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    Your Elvenar Team

What is Evil, Anyway?

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
I've been reading some forums and the question keeps coming up, in one form or another. So here is a bit of philosophical musings for your enjoyment, or to help you get to sleep....your choice.

Since it is humans who are asking the question I'd like to begin with a famouns definition of man, offenerd Kenneth Burke, a Marxist critic from the last century, in "Language as Symbolic Action" (1966, don't remember the publisher but it's in the Wiki, I'm sure).

In that he says of man, "Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection."

One could spend a lot of time unpacking all these things, but what has always struck me is his emphasis on how we are "goaded by the spirito fo hierarchy." As I understand the phrase, we seek to put some things at the top and some things at the bottom of things to be praised and things to be condemned. This idea of there being good and evil goes way back, of course, and usually whatever structures a society has in place for determining what actions and attitudes should be classified as "good" and which as "evil" define their culture. And often changes to match the culture as it changes.

This fluidity of "good and evil" makes it very difficult to define what exactly, is "good" and what is "evil." That they are categories is obvious, but are they empty ideas used to classify the actions and attitudes of societies, vessels at either end of a continuum? Or are the ontological qualities which exist in the actions, the attitudes, and even the persons themselves? In other words, are they merely a measure of what societies like and dislike or are the something existent apart from those attitudes and actions?

I ask the question because if they are a separate thing then they become the standards by which we measure our actions and attitudes. But if they are just vessels into which we toss what we think are bad things or good things (what we don't like or like), then they are not absolutes and cannot, technically speaking, exist at all.

Another story was told of "good and evil" in Genesis, chapter 3. You've probably heard this story a lot of times, or at least often enough that there is no need to repeat it here. What it says about "good and evil" is interesting though for most people, upon reading the story, think that when God says to Adam, "don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for in the day you eat thereof, dying, you shall die" (The last phrase is a better translation for the Hebrew as it captures the actual verb form and means, roughly, "you shall be separated from eternal life so you will eventually die." -- sort of like receiving a death sentence with no chance at a reprieve). In any case, the result of eating the forbidden fruit, is that Adam shall "know good and evil." (Eve is not present when the command is given).

Now you know what happens. Eve takes the fruit and gave it to Adam. "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. as it says. Now here's the thing. Adam and Eve know nothing about evil. And the "good" they know is just the natural and normal state of things. When they eat the fruit something changes. "The eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked." Is being naked evil? If so, did God create them in an evil state? The answer is interesting I think because Adam and Eve see they are naked and then sew some fig leaves to cover themselves. Why? In the story they are a couple, they are the only couple, and they have been naked together for a long, long time. So why, exactly, were they ashamed? My thinking is that their nakedness was neither evil or good, but that once the "eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked" at that moment they choose to "fill" the concepts of "good" and "evil" with what they thought were "good" and "evil." That's how I read it anyway.

Now some will read it differently. They will see nakedness as evil and when Adam and Eve's eyes were opened they saw "evil" as a discovery of an ontological thing existing in nakedness. That is the other way to think of evil.

Kenneth Burke's view is that we fill the categories ourselves and that, in the end, nothing is has ontological good or evil. My own view is that the necessity of having the categories is due to the psychology of humans, but that what is in those categories could also be prescribed by God. The psychological necessity of "good" and "evil" comes from language itself as humans can, and do, engage in the practice of mental recursion. Mental recursion is entering into a line of thought which can repeat itself, literally, forever, if allowed. For instance, counting integers,. Begin with 1 and continue until you reach the end....but there is not end and thus we eventually either quit, or "cap" it off with a word, like "infinite.) "Good" and "evil" are capstones which enable us to categorize actions and attitudes along a continuum with "good" being at one end, and "evil" at the other.

Kenneth Burke and Richard Weaver both used the phrase, "god and devil" terms to refer to words we place at either end of the continuum and use to label persons, places, ideas, things, and whatever. This labeling we do quite naturally and is, I think, something Burke would have said grows out of our need for order. In any case, that is one way to imagine evil.

Another way is to see evil or good a ontological -- something which exists outside of the observer and independent of the observers existence. When God created "the heavens and the earth" He pronounced the whole of creation "very good." The question is, was he declaring the ontological condition of the world or was He declaring the pragmatic state? In other words, is creation "good" in it's essence or "good for something" pragmatically.

This, of course, introduces a third idea of "good" and "evil." A thing may be :"good" ontologically, it may be categorically, or it may be good pragmatically. Evil would be the same thing.

So what is evil? My own opinion is that evil is not an ontological thing. If it were we could probably boil it down, extract it, and then do something with it. (I stretch the point a bit here, but the discussion of ontological existence is fraught with danger and if you think this is a bit long already, be thankful I didn't elaborate). It may be a categorical capstone. My problem with that is that it makes the whole thing seem to be a bit arbitrary. It's "good" when society says it's good, and it's "evel" when society says that. If "good" and "evil" are subject to the whims of the social group then they are not absolutes as all and that just untenable to my mind (though, of course, I may be wrong).

That leaves the third alternative, that "good" is somehow "good" because it serves a practical purpose. The problem with this is that for it to be good then, the purpose for which it exists, must itself, be good. Sigh. How does one measure that?

Assuming that "the good" is whatever is at the end of the teleological rainbow, and that "God" (as defined by Spinoza who held that "God" was the force of nature by which nature began, continues, and ends -- "the force," in Star Wars terms), is "good," then whatever serves "God" would be considered "good." Meaning if an action or attitude brings the Universe closer to the goals of that "God." would be "good," and whatever actions or attitudes drives the Universe away from that idealized state" would be "evil." To the degree they fulfill the goal they are good, to the degree they don't they are evil.

But of course, this does bring about two significant questions: First, can we assume the Universe is being (un-consiously) directed toward some goal? And second, is that goal itself, "good?" As you can see, the question of "good and evil" isn't at all something we can easily get a hold of and wrestle with. If one believes in a conscious God and assumes that He/She and His/Her goals are good, then good and evil can be seen as ordering one's will to that of God. In other words, evil would be "will apart" from God while "good" would be "God's will." But that's a lot of assuming and with that I think we can end.

AJ
 
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