Preamble: To prevent a confusion and, even worse, a misunderstanding, I must clarify my position on Good and Evil up front. I see evil all around us in the world, and it is often my impression that the actual power of evil is far greater than the flimsy moral power of the good. Yet, in absolute terms, I insist that evil is temporal and only goodness is absolute. The Absolute, in my philosophical treatment, is an Ideal, rather than the reality of existence. The world needs the Absolute to be able to tell the right from the wrong, as the gold standard of morality, even if this gold standard is not part of the “real world.” Our discussion below is a distinctly philosophical discussion. Contrary to the general understanding existing in philosophy since the Ancient Greeks invented it, I do not see Ethics as part of philosophy, but rather I see philosophy as part of Ethics, which also includes a separate, although connected, discipline of Social Ethics, based more on the pragmatic convenience of society than on the conception of the Ideal.
I wish to emphasize here that the following focuses on the philosophical component of Ethics and leaves the Social Ethics component out of this particular consideration, and the reader needs to approach my treatment of the subject of good and evil with this in mind.
The seemingly endless discussion of good and evil continues in yet another entry, this time tapping on the reputable authority of Epictetus reflecting on this subject, followed by Simplicius elucidating it.
Epictetus, the great Greek stoic of the Christian era, makes short shrift of the question of evil. He says: “As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing it, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the universe.” Simplicius has a lengthy and curious discourse on this text of Epictetus, both amusing and instructive. “Evil is not part of the nature of things,” he argues. “If there were a principle of evil in the constitution of things, evil would no longer be evil, but evil would be good.”
Remember my comment on the Stoics’ argument on good and evil being nice fodder for psychology, rather than for philosophy? Surprisingly, this observation of Epictetus, as well as Simplicius’s comment on it, are so much in harmony with my own view of evil, expressed in several entries in this section, that there is no need for me to add anything to it, except that both these observations are pure top-grade philosophy!
Curiously, one point made by Simplicius, that “If there were a principle of evil in the constitution of things, evil would no longer be evil, but evil would be good,” deserves our very special attention.
I assume that what Simplicius means to say is that had evil been part of the original Creation not as an effect of a good cause, but as a Kantian thing-in-itself, evil would have had to be good, because everything created by God must be good. After all, we are not Manichaeans, and we do not believe in Ahriman’s independence from a constrained God! (It must be noted, however, that Simplicius was a persecuted pagan philosopher in the reign of Justinian I, and, in this context, my reference to the Christian Bible can be questioned. However, Simplicius’s opposition to Christianity by no means precludes his philosophical agreement with parts of the Bible, and this particular tenet about the goodness of God’s Creation must raise no objection from a devout admirer of Plato, which Simplicius admittedly was.)
But let us now develop a logical argument. Qualities are established and understood through opposition: hot and cold, day and night, good and bad, etc. Is it then possible to say that, absent evil, good would cease to be good, and even God would no longer be good, but basically taken for granted, non-ethically, because ethics itself ceases to exist?
Wrong argument! We have accepted God by definition, and He is good by definition, too. Moreover, we are told by the Bible that “every thing that God had made… was very good.” Original goodness is thus absolute, in the sense that it does not require the opposition of evil, to exist as a philosophical concept.
It is only in the temporal world without philosophical transcendence, that good can only be qualified as such via its complementary distribution with the concept of evil. Which means that neither “before” the creation of time nor “after” the end of time in eternity, if such a thing ever happens to man in afterlife, the concept of goodness can lose its significance. It is by no means that “good” and “bad” are only relevant to our freedom of choice (good choice versus bad choices), and also psychologically, as matters of attitude, as Nietzsche is seeing them! There is most definitely such a thing as “absolute goodness,” although the same cannot be said about “absolute badness.”
But wait, there is more to it than metaphysics! The ethical argument works here too. Even if we abandon the insistence on the theological imperative of absolute goodness and propose that the Absolute can be ethically neutral in eternity, this cannot work from the standpoint of our ends and purposes in time either, where good and bad are essential practical moral concepts. There must exist a necessary connection between our ethical preference for the good and rejection of the bad, on the one hand, and the Absolute Eternal ethical standard, on the other. In other words, it will probably make more sense to postulate ‘goodness’ as the natural state of eternity, and therefore God is also good, even outside time, than to make the Absolute ethically neutral, and, ergo, not applicable to the ethical practicality of human existence.
And so, this thing appears to be settled. Goodness is the natural, the one and only state of eternity, and also the eternal nature of all things. Eternity, therefore, is not neutral, but it is positively charged with absolute goodness, whereas evil is of a different, temporal substance, and the complementary distribution of Gut-und-Böse cannot in itself define the nature of good in any possible way.
