Evil as a positive existent

[Kei]

And I also believe it is not so much the commandments but what is within them, and more our conscience. Really anything against the Will of God should be avoided.

 

[STT]

IOW, “blindness” has no meaning except in relation to sight. And we can experience the fact that any degree of blindness, anything less than full sight, is an obstacle to the good that sight achieves for us, i,e, full sight is the perfection of the optical system, it’s the reason why the optical system exists and therefore is part and parcel of its essence.

We can experience blindness, lack of vision. This means that evil is something, a mental phenomena.

The idea behind the term, “the knowledge of good and evil” is that this knowledge is only obtainable as we experience both, because only then can we identify good as good and evil as evil. Prior to that, everything in Eden was good, so good wasn’t a separate reality identifiable on its own-there was no real reason for the word “good” in fact. Now we can come to know evil, the result of disobedience of and separation from God, and learn to hate it-and turn towards the source of all good, God Himself. Both physical and moral evil teach us this fact, paralleling each other so to speak, so that we come to know good and evil directly, viscerally. Unless evil can be identified as something at odds with and opposed to God, then this knowledge brings no benefit, this life has no purpose; God may as well have prevented Adam from sinning to begin with or just stocked heaven with the elect and hell with the reprobate from the beginning, as Calvinists believe He eventually does anyway. But either of those would’ve involved God reserving free will from man or overriding or eliminating it.

In any case evil is not God’s intention, other than to allow us to experience it, to wallow in it for a time like the prodigal in the pigsty, to learn run from it.

I heard these things. Do you agree evil is a thing, like good, which we can experience it?

 

[Richca]

That is what I believe, I can’t quite get my head around the claim that evil is non-being.

Evil is a non-being in a subject or substance that has being and so evil is called a privation which is a negation in a subject. Evil is the contrary of good. Good is defined as that which is desirable for nothing is desired except that it is good or seems good. To be or to exist is desirable because to be or to exist is good. Everything naturally desires to preserve its own being. Being and good are universally convertible terms, that is, whatever has being is good insofar as it has being. Since evil is contrary to good, it follows that evil is undesirable and contrary to being since being is desirable and good and convertible with good. Now, nothing contrary to being can itself be a being. So, evil is a kind of non-being which is called a privation which is a negation in a subject. Thus, St Augustine says that evil is a tending to non-being.

Second consideration. Death is a sort of natural evil whereby a thing ceases to exist. If evil is some sort of positive entity or being it seems we have some sort of contradiction here, namely, if death is a being and death implies ceasing to be, than it seems that in death we have existing or being and not existing or not being at the same time.

 

[fhansen]

We can experience blindness, lack of vision. This means that evil is something, a mental phenomena.

Of course we experience it, as we experience any evil, otherwise there would be no need or possibility for the concept of evil to begin with. Blindness has no use, no purpose on its own, as sight does. If everyone had sight, there’d be no concept of blindness. But if everyone were blind, there would be no concept of either sight or blindness, because sight would not exist, and so neither would its opposite “exist”, the absence of sight. Only sight is a positive in this case.

Likewise, BTW, Adam & Eve had no concept of evil in Eden, because in their innocence they had no knowledge, or experience, of it. They knew only good, with nothing to contrast it with. They had only one command at that point, essentially ‘Thou shall obey God’. Their disobedience of that command would open the door to all moral evil that followed, and from then on they would know evil, beginning with that first evil which catapulted them into a whole new world of innocence lost.

I heard these things. Do you agree evil is a thing, like good, which we can experience it?

Only in that we can experience the absence of good. We know what’s missing when it’s gone. We know something is wrong when our arm is broken, and therefore painful and useless, not able to perform according to its purpose.

 

[Richca]

We can experience blindness, lack of vision. This means that evil is something, a mental phenomena.

Evil is found only in good and being. Blindess does not totally destroy a person. A blind person can make acts of intellect and will, acts of at least some of the interior sense powers, and acts of the other four external senses. So, a person may experience or have knowledge of blindness especially a person who had sight before then became blind, but this experience is reduced to whatever is left of the person’s being minus the blindness. The power of sight or vision is not in act in a blind person and thus sight or vision is not a being in a blind person. Blindness involves a problem with the eyes, it is not a mental phenomena.

We can experience evil especially when we do sinful or evil actions such as fornicating or when somebody does evil to us such as striking us with their fist. Our sinful actions have being and good insofar as they are actions. Again, evil is only found in good and being but it is not itself a being but the privation of good and being. The evil we experience in our sinful actions is the absence or privation of good and being in them, they are disordered. But, insofar as our sinful actions exist and we do them, we experience them. It doesn’t follow that evil is a thing. Evil is defined as the privation or absence of good. If we think about it, the very word ‘privation’ implies that evil is not a being.

What may be of some help here is what St Thomas Aquinas says in the ST:
As the Philosopher says (Metaph. v, text 14), being is twofold. In one way it is considered as signifying the entity of a thing, as divisible by the ten “predicaments”; and in that sense it is convertible with thing, and thus no privation is a being, and neither therefore is evil a being. In another sense being conveys the truth of a proposition which unites together subject and attribute by a copula, notified by this word “is”; and in this sense being is what answers to the question, “Does it exist?” and thus we speak of blindness as being in the eye; or of any other privation. In this way even evil can be called a being. Through ignorance of this distinction some, considering that things may be evil, or that evil is said to be in things, believed that evil was a positive thing in itself.