée humaine(Lausanne, 1946).RADOSLAV A. TSANOFF[See also Buddhism v1-34 ; Demonology v1-79 ; Dualism v2-05 ; Existentialism v2-22 ;God v2-39 v2-40 v2-41 ; Happiness and Pleasure v2-43 ; Hierarchy v2-50 ; Neo-Platonism v3-47 ;Right and Good v4-24 ; Sin and Salvation v4-31 ; Theodicy v4-50 ; Utilitarianism. v4-60 ]The Dictionary of the History of IdeasElectronic Text CenterPO Box 400148Charlottesville VA 22904-4148434.924.3230 | fax: 434.924.1431Maintained by: The Electronic Text Centerat the University of Virginia Library© 2003 the Gale GroupAll Rights ReservedLast Modified: Thursday, May 1, 2003 |
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