In Our Time - Evil

Episode Date: May 3, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the concept of evil. When Nietzsche killed off God he had it in for evil as well: In Beyond Good and Evil, he constructed an argument against what he called the “herd morality” of Christianity, and he complained "everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbour is henceforth called evil." Nietzsche claimed that it was a dangerous idea that distorted human nature, ‘evil’ was invented by the church and was a completely alien concept to the noble philosophers of the ancient world. Was he right, did Christianity really invent the idea of evil? And has the idea meant anything more than excessively bad? With Jones Erwin, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Limerick; Stephen Mulhall, Tutor in Philosophy at New College, Oxford University; Margaret Atkins, Lecturer in Theology at Trinity and All Saints College, University of Leeds.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche constructed an argument against what he called the herd morality of Christianity. He complained, quote, everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbour is henceforth called evil, unquote. Nietzsche believed that it was a dangerous idea that distorted human nature. nature, that evil was invented by a church which worshipped the weak and was a completely alien concept to the ideas of the noble philosophers of the ancient world. Was he right then? Did Christianity really invent the idea of evil? And has the idea ever meant anything more than excessively bad?

With me to discuss the place of evil in Western philosophies, Jones Irwin, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Limerick, Stephen Mulholl, tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford University and Margaret Atkins' lecture in theology at Trinity and All Saints College at the University of Leeds. Jones Irwin, Plato used the term, how do you pronounce it? K-A-K-O-N. Kach-on. Kach-on in the Republic. What did he mean by this and how close is this to a classical definition of evil? Well, I think there is a question as to whether the concept of evil arrives until Christianity, as to whether there really is a Greek conception of evil at all, because in Plato there are some paradoxes with regard to his conception of evil. He seems to regard

evil as a privation, an absence of being, and defines good as being and therefore evil as by definition non-being. So in one sense, evil doesn't, strictly speaking, exist at all. It's a privation of good. But on the other hand, evil seems to play a part in his text in terms of the characters he describes. So, for example, if we take the Republic, we have a figure like Trosimachus, who is very much a character of evil. So Plato, from a metaphysical point of view, is saying that evil is a privation. On the other hand, saying that it plays a very great part in the lives of people and is a very powerful force that needs to be negated and worked against. And I think this paradox in terms of the description of evil,

both seeing it as powerful but also as denying it any real status, metaphysically, is a paradox which is going to continue right the way through the history of philosophy. Can you just unravel that a bit more? How did he arrive at the idea that it was a privation? What was the basis for his assertion, belief that it was a privation, Maybe belief's the wrong word here. Conclusion. I think this is to do with the Greek optimism that is shared both by Plato and Aristotle.

And the view that being is good, that human beings naturally are good. And therefore, the evil is a distortion or dysfunction. And so from that point of view, evil isn't really natural. It's unnatural. And that's what leads Plato to say that it doesn't really exist other than as a dysfunction of what does exist. So it has a parasitic existence, but not a real. formidable existence, a primary existence,

it's existence of secondary, something derivative. And this also leads Plato to say that no one would consciously or willingly, knowingly, choose evil. One can only knowingly choose good. And therefore any choice of evil is the result of ignorance, the result of a lack of self-knowledge.

Because if you know the good, if you know yourself, you will always choose the good. And that's very much characteristic, I think, of a Greek optimism. Margaret Adkins, for Plato, all earthbound qualities had their perfect counterpart, as I understand it, in some other realm. But there's no form for bad or evil in Plato's theory of forms. And Aristotle, a student of Plato, abandoned this theory of forms.

Why did he do that? And where did he place good in his philosophical system? It seems to me that quite interesting thing about Aristotle is how uninterested he is in evil, maybe for some of the reasons that Jones was talking about. But I think, because he's the person who really takes up goodness, as an explanatory tool right across his philosophy, because Aristotle's writing and teaching about a whole range of subjects, much broader than Plato,

metaphysics, biology, ethics. And in each one of these, goodness, is the explanatory tool. You understand by understanding what the good thing is. You understand the world by understanding the unmoved mover who's equated with God and goodness, who generates the movement and existence of the rest of the world. You understand biology by understanding what a good specimen of something is.

