Susan Nieman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2015), visualized as a social media feed:

Alfonso Ⅹ

hates his Ptolemaic astronomy class

Alfonso Ⅹ

If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.

good Christians everywhere

Blasphemy!

Gottfried Leibniz

LOL. Nooooobody expects the Copernican Revolution! God doesn’t look so dumb now, does he?

Isaac Newton

Seriously. The more I look, the more amazed I am at the order and wisdom of Creation.

René Descartes

But how do you know your observations aren’t the result of an evil demon manipulating your senses rather than true reflections on the state of creation?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Alfonse, this just shows what book learning will get you. A humble farmer would never be so hare-brained as to try to out-think God.

Pierre Bayle

launches the Enlightenment

Voltaire likes this

Pierre Bayle

Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.

Gottfried Leibniz

You’re as short-sighted as Alfonso. What look like crimes and misfortunes to you are just part of the mosaic of the best of all possible worlds from God’s point of view.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

On the contrary, Pierre. History — including the crimes and misfortunes of the human race — is the plan of God fulfilled, verifying the reality of providence. We just need to crack the code.

Pierre Bayle

likes Manichaeism

good Christians everywhere

Blasphemy!

Gottfried Leibniz

God could no more create a most perfect world without evil than He could create a square circle. If we were omniscient and could see the whole of creation over the whole of time, we would realize its perfection. Over time we will learn the connections between sin and suffering, and better understand God’s wisdom.

Immanuel Kant

But we aren’t omniscient, and we can’t see the world this way, so what makes you so confident?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

So God is like a grocer? He can give you anything you want as long as it’s in stock? ‘It may not be great, but it’s the best we could find today.’

Gottfried Leibniz

invents Calculus

Isaac Newton

The hell you did.

Alexander Pope

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee:
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good;
And in spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Voltaire likes this

David Hume likes this

Immanuel Kant likes this

Voltaire

You realize this puts the kibosh on original sin and divine providence, don’t you?

good Christians everywhere

Blasphemy!

Alexander Pope

If plagues or earthquakes don’t break Heaven’s design, why should we think the cruel acts of men would?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To deny the existence of evil is a most convenient way of excusing the author of that evil; the Stoics formerly made themselves a laughing-stock for less.

Voltaire

Seen the news lately?

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Lisbon destroyed by earthquake, fires, tsunami; tens of thousands killed; God’s benevolence thrown into doubt.

Voltaire

Best of all possible worlds, my ass.

Immanuel Kant

Even earthquakes have a positive side to them. Who knows but that the alternatives might have been even worse?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The tragedy wasn’t caused so much by the earthquake as by the idiocy of packing so many people into an urban environment which is foolish humanity’s method for making earthquakes as horrible as possible.

Immanuel Kant

I think you’re right after all. All these attempts to excuse-away suffering and praise this as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ are just philosophers brown-nosing God in the hopes of getting on His good side.

Johann Gottlob Krüger

This is a sign and a warning. Don’t be sorry for the victims, but be thankful for the mercy shown to the survivors who now have a lesson in God’s promised end to worldly treasures.

Gabriel Malagrida likes this

Immanuel Kant

This was a natural disaster, but it should humble us in our scientific and technological hubris.

John Stuart Mill

Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, is nature’s plot against every living being — in many cases after tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of purposely inflict on their fellow living creatures.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of nature; everything degenerates in the hands of men. Please come to my book signing.

Immanuel Kant likes this

Immanuel Kant

You have done for human nature what Newton did for gravity, and have proven Pope was right all along.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We need to retreat along the path we took to decadent civilization all the way back to when we were noble savages and then make our decisions again without the influence of vanity.

good Christians everywhere

You mean that we should ‘become as little children’ to escape the consequences of the Fall of Man. I think I know this story.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Uh… not exactly. God’s guidance is not necessary here. If we do not interfere, nature will punish vice and reward virtue all by itself.

anonymous

If we are naturally good and virtue prompts its own rewards, how did we fall so far so fast and why would it take so much work to get us back to paradise?

