Concrete Versus Spiritual Good and Evil

Good and evil are often thought to always boil down to some experience. If we suffer, or if we are blessed with good, this is always experienced by us, think most. Evil is either physical or psychological, but always some undesirable experience, always present to the mind. Likewise a good that never comes into the field of our physical or mental experience is hardly a good at all; it may as well be a fortune left to us in a Swiss account that we never learn of nor spend all our lives, if it never comes into the field of our consciousness.

Certainly there is such a thing as good and evil experienced by us; this is its their most obvious form. At its most concrete it is a physical torment or biological pleasure (pleasure whether induced by a good meal, sex, a good night's rest or drugs--all of these being biological pleasures). It is obvious and hardly needs to be mentioned that concrete goods and evils can come in the form of mental as well as biological pleasures. It hardly needs to be said also that the line between the psychological and physical pleasures and pains is hardly clear at all; a thousand things can be a mix of the two, mental depression being due to physical handicap and so on.

What I call concrete good and evil is either good or bad experiences that are, quite simply, actually experienced (whether by the body or psyche). There has often been a problem of evil in philosophy as regards God and whether evil would exist if God really does exist. The problem is no doubt familiar with the reader, and the only comment I would like to add here in the following digression is that it is quite absurd that in any possible world there could be zero evil. Good and evil both are necessary consequence of any variation in consciousness to the slightest degree. A man goes hungry and this is experienced as a pain; but the pain soon swings into pleasure as he dines. Were hunger impossible there would be an impossibility of taking any pleasure in eating; it would be like trying to take pleasure in resting when one is not in the least tired.

Pain can be and sometimes will be discomfort due to a lack of a good one is accustomed to having as well. Have a man sleep on a thatch mat for the first night in his life, and it is not so much the hardness of the surface that pains him as he lies down, as to the contrast between what he is used to and that hardness. Let him sleep every night of his life on a feather bed and he will get no especial pleasure from its softness; let him sleep every night on a thatch mat and he will not feel any pain in it. But let the man used to a thatch mat sleep in a feather bed and it will be pleasurable, likewise painful for the man on his first night sleeping on the thatch mat after always sleeping on the bed. The contrast between what one is used to and the present sensation is the whole source of the pain or pleasure involved here in these particular examples.

Another way of putting it is more abstractly logical. There is a certain value to any given experience, either a mix of experienced pain and pleasure, a certain magnitude of pleasure, or a certain magnitude of pain. This encompasses all experience. Lowering one's pleasure-value in a given experience is felt as a pain, though someone at that same level of pleasure-value who is moving upward in value rather than down will feel a pleasure here. The man used to living in a mansion will find a less classy penthouse apartment abominable; the man used to living in a studio apartment will get immense pleasure upon moving into the penthouse.

The point here is that in human experience there is always going to be a variation in what I call "experience-value". Experience-value is merely a term to describe an experience with a certain magnitude of pleasure or pain, or a mix of them; this applies to all experience, is often relative to context (see the mansion/penthouse example above), and no experience does not have some magnitude of value. Now, if there is going to be any variation in experience-value at all, there will obviously be evil. Any change in one's sensual or emotional experience will involve a variation in value. There can be no meaningful conscious life without a constantly shifting experience-value; a completely uniform value of experience is hardly within the pale of human possibility, so we are justified in calling it inconceivable, in the sense that it is so alien to what humans call "life" that we may safely disregard it as nonsense. There is going to be shifting value in human life, so far as human life is anything like what we experience presently as conscious beings. And the resulting conclusion of all this is that any shift in value is going to necessarily involve some magnitude of pain, or evil, when the experience-value is shifting down. Evil is equally lack of good as much as it is a positive pain in itself. I do not mean to embrace the "evil is only lack of good" theodicy here; I mean to point to the very real fact that, whatever its positive or negative ontological character, evil certainly can be and sometimes will be simple lack of good. It can be an evil that one's favorite television show is suddenly canceled and one won't be seeing it anymore. To claim that all evil has a negative ontology is the theodicy that I do not embrace; but to say simply that goods we are accustomed to being denied us can and sometimes will be felt as a pain is not a theory, but a simple fact and datum.