So he's not very interested in distorted, monstrous specimens. He's interested in the good specimen, which actually leads him very interestingly to be able to explore and examine the types of animals that people before that are despised. He says at the beginning of his parts of animals, there are gods here too. There's something wonderful, even in the worms and the insects and the sort of things people haven't wanted to look at before,

because you can understand what it is to be a good beetle or a good rabbit or whatever. Where I think perhaps the weakness is, and this would be an interesting comparison with Plato, is that his ethics is so concentrated on the good person, what it is to be the virtuous person, that he can't really deal with seriously bad people in the way that Plato can, notably in the Republic, Plato gives us an interesting description of the tyrant, the tyrannical man, and a story as to how he became that. Aristotle can't really do that.

Stephen Mulhold, Aristotle wrote the ethics as a guide of virtuous behaviour, as I believe. Who did he think was capable of virtuous behaviour? And why did you think that virtues, he described it, was so desirable? Well, in order to answer that question, you need to see that he connects the ethics to the politics in his thinking. And one short answer to the question is to say that he thinks it's members of the police, it's members of the political community who are capable of attaining a kind of human flourishing that he saw as the ultimate purpose or point of ethics. So that means that people who aren't members of the police don't count as candidates for this kind of flourishing.

So that's women slaves. slaves, and of course any other human beings who aren't parts of the Greek city state. So he has a very exclusive sense of who the candidates are. But once you, as it were, take that for granted in the background, then he has a very strong sense that this possibility of attaining the kind of end state of human flourishing is available to everyone, given the right kind of circumstances, which for him meant, I think, primarily the right kind of education.

His view was that although human beings don't design, as it were, come into the world innately virtuous. What they do come into the world with is the capacity to become virtuous. But you're not going to get there unless you have the right kind of teachers, unless you attain the right kind of relationship to the more mature, wiser members of the community who can, as it were, inculcate the right kind of habits or character traits, what he meant by virtues. It's the example of the virtuous man, as much as anything in particular that the virtuous man says,

or could say to you, that will give you what you need to know in order to achieve this kind of flourishing. We've already, in a short time, we've only been discussing this for about 10 minutes or so, we've already moved quite a long way from the idea of evil at Jones Owen. Is this because, are we going back to the idea that it figured so lightly, so slightly,

in Plato, Aristotle, in classical philosophy? And if so, why? Because people can't have been any less bad den than they are now. Sure. Well, I think, say, in terms of our assessment, Aristotle's philosophy, with regard to the description that Stevens just made there of how one acquires virtue, one also can acquire vice, and Aracol who uses the same term as Plato-Cac-on, so one can build up a disposition of vice based on habit. And if one builds up that disposition of vice, Aracetyl says it's nearly insurmountable.

So the person who is evil, if you like, is really almost incapable of overcoming that. And that will have been built up in terms of habitually doing bad. bad actions. Now that person is still responsible, Aristotle says, and that's an important move, I think, away from Plato because Aristotle says that person is still culpable because they've made an initial choice. But if they've built up that habit, it

is almost nearly insurmountable. Now, in terms of Plato, I think there's also a sense in Plato's later work that evil becomes more important. In the same way that Aristotle gives a substantive description of the life of vice and the ethics. Also in the laws, Plato actually says that

evil may be an equal ontological principle with God. So he seems to move in his last text written on his deathbed, Plato, to the view that evil may even be a cosmic principle, which of course is going to be a very great influence on post-Greek philosophy, on Christian philosophy in particular.

Even accepting that point, I mean, one can try and motivate a bit more the thought that good is a very, very strong notion in both Plato and Aristotle. I mean, when you get philosophers who find themselves, in the position of claiming, for example, that it's better to suffer injustice than to do it,

then what you get is a very strong sense that achieving good and flourishing is such a substantial good for the individual concerned that part of the difficulty they might be having with the thought that people could as it were knowingly do evil is that it depends on the idea that doing evil is a matter of damaging yourself

as well as damaging other people. And I think that's a less familiar thought. in a kind of more modern context. But I think a very attractive thought in more ways. Margaret Atkins, is that anything to do with the idea of acrasia? Is that how I pronounced it? The Greek word acrasia, Aristotle's idea, that not being virtuous was what we would call now there's, I suppose,

diminished responsibility. Well, that's one form of not being virtuous. You can be vicious, which is not getting it right about what you should do and having the emotions that get it wrong, you can be acratic or weak, in the sense that you know what you should do, but you fail to do it because your emotions overcome come. And he also has another form called brutishness.