Immanuel Kant

invents transcendental idealism

Immanuel Kant

I’m starting to distrust the intuition that says virtue and reward are systematically, necessarily connected. All human moral effort seems an attempt to fulfill this intuition, but it fails, and so requires faith in a Divine judge to set the scales right in the end.

Immanuel Kant

There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ — they occupy different dimensions, and only coincide by coincidence.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

That’s too passive. The aim of philosophy is to describe reality in terms of the divine ideal it is enacting — a divine ideal that is the same as that of enlightened human reason — and then to press our reason on reality, to make our ‘ought’ an ‘is’ by force or to understand every ‘is’ as an ‘ought’ by reason.

Karl Marx

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.

Immanuel Kant

Come to think of it, if we knew that there was a necessary connection between virtue and reward, that would be the end of virtue, as it would just be subsumed by self-interest. What makes an action virtuous is that we do it because it is right, not because we expect fortuitous consequences.

anonymous

So we should always do ‘the right thing’ whatever the consequences? What if a murderer asks me if his intended victim is hiding in my cellar, is it okay to lie to him and say ‘No’?

Immanuel Kant

In such a case, you shouldn’t lie. How confident can you be in the consequences of your actions? What if you lie and the murderer goes away only to immediately find your friend who has, unbeknownst to you, crawled out your cellar window to try to escape?

anonymous

Weak.

Immanuel Kant

invents deontological ethics

good Christians everywhere

Not exactly.

Immanuel Kant

Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

anonymous

I think I saw that on a refrigerator magnet.

Immanuel Kant

Try this one on for size: ‘Act as though the principle of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.’ What do you think?

Immanuel Kant

It’s kind of like imagining that although this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it could be quasi-better if some of our freedom were replaced with natural laws that compelled goodness; if we behave as though those laws were already in force, we get the goodness and the freedom too. Imagine that you yourself were God creating the perfect world with the principles you choose.

Karl Marx

Let’s stop imagining and start doing it.

Pierre Bayle

God is either willing to remove evil and cannot; or he can and is unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able to do so; or else he is both willing and able. If he is willing and not able, he must then be weak, which cannot be affirmed of God. If he is able and not willing, he must be envious, which is also contrary to the nature of God. If he is neither willing nor able, he must be both envious and weak, and consequently not be God. If he is both willing and able — the only possibility that agrees with the nature of God — then where does evil come from?

Pierre Bayle

Makes Manichaeism look pretty sensible in comparison, doesn’t it?

anonymous

Have you considered that maybe God permits sin and imperfection in order to make his wisdom more obvious and pronounced?

Pierre Bayle

So God is like a doctor who lets his children break their legs so he can show off how good he is at setting bones?

Augustine

God gave us a great gift, the gift of free will, but that necessarily included the freedom to do wrong. God, in order to be just, as we know God to be, must meet wrong actions with bad consequences. So there is no incompatibility between there being evil and cruelty in the world and there being a just and good God in charge of it all.

Pierre Bayle

Yes, but God, being omniscient, knew that we were going to abuse this gift of free will, and so He admitted evil into creation voluntarily. This is the difference between giving your son the car keys, knowing that he could get drunk, and giving your son the car keys knowing that he is drunk.

Pierre Bayle

So either there is a competing evil agency up against God’s power, or God Himself planned man’s fall from grace, and that this fall should be contagious, that it should ceaselessly and endlessly produce all imaginable crimes over the entire face of the earth — in consequence of which he prepared all the misfortunes that can be conceived for the human race — plague, war, famine, pain, trouble — and after this life a hell in which almost all men will be eternally tormented in such a way that makes our hair stand on end when we read descriptions of it.

Pierre Bayle

I suppose there’s another option: we could reject reason itself for getting us in this dilemma in the first place, and instead just throw ourselves blindly on faith.

