Abstract

The experience of evil in all its aspects has always been a challenge for the project of philosophy as a search for meaning. From the beginning philosophers have tried to explain evil, but they could only do so by making this brutal fact somehow intelligible so that it could enter rational discourse. Out of respect for the victims of horrible evil, we may now be inclined to stop all attempts at explanation, which all end up as justifications of evil. But by this refusal to discuss what concerns us humans most, philosophy shows how marginal and futile its intellectual activity is. This is the torture of philosophy: either giving up its own project of making sense or trying to understand evil without justifying it, whereby philosophical arguments always tend to become edifying and quasi-religious. For Kierkegaard this torture shows the impossibility of the philosophical project. All philosophical explanation of evil is "a glossing over of sin, an excuse of sin". Only religion seems to offer meaning for evil, though, as Nietzsche said, it makes suffering worse by bringing it within the perspective of guilt. Philosophers, he argues, should give up this desperate quest for meaning, which always ends with new versions of the ascetic ideal. There is a long tradition wherein philosophy is seen as a therapy and a consolation for those confronted with suffering. The most influential view was the Neoplatonic, which also incorporated many Stoic arguments. In the second part of this paper, some arguments on evil from that tradition are proposed, without, however, a desire for consolation. We may learn from Neoplatonism ways to discuss evil without making it an intelligible object. As Augustine said, we understand evil by not understanding it, as we may see darkness by not seeing it. Evil is not a being, a property, a function, an attribute. It is a perversion, failure, mistake, that is a non-being parasiting upon a being. In a discussion with Spinoza it is argued that it is not possible to give up altogether a normative concept of reality. The Neoplatonic concept of evil is also linked to the acceptance of contingency in the world. Only when things are not absolutely determined, is it possible to understand that something can go wrong. The notion of accidental causality makes it also possible to understand the tragic aspect of evil. However, this notion becomes problematic when applied to moral evil. It is in its explanation of moral evil that the limitations of the Neoplatonic approach to evil become clear. In particular its basic axiom that all agents act for some good, is questionable