The brutish person is the person who hasn't really got the reason at all, and somebody who functions like an animal. I have a very strong sense that Plato could explain an evil person, what we would call an evil person in a way that Aristotle couldn't, When Aristotle's talking about the brutish person, he lumps together in the same paragraph somebody who, a woman who wants to go around ripping open other pregnant women and eating their embryos with someone who choose their fingernails. As if all these forms of bizarre behaviour somehow completely inexplicable

and can be put in the same category. when Plato's talking about the tyrant, he has an elaborate story about how one of your desires, he has a divided soul, the reasoned part, the spirited part and the desires, one of the desires can get out of control and can be so grown and developed and become a great passion that it can lead you on from eating too much to stealing to murder and so on and so on and so on.

He's got a story about it. And that person is a wicked, an extremely wicked person. Whether or not you want to buy his story is another question. But I don't think Aristotle's even got a story about that. Before we move on to Christian ideas of evil, the word evil does figure it. Would you say that the word evil is useful in... I'm asking you, John, is it useful, as excessively bad would be better for classical ideas of what we're talking about? I think in terms of the way we describe evil now,

we do have a very Christianised view of evil, if you like, our culture has the sense of evil that has really come from the medieval period. So I think it can be misleading to refer to the Greek view as evil. And to that extent that would agree with that, I think that we're probably best to stick with an idea of bad for the Greeks and really see the conception of evil as beginning in the early medieval period with Christianity.

Well, let's talk about Christian evil and start with Augustine, St Augustine of Hippo, writing at the beginning of the 5th century. And he faced up to the notion of evil that's been a real philosophical dilemma for the Christian church, which is at its crudest, that if God is omnipotent, all-knowing, and perfectly good, those three things, and how can you account for the existence of evil? How did St. Augustine tackle this, Margaret Atkins? Can I just start by making a point about language, if you don't mind?

Augustine and the Western Christian writers after him are writing in Latin which doesn't actually have a different word for bad and evil so we mustn't be too easy to say oh this is a Christian concept it would actually be quite difficult for Augustine to make that distinction which in some ways I think helps him and us maybe think more clearly because I'm not sure that in conference language, people really know what they mean when they talk about evil. It brings together a whole

mishmash of ideas which can perhaps get clarified if we avoid the word and say, let's think about the things. But Augustine himself, the first thing always to say about Augustine, he's an incredibly restless and incredibly fertile thinker. His thoughts are always moving on. He's always dealing with a different dispute. And so he doesn't have one answer to the problem of evil. Evil was probably the thing that preoccupied him almost more than anything else throughout his life. He has maybe five or six different answers, some more important than the others. Where he started was as a manichy. For ten years he was a follower of a religious group,

which was actually a world religion, went on to the 16th century from Africa to China, huge, important religion, which was really designed to give an answer to the problem of evil. And the answer was... I was led by a heretic, then called a herritic called Manny. Called money, yes. And light and dark and...

Exactly. The answer is that there are two principles, not one. And Augustine was very drawn to this because he thought this is the answer. Why are the nasty things in the world? Because there's an evil principle from which they come. And the manichies had some marvellous arguments. One of the arguments was maggots and scorpions. Marnie says at one point,

put a scorpion in your hand and tell me there isn't an evil creator. When Augustine became disillusioned with the manichies, basically because he didn't believe that their mythology stood up to scientific examination, that was in a sense the beginning of his Christian wrestling with the problem and it just carried on and on. But after that always, the one thing you can say about his answers is they can't be manichy. The answer to the question about the scorpion,

it's almost a contemporary answer really, is you're seeing it from the wrong perspective. His answer, yeah. answer, the poison might be a bad thing for you, but it's jolly good for the scorpion. So a sense of the order of creation and of each thing in there having its own purpose. And he also in that context picks up the Platonist argument about evil being an absence of good, and he develops that. Jones, could be John Zeman, can we talk about his idea of how he explained the disasters that were befalling so many people at the empire at the time of his right? writing. He seemed to say that these were sent to test and to prove that disasters were a good

warning for Christians. They were a good thing. I mean, I'm obviously simplifying, but you'll more complicate, I hope. I don't know about that, but I think that the reading of Augustine has to take into account that there are many discontinuities, as Margaret has said, in his thought. And I would argue that in particular his later work, I'm thinking here of the city of God, primarily, there's a sense in which the manichaeanism of his early work kind of resurfaces. And I would say that very much under also the influence of stoicism, there is nearly a cult of suffering, which is another word for evil, if you like, in the later Augustine suffering, in something like the city of God,

that to some extent there's a sense that there's a great harmonious order in the universe. But there's also, I think, a sense of great turmoil and torment and doubt in the later Augustine, that at times comes close to agnosticism, I think, in the face of all of this. He talks about perseverance, hope without hope. So one hopes, but one hopes without hope. And I think to that extent that Augustine has lost some of the earlier harmony

that he had in works like the confessions where everything kind of worked out in a dialectical way that you had evil and suffering, but it all made sense in the end. I think by the end of his work, it's making less sense. It stopped making sense. and the evil and the suffering have really almost become all-encompassing.

