By ZELIG
Added: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:43:55 UTC

It's a fact not often acknowledged by comfortable moralists that "evil" of some sort is necessary in order for exemplary "goodness" to exist and triumph. In a world without great suffering, what would "compassion" and "sympathy" mean? In a universally "just" political system, the fight against "injustice" would be superfluous.

It's a sobering fact that very many widely praised historical figures are unrecognisable if we extract them from various forms of "evil" and suffering. Socrates, Thucydides, Jesus, Tacitus, Shakespeare, Galileo, Voltaire, Pascal, Locke, Helvetius, Spinoza, J.S. Mill, Marx, Wollstonecraft, Schweitzer, Gandhi, Mandela, the list is endless.

The idea of attempting to eradicate "evil" and suffering (qua suffering) was, for Nietzsche, both impossible and undesirable. Impossible because life itself depended upon them, and undesirable because concepts of "goodness" and "badness" were codependent. Abolishing "evil" (supposing such a thing were possible) wouldn't leave behind "goodness", it would leave behind the profoundest mediocrity and contemptible blandness. This is one reason that Nietzsche labelled J.S. Mill "a blockhead" (though to be fair to Mill, it appears Nietzsche hadn't fully read him, otherwise he's have known that Mill had explicitly argued that an unhappy Socrates was to be preferred to a contented fool).

But the question still stands: many of us champion people as heroes because they fought against various forms of "evil" and "suffering", without fully realising that the nonexistence of these ills would also mean the nonexistence of these celebrated figures. What do we want? Do we really want to live in a world in which great moral and intellectual courage is superfluous?

TAGGED: CRITICAL THINKING, PHILOSOPHY