And so my idea here is that insofar as we are conscious, there will be a constant variation in experience-value for us. This necessarily entails evil; for the only other possibility that will allow for a shifting experience-value is that humans go from a good experience-value, on to better and better forever; if they go in the least down in experience-value, this will be an evil and pain no matter how comfortable it would be for someone moving up. Perhaps, in some conceivable world, human beings could simply rise up and up in value and never move down. In this way there would be true variation in experience-value without such a thing as evil. But the way of the world seems otherwise, and it would be arrogant of human beings to speculate whether such a world of ever-increasing good is possible at all. Such a scheme is certainly, at least, so alien to our way of living that we may safely disregard it as a consideration. It doesn't seem very realistic to expect it, nor does it seem quite pleasurable to imagine being in such a world, there being simply too much pleasure in it to really please. And so yes: there will be variation in experience-value, and that variation will have to sometimes move up (into pleasure) and sometimes move down (into pain). This variation is bound up in what it is to be conscious at all; and so at least here we will not find fault with God for the existence of pain, seeing that it is bound up in the very concept of consciousness, and the fact that it requires a constantly shifting experience-value.

But I wish now to get to the central distinction of this essay, which is between concrete and spiritual goods and evils. I will propose something that at first seems counterintuitive: that not only are there experienced--concrete--goods and evils in this world, but there are very real goods and evils that may never be experienced by us at all. These are personal goods and evils that we enjoy and benefit from, or suffer, without it being necessary for us to know it, nor even to experience these goods and evils or any of their effects, ever. These non-experienced goods and evils are very real, and very personal to each of us; they are what I call spiritual goods and evils. We suffer spiritual evils without ever feeling any of their effects, and without them coming into the horizon of our consciousness in even the tiniest vestige. Likewise we are blessed with spiritual goods that we enjoy without us ever--physically or emotionally--becoming conscious of their existence, or even the effects of their existence, at all. This is a counterintuitive claim, I know, but I intend to defend it in the following way.

Let us take first the goods that we can possibly (though of course are not commonly) be blessed with, without any trace of their presence or existence being experienced by us. For an example let us take Edgar Allan Poe. He was a man plagued with mental disease, who lived in poverty, who died horribly at the age of just forty. Although he had brief spells of popularity for his writing, everything actually experienced by him would indicate his public failure in his art. Perhaps personally he suspected his fame would live on posthumously; but at least we may say with confidence that, if so, he never received confirmation that he indeed did. And yet we say his life had immense value; in fact writers dream of living a life such as his, even should they never, like Poe, get to experience or even learn of their lasting fame. We might even say that many would envy Poe to extreme degrees; this is not such a wild claim. Most writers would take Poe's destiny of posthumous fame and romanticized suffering as their own given the opportunity; it is considered a life and destiny that one would treasure should it be one's own. And yet what Poe actually experienced and learned of regarding his life would make such a life devoid of any blessing. Should we look at the blessings that actually passed through his consciousness in his physical and mental life, they are near to none. No, he did not ever learn of his posthumous success as a writer; no, he never got the satisfaction to find out how many millions would read him, and nor did he ever receive monetary benefit from such readers. And yet most would agree his was a life to cherish; there are many, many writers who, given the opportunity, would gladly throw themselves into such a life and live it and consider it a wonderful thing (though were they living it they would never know this).

This is just one example of blessings that are spiritual, rather than what I have called concrete (which are always experienced). There are other possibilities for spiritual goods; suffice it to say that what the spiritual goods boil down to is that they are real, whether they are experienced or not. They are true goods; and when a good is real and exists (just like Poe's posthumous fame obviously exists) but remains not experienced, it is a spiritual good. Poe's fame was real without him knowing of it; his writing's success was also real, and this is where the blessedness of his life resides, in this very real appreciation of him as a man and an artist. He never, however, learned or experienced this blessing that is very real and personal to his life; a blessing that is certainly his.

