There is a certain type of dialectical philosopher who is always trying to convince us that the good things we want to believe in are already present, implied as a necessary consequence, in the bad things whose existence we are forced to acknowledge.
Albert Camus says that the rebel's metaphysical rejection of the universe implies a standard of ultimate values according to which that universe is found wanting. Ergo, nihilism actually incorporates and necessitates its opposite: there is thus "a path through nihilism that leads beyond nihilism."
Josiah Royce—according to George Santayana's interpretation of this philosopher, in his Character and Opinion in the United States—made a whole series of similar argumentative moves.
We know that God exists, he says, because we know that error exists; and the existence of error implies the presence of an ultimate truth, by contrast with which it is found to be in error; which implies the existence in turn of a kind of universal mind or truth; thus, God.
But Royce didn't stop there. He was for drawing a whole pantheon of absolute values from their opposites. The problem of evil? It's an illusion, he said. Evil calls forth good in reaction, in order to do battle against it; hence evil is necessary to good, and good is necessary to evil. So, all the existence of evil does is to underline the presence of good.
Not everyone will be blessed with the temperament to find these "solutions" adequate or persuasive. Santayana speaks wryly of the "evident chasms and assumptions in this argument" of Royce's.
A friend of mine accuses me of relying too much on this one philosophical chess-move myself. "You're always trying to make some variant of that same transcendental argument" he tells me—"you're like: 'this thing already includes and requires the idea of this other thing, and in the very act of positing the one, we are...' etc."
There's a reason why I rely on this particular conjuring trick as often as I do, however. It's because it's the only one philosophy has to offer. Or at best, one of very few.
Philosophy is not an empirical discipline, after all. It cannot establish new facts through prediction, verification, and experiment. The only way it can produce a new positive truth—or apparent truth—therefore, is through deduction; the exploration of "relations of ideas," as Hume put it, as opposed to "matters of fact."
Philosophy has many tools of critical destruction—it is very good at pointing out the "chasms and assumptions" within our existing worldviews—all of the unquestioned dogmas that undergird the philosophically naive picture of the world—and thereby demolishing them.
(Santayana demolishes a few more of these along the way, in this book—including even the dogma of past experience, on which even the most supposedly skeptical empiricists rely. Doesn't the past only exist for us through memory, he asks; and isn't memory merely another word for a present sense impression, or present thought within the mind, without any necessary relation to a "real" past we are remembering?)
But people want things of philosophy other than mere destruction. They are forever calling upon philosophy to be constructive. Which amounts in practice to a demand that philosophy produce rabbits out of hats.
People want philosophy to demonstrate the objective existence of God, Being, beauty, morals, reality, truth, knowledge—using nothing but its powers of deduction; of establishing necessary "relations" between "ideas."
And so, the philosopher has no choice but to turn to the arts of the conjurer. There is no way to pull a rabbit out of an empty hat unless you can convince your audience that the hat was itself a rabbit all along; or that it necessarily contained a rabbit, as an unavoidable logical corollary, as soon as it was admitted to be a hat.
Thus, Royce—being called upon to defend the existence of a universal mind or of some ultimate good and providential direction to the universe—declares that their being is implied in their very opposites: that the admitted existence of error requires the idea of truth; that the presence all around us of evil requires the existence of good.
If it were not for evil, there would be no circumstances calling forth good to do battle against it, he says. Therefore, according to Royce (at least in Santayana's rather skeptical encapsulation of his theory), you need evil in order to inspire good.
It's really not much more than an updated version of Milton's earlier theodicy—his preferred method of "justifying God's ways to man." It's saying: were it not for man's fall there could not have been God's grace. If it were not for so much sin and misery, there could not have been so much redemption and atonement.
Thus, "all [Satan's] malice served but to bring forth / Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy," as Milton put it. One was necessary to the other, in a highly Roycean fashion. As Royce might update the idea: "all evil serves but to bring forth the zeal of social reformers."
There is essentially no limit on the evils and horrors one can exonerate, if one takes this thought at face value. You could say that we must not abolish poverty or slavery or oppression or war or suffering, since these serve merely to underline and call forth all the contrasting political virtues. You would have no riches without poverty; no happiness without misery; no peace without violence.
As William Blake once wrote:
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor;
And Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.
Santayana, though, cites some grounds on which we might doubt this too-pat resolution. For one thing, he writes, not every good answers to Royce's "bellicose description." Not every good, that is to say, is so obviously defined by its conflict with evil.