(Postscript: Now, what about the Nietzschean Jenseits von Gut-und-Böse? Ironically and excitingly, in our very last observation above: “the complementary distribution of Gut-und-Böse cannot in itself define the nature of good,” we come to the realization that we have climbed up somewhere along a religion-owned path, and---lo and behold!---have found our friend Nietzsche already there!)
I wish to emphasize here that the following focuses on the philosophical component of Ethics and leaves the Social Ethics component out of this particular consideration, and the reader needs to approach my treatment of the subject of good and evil with this in mind.
The seemingly endless discussion of good and evil continues in yet another entry, this time tapping on the reputable authority of Epictetus reflecting on this subject, followed by Simplicius elucidating it.
Epictetus, the great Greek stoic of the Christian era, makes short shrift of the question of evil. He says: “As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing it, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the universe.” Simplicius has a lengthy and curious discourse on this text of Epictetus, both amusing and instructive. “Evil is not part of the nature of things,” he argues. “If there were a principle of evil in the constitution of things, evil would no longer be evil, but evil would be good.”
Remember my comment on the Stoics’ argument on good and evil being nice fodder for psychology, rather than for philosophy? Surprisingly, this observation of Epictetus, as well as Simplicius’s comment on it, are so much in harmony with my own view of evil, expressed in several entries in this section, that there is no need for me to add anything to it, except that both these observations are pure top-grade philosophy!
Curiously, one point made by Simplicius, that “If there were a principle of evil in the constitution of things, evil would no longer be evil, but evil would be good,” deserves our very special attention.
I assume that what Simplicius means to say is that had evil been part of the original Creation not as an effect of a good cause, but as a Kantian thing-in-itself, evil would have had to be good, because everything created by God must be good. After all, we are not Manichaeans, and we do not believe in Ahriman’s independence from a constrained God! (It must be noted, however, that Simplicius was a persecuted pagan philosopher in the reign of Justinian I, and, in this context, my reference to the Christian Bible can be questioned. However, Simplicius’s opposition to Christianity by no means precludes his philosophical agreement with parts of the Bible, and this particular tenet about the goodness of God’s Creation must raise no objection from a devout admirer of Plato, which Simplicius admittedly was.)
But let us now develop a logical argument. Qualities are established and understood through opposition: hot and cold, day and night, good and bad, etc. Is it then possible to say that, absent evil, good would cease to be good, and even God would no longer be good, but basically taken for granted, non-ethically, because ethics itself ceases to exist?
Wrong argument! We have accepted God by definition, and He is good by definition, too. Moreover, we are told by the Bible that “every thing that God had made… was very good.” Original goodness is thus absolute, in the sense that it does not require the opposition of evil, to exist as a philosophical concept.
It is only in the temporal world without philosophical transcendence, that good can only be qualified as such via its complementary distribution with the concept of evil. Which means that neither “before” the creation of time nor “after” the end of time in eternity, if such a thing ever happens to man in afterlife, the concept of goodness can lose its significance. It is by no means that “good” and “bad” are only relevant to our freedom of choice (good choice versus bad choices), and also psychologically, as matters of attitude, as Nietzsche is seeing them! There is most definitely such a thing as “absolute goodness,” although the same cannot be said about “absolute badness.”
But wait, there is more to it than metaphysics! The ethical argument works here too. Even if we abandon the insistence on the theological imperative of absolute goodness and propose that the Absolute can be ethically neutral in eternity, this cannot work from the standpoint of our ends and purposes in time either, where good and bad are essential practical moral concepts. There must exist a necessary connection between our ethical preference for the good and rejection of the bad, on the one hand, and the Absolute Eternal ethical standard, on the other. In other words, it will probably make more sense to postulate ‘goodness’ as the natural state of eternity, and therefore God is also good, even outside time, than to make the Absolute ethically neutral, and, ergo, not applicable to the ethical practicality of human existence.
And so, this thing appears to be settled. Goodness is the natural, the one and only state of eternity, and also the eternal nature of all things. Eternity, therefore, is not neutral, but it is positively charged with absolute goodness, whereas evil is of a different, temporal substance, and the complementary distribution of Gut-und-Böse cannot in itself define the nature of good in any possible way.
(Postscript: Now, what about the Nietzschean Jenseits von Gut-und-Böse? Ironically and excitingly, in our very last observation above: “the complementary distribution of Gut-und-Böse cannot in itself define the nature of good,” we come to the realization that we have climbed up somewhere along a religion-owned path, and---lo and behold!---have found our friend Nietzsche already there!)
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