The evils that we suffer but never experience (spiritual evils) are also based on the principle of reality outside of one's actual knowledge and experience.

Take for instance a woman whose husband is cheating on her. Suppose now there are two possible roads for her: one in which she never learns of her husband's infidelity, and the other in which she does. Should she never learn of it, they will go on married, happy with each other, till eventually the affair ends and she never learns of it at all, but dies happy, trusting him. The other road is that she learns of it, is devastated; and whether they stay together or not she always has that heartache involved with his cheating. Hypothetically speaking, would she rather remain in ignorance, or learn the truth? If she learns the truth she will suffer incredibly the rest of her life; if she is ignorant she will always live in happiness. Of course, not all people (though most) would like to learn the truth, notwithstanding the suffering involved on this road. Shall we say that this woman wishes to suffer? That she wants to forsake the happiness of her ignorance, and desires agony? This is a phenomenon that has only one possible conclusion--we must hold that should the woman never learn of her husband's cheating, this is a kind of suffering in itself. This we shall call spiritual suffering; the road that woman takes if she never learns of his cheating is an undesirable road, a road of spiritual evil, though it is evil that she never experiences and never learns that she suffers. That other road--the learning of the truth that causes the anguish--that, at least, is the road of what is real; and so, though the suffering in this case is concrete (experienced), rather than spiritual, it is much preferred. The woman who never learns of her husband's infidelity, and lives on in happy illusion, is a woman who suffers spiritual evil, the evil of not knowing the truth. It is preferable for most people to know the truth, which is bound up in bringing that suffering into the concrete; in that case the woman lives in very real, very experienced agony; but this is preferable to not knowing the real spiritual evil she'd suffer never learning it. All this implies that, though the suffering of the woman who never learns the truth is not ever experienced by her, it is very real suffering and evil, bound up as it is in her husband's very real infidelity.

There are many, many examples such as this that would point out the fact that we do not suffer only evils and goods that we experience, but many that do not impact our experience at all. Just one more example: Say a man secretly films a sex act between him and his girlfriend. He posts the film on the Internet to her utter humiliation--and now suppose that she never learns of it at all. She goes all her life in pleasant unconsciousness of the pornographic film's existence. Are we to say she suffers nothing because of it? Were it to happen to the reader, and were he or she unaware of it to this moment, would not that be an evil, a suffering that is very true and real, though we are totally unconscious of it? It is obvious that not only would most people feel horror at such a prospect, but would want to learn of it were it true of any of us--though this would make us suffer horribly. Are we to suppose, then, that were it true and we never learned of it, we would suffer nothing in regards to it, and it would not be an evil we endure in any sense at all? Obviously not.

Every example I have given of spiritual suffering here in this essay is laid bare for us to consider; perhaps this is a fallacy. After all, those that suffer the spiritual evils never learn of them, and so cannot consider them; and we have learned of them and only then considered them here from our especial perspective. However, it is this ability to consider "what is real outside of my experience and knowledge" that is the key to understanding how it is possible for us to suffer evils that never affect our consciousness. We suffer them, quite simply, because they are realities, and realities about us.

We wish to know what is real most of all. Even should human beings experience only bliss and happiness, if we experienced the heart of heaven but in reality were abject junkies experiencing the effects of some super-drug while endlessly sleeping in squalor; if all our bliss were illusion and unreality, we would rather know the truth. When sufferings are spiritual but unknown to us, we wish to know the truth that will make us suffer in actual concrete experience. And likewise when pleasures are experienced by us but based in unreality, we wish to learn the falsity in them and go back to what is real, even if that means concrete pain for us.

Epistemologically, we are unified with the reality of the world in-itself; to reach out and learn of the true and the real is the very nature of what knowledge is in the first place. And it is the reality of spiritual goods and evils wherein they have their being; the way they exist without us ever becoming conscious of their effects is the simple fact that they are real. They are real about us, and thus have their being in a firm place of truth; truth that is true, and true about us, whether we experience its effects or not.

Angelhaunt.net: Because earth's madness is heaven's sense.