Søren Kierkegaard likes this

Voltaire

I admire Pope and agree with him. No philosopher has been able to explain moral and physical evil. Bayle only taught us to doubt, but he also makes us doubt ourselves in our doubting. Yet it is cruel to respond to a Lisbon earthquake by speculating that maybe it is part of a greater good. (Still, if people did not themselves do such evil to one another, we could well tolerate a Lisbon earthquake now and then.)

anonymous

Well, what then would you have us do?

Voltaire

Let us work without reasoning, it is the only way to make life endurable. Cultivate your garden.

Voltaire

Voluptuousness and philosophy produce the happiness of the sensible man. He embraces voluptuousness by taste. He loves philosophy by reason.

Marquis de Sade likes this

Immanuel Kant

When you look at the inner perfection of mechanism and delicate beauty of a plant that preserves itself throughout the turns of the seasons, it is impossible for anyone to believe that this is just the result of natural laws — one immediately discerns the hand of the Creator in this.

David Hume

On the contrary, most people never point to ordinary miracles like these when they attempt to come up with evidence for the influence of the divine. They always point out the weird deviations — some sudden and unexpected death or accident, or an unusual drought or monsoon. It’s only philosophers who gaze thoughtfully at their own wrists, musing ‘God designed this!’

Voltaire

You know what really gets my goat? The Creator gave us eros, or in any event eros is such a magnificent and uncanny thing that even without the Creator, it would tend to make anybody worship the Divinity. But then, in this ‘best of all possible worlds,’ we get syphilis. And where did it come from? Not from fallen sinners getting their just deserts, but from innocent Indians living in a state of nature overseas.

Arthur Schopenhauer likes this

David Hume

Polytheism makes more sense, given the weird contradictions in the world around us — the universe doesn’t appear to have a purpose, but many cross-purposes. The idea that this universe must have a creator, who is thereby mighty and praiseworthy, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s just as likely to have many creators, or a creator who was haphazard and thoughtless, from the evidence available to us. For that matter, why assume it was created at all. The universe isn’t like a watch lovingly crafted by a watchmaker, but like an egg laid by an ostrich, who generates and deploys it without putting any thought into its construction or destiny at all.

David Hume

Polytheism would lead to a morally better society, too.

good Christians everywhere

Atheist!

David Hume

No, just a skeptic. The differences between theism and atheism are only differences in degree and tone. Religion and reason both lead you into thickets of nonsense. Reason is especially inept at explaining evil.

Marquis de Sade

But it’s a fabulous way of becoming evil!

Marquis de Sade

I’ve been trying to think up the worst crime against nature imaginable, but I’m having a devil of a time of it. All crimes seem to either be encouraged by nature or surpassed by it. I still have hope of one day outdoing the devil himself in evil, but I don’t think I’ll ever outdo God… I’ll have to be content to learn from His example and describe Him carefully in my writing, between bouts of sodomy.

anonymous

You are one sick f—er. I’m surprised the guards let you play on the Internet.

Marquis de Sade

I am the sick fucker. One day they’re going to name sick fuckery after me. But, you know, God must have created evil for a purpose, right? In this best of all possible worlds, what appears to be evil must be an essential part of the greater good, right? So why not give yourself over wholly to evil, confident that you are helping to fulfill God’s design? Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, so saith the Lord, and I intend to do all I can to add to the ranks of the blessed.

anonymous

Don’t feed the trolls.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Life is a monotony of uninterrupted suffering. Or rather suffering interrupted only by monotony. (Even our fondest imaginings of the afterlife divide it into suffering and monotony.) The world is likely as bad as it could possibly be and yet still continue to exist. But there is a sort of justice in this, in that we are so contemptible that this is what we deserve.

Arthur Schopenhauer

And of course there is no God.

Friedrich Nietzsche likes this

Sophocles

To die quickly is a blessing. To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.