Nor is the game obviously worth the candle, in Santayana's view—if the only good to be wrung out of existence is that of a temporary respite made pleasurable solely by the magnitude of pain that preceded it.
"[T]he case is much worse," Santayana writes, "if we are expected to make our heaven out of the foolish and cruel pleasures of contrast, or out of the pathetic obfuscation produced by a great relief. Such a heaven would be a lie, like the sardonic heavens of Calvin and Hegel."
If that is the best God could do, then we are inclined to say, with Stephen Crane—"Oh, most interesting God / What folly is this?" Why create a universe in the first place where the only good available for purchase came at such an appalling cost?
There are other problems with the theory too.
Royce seemed to have in mind, when he thought of "evil," primarily social sin and oppression—the misery that calls forth the perpetual struggle for social reform: something like Saul Alinsky's image of the endless mountain on which the social reformer must climb, never quite reaching the top; the rock Camus's Sisyphus is pushing, and without which he could not be happy or find meaning.
But there are evils that cannot be reformed or tackled through political change; horrors that do not answer to the description of social injustice; losses intrinsic to mortal life that are not amendable to mitigation merely through achieving a more wise and just public policy.
Death, for one—which, as Walter Pater observes in Marius the Epicurean—would still be with us, and still causing us pain, even in Utopia.
"That a Numa, and his age of gold, would return, has been the hope or the dream of some, in every period," as one of Pater's characters observes in Marius; "Yet if he did come back, or any equivalent of his presence, he could but weaken, and by no means smite through, that root of evil, certainly of sorrow, of outraged human sense, in things, which one must carefully distinguish from all preventible accidents.
"Death," he goes on, "and the little perpetual daily dyings, which have something of its sting, he must necessarily leave untouched."
William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, allows that there are perhaps "[s]ome evils, indeed, [that] are ministerial to higher forms of good"—in just the way Royce describes—temporary social conditions that can be ameliorated, say.
But there are other, more "radical evils," that are not susceptible to this treatment. "It may be," James wrote, "that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource."
This appears to be Santayana's position as well (for all he was often dismissive of James's philosophy). After all, he writes—even if some past evil makes way for future good, that later good cannot remove the past experience of evil. "To remove an evil is not to remove the fact that it has existed," Santayana writes.
Thus—he concludes—"The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism."
I'm inclined to think Santayana has the better of the argument here, over Royce. Indeed—Santayana observes that Royce's dialectical assurances seemed to desert even him, when confronted with actual evil.
The sinking of the Lusitania, for instance, is a wartime atrocity that could, in theory, have been defended on Roycean grounds as one of those necessary and "ministerial" evils that fosters some responsive good—it called forth the American war machine, after all, to fight the Kaiser (and some people at the time considered this a good; though it is hard in retrospect to agree).
In practice, however, Royce came forth with none of these ultimate rationalizations. It appeared to him, when confronted with the genuine article of unprovoked, unmerited death and suffering, that this was merely and completely bad—bad beyond appeal—bad without any ultimate excuse or cosmic justification.
"A Socratic demon whispered No, No in his ear;" Santayana writes, "it would have been better for such things never to be. The murder of those thousand passengers was not a providential act, requisite to spread abroad a vitalizing war; it was a crime to execrate altogether."
The passage is striking, in the midst of Santayana's generally stately and civilized prose, for its indignation and passion. It is one of the best in the book, and—to my mind—conclusively persuasive.
There are indeed "forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever," as James wrote, and Santayana agreed. Wartime atrocities and murders are one of them. Death from brain cancer—or just about any other cause—must be another.
The human mind cries out: "No, No [...] it would have been better for such things never to be."
And if there is a God that set up the universe in such a way that only through such things could any good come about, then that is a most strange and perplexing God indeed.
He set up the rules of the game in the first place; he loaded the dice of the universe. If he could do no better than to make pity only possible through poverty, mercy through misery, redemption through suffering, or life through death—then he is either not as good or not as powerful as the believers have proclaimed.
If this universe was the best God could do, then that Being either does not wish us well; or is just as helpless as we are before whatever nigher Nature first conditioned the universe and established its unbreakable laws—
A Nature which, whatever else it may be about, seems—as Leopardi once put it—to have something other than our good and happiness in mind.
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