And the love and the beauty have really departed from the scene. Now, I think perhaps that's to do with the fact that one can trace this from biographical details, like the vandals knocking his doors down and also he's on his deathbed. Sorry, Stephen, you were nodding. Can you tell us how to say what you were going to say? What I was going to say in effect was that one way of seeing, as it were, the depth of Augustine's sense of the reality of evil is, as it were, the preoccupation he has with the notion of original sinfulness.

And in a way of seeing the difference between that, specifically Christian doctrine and the thoughts of Aristotle and Plato, is I think to go back to that idea of the acratic person. Because... The acratic person, persons who's the falling away, the laps into... Yes, the non-being, yeah. But this is someone who, as it were, knows what the good is and then proceeds to go and do the reverse of it.

And an old teacher of mine did a kind of informal survey of students of his, about what they thought about this problem. And it was interesting. Roughly 50% of the students thought that it was obviously the case that human beings could know what was good and go ahead and do the reverse. The other 50% thought it was absolutely impossible. How could you really genuinely know what the good is

and not be attracted to act in accordance with it? If you, as it were, go the other way, that must be because you don't really see that as the genuinely good thing. Well, Gusson thought you cannot choose evil knowingly, didn't he? Well, that's the Aristotelian thought. That's what allows you to say that there really is a problem with the notion of Acrazia, the notion of a weakness of will.

There must be a failure of knowledge if you go and do the bad thing, right? It can't be the case that you really fully properly comprehend that it's good and yet fail to do it. That's the difficulty. Whereas for someone like Augustine, it seems an almost self-evident fact about human nature that there's a certain kind of perversity in the will, that it's perfectly possible in indeed a very familiar human phenomenon

to see the good clearly and yet not head towards it. I'm sorry to do this leap with you, but can we move on several hundred years to Aquinas and how he tackled, can I start with you, Steve Mollon, how he tackled a problem of evil? We're in the 13th century. Are we talking about the problem of evil then? Is that phrase relevant to what Aquinas is setting himself up to do? I think so, just as much as it is in a certain way.

for Augustine. I think what Aquinas does is make a relatively familiar distinction in the tradition between what you might call natural evil and moral evil, a distinction between, as it were, evil suffered and evil done. I mean, there are various ways in which the natural phenomena of the world creates suffering, pain, death, and so on, and sometimes inflict that on human beings. So you called storms and earthquakes, evil? Volcanoes erupting, lions, devouring lambs. Those would be forms of natural evil. but then on the other hand, there's the evil that's actually done by human beings, both to the world and to other human beings.

And he has a different, as it were, response to evil in those two different forms. In the case of natural evil, he has the kind of thought that Margaret was saying Augustine helps himself to, the thought that, as it were, you cannot conceive of a natural order which didn't contain natural evil, suffering of various kinds. because if you're going to create a material animate being, like, say, a lion, precisely because it's finite, it's going to be dependent on its environment for sustenance, for reproduction, and so on. You can't have a lion doing what a lion is supposed to do without it devouring lambs. So although, obviously, from the lamb's point of view, it's a bad thing.

From the point of view of the lion, it's just the lion doing what lions are supposed to do. So if God is going to create a material world at all, it's not going to be possible. for him to create entities who are capable of flourishing and, as it were, fully manifesting their nature, without that manifestation having what we would think of as deleterious impacts on the nature of other elements of the natural order. So if you want nature at all,

then you're going to have a nature that involves a modicum, maybe even a relatively large amount of suffering. The alternative is not to create a natural order in which that modicum becomes almost vanishingly present. The alternative is to have God not create a world. Johnzo, did Christians invent, did Christianity invent the notion of evil as Nietzsche climbed? Well, certainly in terms of Nietzsche's analysis, I think that the way that Christians talked about evil

linked itself more with his critique of the concept of evil. So his critique of evil was really a critique of Christian conceptions of evil. Whether they invented or not is another question, because I think we've pointed to the fact that there were substantive ideas of evil in the Greek period. But certainly from Nietzsche's perspective, I'm thinking here particularly Yvonne, the genealogy of morals. The idea of evil and Christianity is based on a reactive psychology. The Christian morality has nothing to do with good. It has everything to do with condemning and accusing evil.