Gottfried Leibniz

Really? I think if you asked most people, on their death beds, whether they’d choose to live again with the expectation of getting a similar mix of the bad and the good in their lives the next time around, most of them would take you up on the offer. It’s only in comparison to the promised life to come that our earthly lives look awful.

Voltaire

I disagree. I think it’s only the fear of what the afterlife holds that makes us cling to life so strongly. To sleep, perchance to dream.

David Hume

People seem biased to a deceptive optimism. Ask them if they would willingly live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life: ‘No!’ But the next twenty, they say, will be better, so they stick around (complaining about their lost youth).

Immanuel Kant

I don’t expect that anybody would repeat their lives for the fun of it. It is only duty really that keeps us going.

Arthur Schopenhauer

We only sometimes pretend to be satisfied with our lives to try to avoid the schadenfreude of others.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Why do you suppose so many philosophers are so unhappy? I daresay there may not be in the upper Valais a single mountaineer who is unhappy with his life, and who would not voluntarily accept, even in place of paradise, an unending cycle of rebirth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In every age, the wisest have said of life ‘it is worthless.’ Instead of saying simply ‘I am no longer worth anything,’ they lie and say ‘Nothing is worth anything — life is not worth anything.’ Stop wasting your time and infecting the healthy by trying to prove that life is worth living and start living a worthy life and loving it enough that you would consider it a blessing to live it again and again for eternity.

anonymous

So instead of reasoning that this is the best of all possible worlds, or having faith that this must be the best of all possible worlds, you will this to be the best of all possible worlds? That sounds every bit as nutty.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Morality by its very nature is constantly looking at Reality and calling it wrong and unacceptable in comparison with the unreal ideal it sets up. Morality therefore stands between you and your healthy impulse to embrace life. If you want to know the nature of evil, don’t look to philosophy and theology, look to psychology and history: we invented it to serve a need, and we can remember that it is just an invented myth if we try. God is dead, but good & evil continue to wheeze on life support. Embrace all the world, including what you now call ‘evil.’

Sigmund Freud likes this

anonymous

Sounds a bit like Stoicism.

Friedrich Nietzsche

No, I’m going further than the stoics. Don’t just face suffering with equanimity: embrace it. Will it! Suffering — ‘evil’ — is the tempering you need to make you stronger. Don’t look at it as something that you need to justify by looking over your shoulder at what you did to deserve it, look at it as something that you will justify in the future by what you make of it.

Sigmund Freud

Morality may be a myth, but it’s a useful one, in that it allows us to live in modern civilization without all trying to be alpha übermenschen and ripping each other apart.

Sigmund Freud

You want to know why we have these intuitions and longings about a Creator who is intensely concerned with our behavior and who metes out just or unjust suffering and rewards? It’s because we have lingering issues about our parents and have only incompetently and incompletely grown up. They’re illusions we cling to as we try to evade the responsibilities of maturity.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Imagine that you are rebuilding the world with the object of making people happy — of giving them peace and rest at last — but to do this you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one small child, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears. Would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Will you believe that the people for whom you do this would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, remain forever happy?

Albert Camus likes this

Hannah Arendt changed her relationship status with Martin Heidegger to “It’s complicated.”

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Nation that brought us Goethe now brings us the premeditated, methodical, industrialized murder of millions of people. World saved from those rat bastards by a people who celebrate the incineration of cities and advance the technology of mass murder to make it push-button and near-instantaneous. Philosophy again caught flat-footed by evil.

anonymous

Philosophy is out of its depth here. You don’t respond to Auschwitz by trying to make sense of it, but by acknowledging and trying to cope with the senselessness of it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky likes this

Hannah Arendt

No: We must rationally grapple with this. It was refusal to think actively that enabled so many people to bring this evil about. We have to analyze, and judge, and condemn, and not just stare slack-jawed at this as though it were a natural disaster or an inevitable growing pain of historical progress.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the history of the world, we see before us the concrete image of evil in its most fully developed form. If we consider the mass of individual happenings, history appears as an altar on which individuals and entire nations are immolated; we see all that is noblest and finest destroyed. But out of death new life arises, purified and rejuvenated.

