Day # 196 And the wrap...

I meant to wrap up my long digressions on the nature of good and evil, really I did.  I was momentarily side tracked by the impending doom of the human race, but since that danger seems to have passed for the moment I will carry on.

In the aftermath of Nietzsche and, with it, the death of God, one must turn to other sources to deal with the nature of evil in the world.  Short of abandoning everything to the Existentialists, one could look to meta-physics.

(This is the guy.  You can blame him, although he would tell you that we all did it.)



Without a creationist view of the cosmos, one has to turn away from a dualism based on deities.  What then is the nature of evil?  How does it relate to good?  An oft-cited meta-physical view of the nature of good and evil is that evil exists only in the lack of good.  Evil exists, but it has no essence.  Evil is the destruction of good rather that the opposite of good.  If human beings stop creating evil, it ceases to exist.  Thus, evil depends upon good to exist, but the reverse is not true.  Good has essence.  This view is based on the premise that humans know what good is and, in the actions we value, in our mores and our social systems, we strive to advance good in the world.

I have to say that I derive a certain degree of comfort from this philosophical outlook.  Stripped of the trappings of good gods and bad gods, of light and darkness, it is a blessing to think that we, all of us scurrying little insects, have the essence of good blended into our beings.  It is only when we go against our essence that we are capable of evil.

Whether or not this is true, it is a lovely idea.