A Philosophical Happy Hour on the question: do we (some of us, all of us) need to experience evil—even sin, that experience of our own moral fault—in order to discover and know the good?
Drawing upon some of the works of the great tradition, a member asks the question: “to what extent is it important to experience evil and sin? Baudelaire might have converted to Catholicism at the end of his life. Besides Baudelaire, Saint Augustine also made a lot of mistakes before conversion. Dante first had to visit hell before moving up to heaven. The more we sin, the further we are from God, but at the same time, if we are sincere, it might also propel us toward Him…”
Does the experience of evil—be it in the natural faults of nature or the errors of our own making—show us something of goodness? Perhaps we ought to think through this question with some care.
The Experience of Evil
When we think of “evil”, what comes to mind? Perhaps something dark, sinister; a devil, a demon, a person of ill-intent and action. Or perhaps we think of suffering observed more broadly: mental illness, bodily ailment, natural deprivation through injury or defect, and so on.
In this broad sense, we all do experience evil: both directly in our own lives and indirectly in observing others’. Moreover, we can observe evils not only of a natural but also a moral kind: war and murder, theft and addiction and so on. We find evils throughout the world, and invariably, sooner or later, suffer them ourselves.
Evil in Our Souls
More pointedly, we not only experience evil as something extrinsic to ourselves, but also as something in ourselves. Each of us, and probably more often than we would care to admit, chooses to do wrong. We make ourselves deficient in action.
This choice deprives us of something fitting and good for our nature, of an integrity in our action. A darkness comes to reside in our hearts. This darkness often goes unrecognized. But, it seems, a confrontation with it may bear unexpected and unusual fruits. One finds it in the Inferno of Dante. It appears in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. Augustine’s lamentations for his own sin are… moving, beautiful. I believe it can be found in the paintings of Zdzislaw Beksinksi (in the cover art to this post, for instance). How do we reconcile this beauty in darkness—a darkness rankling in our own souls—with the good it lacks?
Through the Darkness
Put otherwise, can we discover good—perhaps even a good otherwise unknown—through the experience of evil?
Join us this Wednesday (9 April 2025) for our Philosophical Happy Hour (5:45–7:15pm ET; latecomers welcome!) to discuss the question of evil’s experiential necessity in our lives with members of the Lyceum Institute.