Hannah Arendt

Who would dare to reconcile himself with the reality of extermination camps, or play the game of thesis-antithesis-synthesis until his dialectics have discovered ‘meaning’ in slave labor?

David Rousset

This is a sign and a warning. Germany was the innovator in the creation of the concentration camp world, but she is not so different from the states that will follow her.

David Rousset

For example, the Soviet Union and its gulag world.

good Communists everywhere

Blasphemy!

anonymous

Why are we so shocked? The British created the concentration camp world in South Africa decades earlier, World War Ⅰ should have gotten you used to senseless mass murder already, and were you not paying attention to the Russian pogroms and the massacres in Armenia and the carnival-like American lynchings? There is nothing really new here. Philosophical responses to evil have never been able to keep up with evil itself.

Giorgio Agamben

Would Nietzsche ask us to will this evil? Could anyone consider himself blessed if his eternal recurrence included an eternally recurring Auschwitz? Were its victims made stronger by their suffering? Whatever else Auschwitz did, it decisively refuted Nietzsche.

Jean Améry likes this

Theodor W. Adorno likes this

Hannah Arendt

Auschwitz should not have happened. It is something to which we cannot ever reconcile ourselves. Amends can never be made.

Jean Améry

And yet it did happen, and Nietzsche is right at least in saying that there is something amiss in our irrational desire to alter the unalterable past.

Arthur Schopenhauer

If the world were not something that ought not to be, it would also not be theoretically a problem. On the contrary, its existence would require no explanation at all, since it would be so entirely self evident.

Emmanuel Levinas likes this

Adolf Eichmann

My life’s principle, which I was taught very early on, was to desire and to strive to achieve ethical values. From a particular moment on, however, I was prevented by the State from living according to this principle. I have nothing against the Jews, personally.

Hannah Arendt

Nonsense. You could and should have chosen differently. Others did. Tremendous evil sometimes takes the banal form of a thoughtless bureaucrat, and to convict you of it does not also require that we discover in you a frothing malice that seems proportional to the crime. Why should we feel the need to trudge through the cesspit of your soul to inspect your motives and intentions? Your crimes speak for themselves.

Hannah Arendt

Some people went along with the horror, but others did not. Some people said ‘no, I won’t.’ Evil is not a mighty, domineering, magnificent, calculating agent — it is a petty, threadbare, cowardly, weak, and vulnerable one. This allows me to still feel at home in the world and to have a childish trust in God.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky likes this

Sigmund Freud

‘Childish’ is right.

Theodor W. Adorno

We have so broken the world that it’s indecent to feel at home in it now. We can’t even feel at home in our own skins.

John Rawls

I think, if we use our imaginations, we can envision a realistic, possible social and political order that minimizes injustice. Envisioning it is only the start, of course, but it gives us reasonable hope that we can again be reconciled with the real world.

Albert Camus

In the midst of a murderous world, reflect on murder and make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers or accomplices, and those who refuse. Over the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward.

Trending Article:

Terrorists turn airliners into missiles, crash them into the Twin Towers in New York and elsewhere in a remarkably un-banal fashion; thousands killed. Those few philosophers still interested in evil still trying unsuccessfully to grapple with the Holocaust, surrender the discussion to postmodernist provocateurs and pundits.

By the way, in case it hasn’t been clear throughout, I’ve been playing fast and loose with chronology, and have mixed actual quotes with paraphrases. Neiman’s book puts all of these philosophers, from various time periods, into a sort of conversation with each other (something I thought was pretty cool and I wish I could find more of), and I’ve just tried to somewhat whimsically illustrate it as one.

Someone really did put a magnet on our refrigerator depicting an angel in flowing gossamer next to the (unattributed) quote from Kant about how he is filled with awe when he reflects on the starry heavens above and the moral law within.