The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil

Thomas Nys, Stephen de Wijze, Thomas Nys, Stephen de Wijze

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317394402
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Why ought we concern ourselves with understanding a concept of evil? It is an elusive and politically charged concept which critics argue has no explanatory power and is a relic of a superstitious and primitive religious past. Yet its widespread use persists today: we find it invoked by politicians, judges, journalists, and many others to express the view that certain actions, persons, institutions, or ideologies are not just morally problematic but require a special signifier to mark them out from the ordinary and commonplace. Therefore, the question of what a concept of evil could mean and how it fits into our moral vocabulary remains an important and pressing concern.

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil provides an outstanding overview and exploration of these issues and more, bringing together an international team of scholars working on the concept of evil. Its 27 chapters cover the crucial discussions and arguments, both historical and contemporary, that are needed to properly understand the historical development and complexity of the concept of evil. The Handbook is divided into three parts:

• Historical explorations of evil
• Recent secular explorations of evil
• Evil and other issues.

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evil is essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of ethics and philosophy of psychology. It also provides important insights and background for anyone exploring the concept of evil in related subjects such as literature, politics, and religion.

PART I

Historical explorations of evil

1

PLATO ON EVIL

Alina Scudieri

Plato’s contribution to philosophy can hardly be overstated: he invented it. He took a burgeoning activity which had been practiced for almost a century – the critical investigation of reality – and gave it a method (dialectics), a purpose (the search for truth about the most important matters for a human being), an epistemological status (wisdom, namely objective knowledge of reality, which can be accounted for and distinguished from lesser forms of knowledge), and a literary style (the dialogical form, which enables the reader to learn the proper way to achieve truth). Philosophy for Plato had a moral and normative role. By knowing the truth about the world we live in, we are able to make the correct life choices and, in the very common case for an Athenian citizen also having a public role, it is instrumental in creating a good political community. For Plato, only those who know what is really good for their fellow citizens can be good politicians. Finally, philosophy does not eschew the problem of the existence and role of the gods in the universe and therefore is the only activity which can safely claim to save our soul.¹

A discourse on evil is part of the search for the truth about reality which characterizes philosophy. This is a metaphysical question, with cosmic import (it affects the entire universe): Plato believed that the universe had been molded by a supremely good god; from this premise he tried to explain the existence of imperfection and evil in the world. It also has a political side, because associated human life follows and imitates the rhythm of the universe, characterized by ages of divine supervision alternated by ages of human self-determination. The philosopher’s discovery enables him (or her, because Plato came to the unprecedented conclusion that women have the same intellectual abilities as men) to identify the problem and seek out a solution. This will always be a provisional solution because evil in the world consists of the imperfection that penetrates the universe and renders every human endeavor provisional. In this chapter, we will follow Plato’s investigation of the problem of evil, which is explored in different, albeit closely intertwined, realms. There is a metaphysical level, which includes the problem of theodicy, or how to reconcile the existence of God with the presence of evil in the world; then a political level, namely discord and civil strife in the city, which are the emblem of political evil and pave the way to tyranny (the worst political evil); and, finally, a moral level, connected to the problem of free will and the individual choice of good over evil (or vice versa). The key to understanding Plato’s notion of evil consists of realizing that evil is never a self-standing metaphysical principle. In the realms of metaphysics, ethics and politics the foundational principle is the good; evil is a derivative concept as it is conceived as absence of good, a kind of imperfection and decline determined by the necessary circumstances present in our universe.

Metaphysics: evil and the structure of the universe

Human life and human action happen in a world which is not a human creation. It is the result of the ordering activity of a divine entity which Plato calls the Demiurge, or Craftsman, on the preexisting matter. Plato never arrived at a creationist view of the origin of the universe, for he believed that both the ideas – the forms of reality – and matter were eternal, and the Demiurge’s activity consisted in putting order in the disorderly original matter.² This explains why ours is both the best possible world and an imperfect world:³ if a better world were possible, God would have formed it, because God is the epitome of everything that is good; on the other hand, the inevitable presence of matter in this world and the circumstances in which the Demiurge works make it imperfect. This is the lesson we learn from the Timaeus, whose account Plato’s describes as an eikos mythos, a “truthful discourse and not a fanciful myth.”⁴

Before examining Plato’s cosmology, we should recall two important facts. First, the origin and nature of the universe was an ancient and fundamental topic. One of the first literary documents of Greek civilization, Hesiod’s Theogony, was an account of the origin of the world presented as the successive appearance of gods in it.⁵ The heavenly bodies were conceived as gods and therefore the secular, empirical study of the sky and the planets was seen with suspicion in many quarters: this fact explains a decree the Athenian assembly passed in 432 bce, named after its proponent, the soothsayer Diopeithes, that forbade the study of the heavenly bodies.⁶ Second, astronomy was a very important topic for Plato, having a conspicuous role in the curriculum of the prospective philosopher in the Republic: astronomy forces our soul to look high in the sky and drives our soul up there (Rep. VII, 529a–b). Plato’s general view about the universe is summed up by a statement in the Gorgias:

The wise men say, Callicles, that both heaven and earth, and gods and humans, are bound by communion, friendship, orderliness, temperance and justice; and that is why they call this whole an order [kosmos] and not a disorder [akosmia] or unrestraint [akolasia].⁷

