Whether Evil Is Something
When mainstream contemporary philosophers take up the question of why people act unethically, they tend to locate the source of trouble in one of three human failings: rashness, weakness of will or ignorance of the greater good. Moral evil, on these accounts, is a mistake, normally caused by an episode of irrationality (although ignorance of the greater good wouldn't be irrational in someone who had no way of knowing better). There are a lot of reasons why philosophers gravitate toward these thoughts. After all, rationality--excellence in the exercise of human reason--is supposed to improve our lives. Virtues show themselves as excellences of human character that are likewise supposed to make our lives go better. And part of the way in which ethical goodness is supposed to improve our lot is through its wisdom, suggesting some inextricable link between ethics and reason.  | | Web Gallery of Art |  Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas by Benozzo Gozzoli. |
I agree that ethical goodness is both wise and useful in human life generally. The rewards that virtue brings to a good person are no less significant, I think, for their tendency to consist in intangibles. Excellence in the exercise of reason seems to me likewise wonderful. I have, however, lost faith that the word "rationality" names all-around human excellence, and with it, the confidence that individual wrongdoing always incorporates sins against reason. Now, you'd think that any sensible person, having unavoidable contact with accounts of the meticulous plotting and coordination that laid the groundwork for some spectacular feat of human badness, would doubt the claim that immorality is irrational. Unlike virtue, which shows itself most plainly when you stand to lose something important by doing as you ought in a world where goodness is no insurance against catastrophe, the exercise of reason can be turned entirely to private gain, or to the advantage of one group at another's expense. But, for me, it took reading a largish chunk of the still larger corpus of Saint Thomas Aquinas to give adequate attention to this fact. sputation on evil with a quaintly premodern-sounding question: Whether evil is something? [An malum sit aliquid?] While it seems that evil is something, or can be counted among things, or is a principle of things that makes things happen, the saint argues that evil has no independent existence. Instead, "that to which evil happens is a distinct thing inasmuch as evil is the lack in a thing of some particular good" (St. Thomas Aquinas, On Evil, trans. Jean Oesterle). He thereby dispenses with the Manichean postulation of independent principles of good and evil at work in our world. It is a subtle point that has even more going for it than its denial of a specific heresy might suggest.Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" starts with remarks about an evil that cannot be alone and a book that does not permit itself to be read, then lifts the covers on deathbed scenes. "Men," we are told, "die nightly in their beds wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eye--die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave." The paragraph concludes, "And thus the essence of all crime is revealed." But unless the essence of all crime is something on the order of pride ("No, Father, you don't understand! I am a monster!"), or a species of guilt so inflated as to make a psychotherapist a better choice than either a real live priest or a real dead ghost (it is unclear which sense to give "ghostly"), the conclusion is obscure. Abruptly, before we have a moment to wonder about that, we find ourselves in a London hotel café with a convalescent first-person narrator, who has a cigar in his mouth, a newspaper in his lap, and such high spirits over the return of health and strength that "Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain." Evening falls, and: by the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door. At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the sea without. Contemplation yields an elaborate taxonomy of the types of people moving past outside the café window. Our narrator begins with generalities about the masses then descends to detail, regarding "with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance."About a third of the tale is given over to his taxonomy of the kinds and classes of Londoner on the street at various hours of evening. All of these subspecies have a place in the life of the City, which is, after all, marvelous. Suddenly, everything freezes at the appearance of a singular face, "(that of a decrepid old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,)--a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression." Fairly consumed by the vision, our narrator's interpretive proclivities hit a wall. The old man has the face of "the fiend": As I endeavoured, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose, confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense--of supreme despair.  | | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-104482 | | Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849. |
In attempting to classify the old man, notice, our narrator initially produces a series of adjectives of the sort that have become familiar in the last year. What kind of person would engage in terrorist acts? Someone cunning, cautious, cool-headed, greedy and envious of our wealth, malicious, amused by the spectacle of disorder, vengeful, buoyed up by the sense of triumph that deliberate sacrifice can bring, but also impoverished, frightened and, quite possibly, bearing the weight of a kind of despair. Notice too that the list does not add up to a motive. It eludes the kind of classificatory impulse that lends order to scenes of collective urban humanity. And so our narrator is forced to postulate a heart linked to a face for the first time all evening: "'How wild a history,' I said to myself, 'is written within that bosom!'" (Domestic history, by contrast, is what he has been reading in the costumes and comportment of strangers.) Fairly burning with curiosity, our narrator grabs his coat, dashes outside to keep the old man firmly in view, and winds up following his quarry for a night and a day.The old man apparently hunts for crowds, and, when he finds them, walks back and forth, immersed in the traffic. Somehow, the old man feeds on the vitality of masses: whenever the crowd thins out around him, he panics and races through the city until he happens upon another bustling scene where he can melt into another throng. It is as if a figure from our initial deathbed scene rose and went wandering, using the collective life of crowds to keep going, the very life that parceled itself out into in tidy categories of people for our narrator before the old man made an appearance. Stranger still, our narrator, who was, actually, good at tracking urban subspecies from the comfort of his café, seems to lose all capacity for classification in the old man's wake. The figures of his London become congeries of individuals, and our narrator is forced, in the end, to abandon all hope of reading the book of wild history in the old man's bosom. According to the narrator, the moral of the story (not unlike the opening of the story) is: "The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the 'Hortulus Animae,' and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that 'er lasst sich nicht lessen.'" We have arrived at the worst heart of the world by way of trying to understand what was writ in the bosom of the old man, whom we met in, and followed back to, the street of the hotel café, "that most thronged mart of the populous town," which is, the narrator remarks, "the heart of mighty London." |
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