So it's negative, it's reactive. And for Nietzsche, therefore the idea of evil, as well as the idea of good, must be transcended. We need to move to quote another title of one of his text, beyond good and evil. Stephen Mulhole, can I ask you, why did Nietzsche associate the notion of being able so closely with what he called the slothed, lave morality of Christianity? Well, in part it's because, as Jones was saying, he attributes a reactive psychology to Christians. But it's also that he sees the Christian moral code as having a very specific kind of historical origin

and as serving a very particular kind of purpose for those who espouse it. The point about good and evil, as Christians understand it, is that what gets categorized as evil are precisely the kinds of capacities and forces in human life that Nietzsche regards as essentially life-affirming or life-enhancing, the capacity to, as it were, exercise your will on the world to remake it in your image,

to simply do what you want and do it successfully. All of these things Christianity condemns with a kind of visceral hatred, Nietzsche thinks. And what they regard as good is pity, compassion, sucker for the weak. And of course, what Nietzsche asks is, not so much what does this mean, but what use is that kind of code? And his answer is, it serves the interest.

of the week. It's the most successful strategy that we could adopt to ensure that they survive and dominate a society to inculcate a moral code in which, as it were, it's regarded as good for people to act in ways which help the weak, and it's regarded as bad or evil for them to simply exercise their own capacity to impose themselves on reality. So what Nietzsche reads into Christianity is, in effect, a hatred of life. And he thinks that that as having a kind of sadistic and a masochistic component. It's sadistic in the sense that it's punitive. The point about the Christian Moral Code is to punish those who are the best, most healthy, most flourishing examples of life. It's masochistic because it's an essential part of Christianity that one, as it were, construct a conscience in which one scours one's own actions in interior life and try to root out those same evil tendencies in oneself.

and that in effect is to try to eradicate those aspects of one's life that are most life-affirming. I don't know that was brilliant, actually. Would you like to comment on that from a point of view of the Catholic reaction, as it were, to Nietzsche's view? I think one thing to say about Nietzsche is that sometimes he presents himself as someone who's rejecting morality, but he's actually doing it in the name of his own very definite set of value. and virtues. I think the Christianity that he thinks he's attacking is a Christianity with bits missing

because of course the affirmation of courage, the affidation of truth, the affirmation of life have been central to Christian morality. The difference is that they've very often been exemplified precisely in compassion and also in the courage of being honest about one's own evil.

And I think courage and truthfulness above all are required for the kind of self-examination that Augustine, for instance, was able to undertake and that quite a lot of us would be quite afraid to undertake. But the Christian arts would be that there's a purpose beyond that and the purpose would be precisely the compassion and the concern for each individual that Nietzsche rejecting the herd wants to reject.

Stephen Moham. I agree with that, and I think also it's important to see that Nietzsche's attitude to Christianity is actually deeply ambivalent. I mean, I think there are good reasons for him to be actually struck with awe when he looks at Christianity. I think you can see this in his writing.

If he is right in thinking that the most fundamentally life-affirming aspect of reality, metaphysically speaking, is the will to power, the capacity to sort of make the world in your own image, then Christianity is the most successful exercise of the will to power in the history of the human race. It is the most incredibly successful strategy, for the weak to impose themselves on the world

and to remake it in their own image. Margaret Adkins, does it make a sense to have a notion of evil without God? Is that a question that's worth asking? I'm not sure that God is so important for understanding there's a difference between good and bad. If you ask, do you need the notion of evil? I'm still, despite the discussion of Nietzsche,

puzzled as to how we divide off the evil from the very bad, which was one of your earlier questions. And I think I'm actually concerned about the ease with which we leap for the label evil, which usually perhaps I'm drawing on Nietzsche here, which usually means them, not us. We might be bad, but they are evil. And I would say precisely one of the contributions of Christianity, Augustine, though I think picking up something in Plato,

is the sense that we've all got a potential to be very, very bad, which takes a tremendous amount of courage, I think, to face, so that we shouldn't divide evil into them and bad us, them who are evil and bad us, but accept that it's a potential that's there, very mysterious and difficult to explain, but a potential that's there in everyone. I'm sorry, no, we haven't time.

It's a pity, isn't it? But there we are, sorry. Thank you to Jones, O'Nover. Stephen Mulhall and Margaret Atkins. I wish we'd had more time. But there we are. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

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