In the Timaeus,⁸ through the speech of the Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus of Locri and in an evocative language, Plato distinguishes “what always is, without generation,” which can be apprehended by the intellect through reasoning, from “what always becomes, without ever being,” which is the object of opinion and sensation. The world belongs to the second kind of entities. This universe, the only and the best of all possible worlds (29a, 31b), is a “living being endowed with soul and reasoning,” molded by the Demiurge according to the image of the eternal gods (37c), endowed with a body and a soul: the cosmos is thus “a movable image of eternity” (37d). The god who ordered the universe was good and as such he was not envious of his creation. He “wanted that everything be like him as much as possible” (29e).⁹ However, like everything that has been generated, the world cannot be immortal or completely indestructible (41b); indeed, because of its bodily, material nature and the circumstances in which the Demiurge works, “necessity” (ananke) is present in it together with “intelligence” (nous): necessity is dominated by intelligence and persuaded to “conduct to the best end the most part of the things coming into existence” (48a). Plato is careful to emphasize in many passages that the ordering activity of the Demiurge never succeeds in completely overcoming necessity, also called “the errant cause” (48a), but only as much as possible.¹⁰ The universe molded by the Demiurge, being endowed with a body, must have a spatial location: this is a three-dimensional field, which Plato calls the “receptacle” (49a) and the “region” (chora 52a–d). This second definition leads us to believe that this concept identifies the necessary circumstances in which the Demiurge’s action takes place. The Demiurge is absolute goodness and the good is the principle of the universe; however, imperfection and evil are present in the world because of the “region,” the circumstances in which goodness operates. The Demiurge is like a carpenter who, while working on a piece of wood, finds a node which hampers his action: the execution is inevitably affected. Timaeus concludes that this world is thus “a perceptible god made in the image of the intelligible” (92c) but is imperfect, more specifically since “the production of non-uniformity is perpetually maintained, it brings about unceasingly, both now and for the future, the perpetual motion of these bodies [the bodies existing in the universe]” (58c). It is therefore because of a necessity intrinsic in the very nature of our universe that nothing in it can be perfect or remain forever and everything is subject to the law of change. Imperfection, disorder, and decline are the destiny of all bodily entities; they are inherent in the physis of the universe: this is the necessary evil in the universe and human beings have no way to intervene on this cosmic element.

When we turn to the Politicus, we find a similar notion of evil, identified as imperfection and change due to the specific circumstances and arrangement of our universe. The central character of the Politicus, a philosopher described as a Stranger from Elea (the native city of Parmenides), reasserts the notion that “absolute and perpetual immutability is a property of only the most divine things of all, and body does not belong to this class” (269d).¹¹ Change for bodies etc. is thus inborn in our universe, but this does not mean that it always has to be for the worse. In fact, from this dialogue we learn that our universe is characterized by two rotation movements: there is an age in which it is accompanied by God along its path, and there is another age in which it is left to itself and thus devoid of divine guidance.¹² This is narrated in the form of a myth and the Stranger insists on this alternation between divine guidance and autarchy of the universe, and excludes other possibilities such as permanent self-rotation, contrary rotations effected by one god, or contrary rotations by two different gods (269e–270a). Plato wants to make clear that there is only one divine cause in the universe.¹³ There is only one god, who, being good, is the cause of everything that is good in the universe and is the creator of order in the kosmos.¹⁴ Plato rules out all explanations of evil and becoming in the universe which imply contradiction or imperfection in the divine nature as well as the existence ab aeterno of two antithetical principles of good and evil – as in Empedocles’ cosmology, for instance. This idea was also put forth in the Republic, where he has Socrates point out that God is the cause of all the goods in the universe, whereas one should look elsewhere for the cause of evil.¹⁵ The age in which the universe was under divine guidance is called the age of Chronos: in it everything was generated spontaneously, including human beings, who blossomed from the earth old and became younger through time, living their lives in a retrograde motion. All the parts of the universe were presided over by minor gods and human beings were assisted by demons (lesser gods); there were no political arrangements or private property with respect to material goods, women, and children (271d–e). As a consequence (Plato always conceived of private property as one of the roots of political evil), there were no wars or civil strife. We might surmise that human beings were happier then, but we should resist this conclusion. For the age of Chronos is characterized by the absence of eros, politics, and philosophy, which are fundamental ingredients of human happiness. Human beings then enjoyed a kind of natural, primitive happiness and they lived in communion with other animals. They were characterized by euetheia, a simple, spontaneous form of virtue which is unsuited and impossible in our time of complexity.¹⁶ The myth of the Politicus does not transmit any sense of nostalgia, of longing for a bygone original condition of happiness and virtue. On the contrary, it shows that our epoch, the age of Zeus, is the real age of mankind, for in it we can enjoy everything that is typically human and enables human happiness – especially through philosophy.

In the Politicus Plato describes the moment of change between the epoch of Chronos and that of Zeus and stresses the differences between them. What is constant, however, is divine care for the human race. Even in our age, when God is not at the helm of the universe, he never loses sight of his “creature” and prevents it from annihilation in “the boundless sea of dissimilarity” (273d). Even when the gods let the universe go without direct assistance, they still take care of human beings and give them “the so-called gifts of the gods” (274c) – fire and the arts. Plato maintains that it is because of an innate affection (pathos), the presence of a bodily element, that the universe experiences change: imperfection and decline are characteristic of our age and increase with estrangement from the origin. Plato uses the notions of “disharmony” and “dissimilarity” to depict the estrangement from the original paradeigma and from the sameness that is typical of what is eternal and divine; our age marks the prevalence of that principle of indeterminacy and multiplicity which Plato had identified in the Timaeus. Evil, to be conceived of as imperfection and change, is situated in this context of philosophy of history, characterized by the cyclical alternation of epochs with opposite features. The age of Chronos will return, but the real age of mankind is ours, the age of Zeus. We should note that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Historical Explorations of Evil
• Part II Recent Secular Explorations of Evil
• Part III Evil and Other Issues
• Index