Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

ENDS OF AN ILLUSION

Philosophy, like the overture to Don Giovanni, starts with a minor chord…. The more specific character of the astonishment that urges us to philosophize obviously springs from the sight of the evil and wickedness in the world. If our life were without end and free from pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why the world exists.

—Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Chapter 1 examined philosophers who sought some reason or other behind the world’s appearances that would explain or redeem or justify our experience. Whether they sought to show that the world could be accepted or that it could be changed can make all the difference in the world. My interest in dividing them was not worldly but metaphysical: to underline the differences between those philosophers, in chapter 1, who insist that reality is not what it seems, and those, in chapter 2, who insist that it is. The problem with appearances is not that they are flimsy, but that they are unyielding—indeed, often inexorable. The drive to metaphysics is a drive to find a real order behind the apparent one, in which all the things we long for—the good and the true and the beautiful—will be connected and revealed.

So described, this may be a project only Plato would admit to undertaking. But one needn’t get stuck on the cave metaphor; above all, it’s meant to teach us that our vision is blurred. What we see is not quite right, in both senses of the word. Philosophy begins with the demand that truth and goodness coincide. Leibniz held the right to consist in an order existing behind the appearances that only God—at the moment—knows how to decode. Marx held the right to consist in an order that humankind could establish only after it stops looking for signs of an order created by someone else. In practice, the difference between them could not be greater. In metaphysics, they were closer than they seem, for each denied that appearances are final. Whether they placed it in heaven or in history, each believed there was another court of appeal.

The alternative is the demand to stay with appearances; as Schopenhauer put it, to let the world itself be tribunal of the world. Its judgment could scarcely be bleaker. Those who insisted on remaining with that judgment could be as different as those who didn’t. Voltaire’s rejection of attempts to reconcile us to the world by appealing to Providence was clearly motivated by solidarity with the victims. For him, to defend God is to betray justice. Sade reveled in betrayal. Where his descriptions of the awfulness of appearance had normative thrust, he wished to provide us with role models. The search for reasons to explain appearances to us, or to reconcile us with appearances, can be refused on many grounds. The thinkers considered in chapter 2 rejected every form of mediation. Facing the world honestly meant facing it raw: experience is just what it seems.

Dividing thinkers into those who search for reasons independent of experience and those who refuse to do so ignores many important distinctions between them—as does the more traditional division of philosophers into rationalists and empiricists. Neither division makes any sense of Nietzsche, which is surely one reason why so many historians of philosophy left him alone for so long. As he predicted, his stature increased with time. Reading his work as centered on epistemology would require interpretive contortions too daunting to be tried very often. The question of whether he’s rationalist or empiricist thus spares itself. But fitting him into the schema I’ve sketched is still more problematic. Nobody was more vehement in denying the existence of an order behind appearances, or in denouncing the attempt to find one as a denial of life. Yet nobody struggled harder against passively accepting appearances, nor warned more actively against nihilism. I do not find Nietzsche’s alternative successful, but it’s significant enough to undermine every effort to classify him as belonging to either group. In placing him outside them, I wish to underscore his allegiances to both. Nietzsche drew the consequences of both traditions. It was he who first diagnosed the narrative I recounted. He subjected the longing for order behind appearances to scrutiny so devastating that it can never be done innocently again.

But he knew that simply accepting the appearances is no solution either. Those who don’t do something with them remain Stoics or slaves. Schopenhauer could serve as an educator, but like the appearances he was mired in, he must be overcome. Once you’ve diagnosed the sick longing that seeks reason behind appearances as well as the feeble resignation that preaches acceptance of them, what’s the alternative? You may try to will appearances themselves. Nietzsche fulfilled the hopes and fears of all those who ever dreamed of taking a piece of Creation into their own hands.

Nietzsche’s work revealed the centrality of the problem of evil precisely for those who recognized the futility of attempts to solve it. His obsession with the problem resulted not from nostalgia but from very clear sight. Nietzsche called the problem of evil

my a priori. Indeed, as a thirteen year old boy, I was preoccupied with the problem of the origin of evil: at an age when one’s heart was ‘half-filled with childish games, half-filled with God’ I dedicated my first literary childish game, my first philosophical essay, to this problem, and as regards my ‘solution’ to the problem at the time, I quite properly gave God credit for it and made him the father of evil. (Nietzsche 5, 16)

After outlining the solutions he developed over time, Nietzsche sketched the genealogical approach we know as Nietzschean.

Out of my answers there grew new questions, inquiries, conjectures, probabilities—until at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, an entire discrete, thriving, flourishing world. (Nietzsche 5, 17)

To examine that world would be to examine Nietzsche’s work as a whole. This might be necessary to thoroughly understand the transformation of the problem of evil that underpins all his work. Instead of trying to do so here, I wish to enter that world by sketching how his transformation of the problem of evil leads to the most radical of wishes to re-create the world. It’s a transformation that puts him close enough to Freud to warrant our discussing them together. Both turned to genealogy in a moment of unmasking and thereby turned the problem of evil into a problem about us. Why and how we explore it reveals worlds about who we are.

ETERNAL CHOICES: NIETZSCHE ON REDEMPTION

The question could be raised during a conversational lull in a good salon: would you live your life over, if given the chance? Eighteenth-century thinkers took a rest from more serious business by discussing it. Few of them were entirely clear about the form of the question. Were they seeking an empirical survey, or a normative claim? Were they asking whether people in general, and any one of us in particular, would in fact repeat their lives over—or whether it would, on balance, be reasonable to do so? Either question might raise itself naturally, and either might be traced to classical sources. Oedipus at Colonus, one of the earliest, is suitably ambiguous: not to be born is the best thing. To die very quickly is a close runner-up. And

This the truth, not for me only
But for this blind and ruined man.
(Sophocles, line 1224)1

Admittedly, it is Oedipus to whom the chorus is speaking. What about the rest of us?

Leibniz was interesting, and interestingly clear.

Had we not knowledge of the life to come, I believe there would be few persons who, being on the point of death, were not content to take up life again, on condition of passing through the same amount of good and evil, provided always that it were not the same kind: one would be content with variety, without requiring a better condition than that wherein one had been. (Leibniz, 130)

The caveat is significant. Leibniz thought that the knowledge we have of the life to come must discontent us with the life we have. That aside, he was as clear about what such a survey would mean as he was certain of its results. Most people would repeat lives that contained the same quantity of good and evil, if they were assured of variety in form. Leibniz took this as evidence that the amount of evil in the world is smaller than the amount of good. One wonders what would follow if it weren’t. Hadn’t Leibniz said that whatever evil is, is necessary? Even if evil were something quantifiable, the quantities may not matter. His claim that this world is the best of all possible ones rests on arguments about possibility. Numbers are irrelevant. If x evils are a necessary part of the best possible world, the fact that x turns out to be plus or minus one (or a hundred, or …) should make no difference. But even Leibniz sometimes left the realm of logic to take up persuasion. The fact that most of us would choose to repeat our lives cannot be for him a proof, but it ought to be a suggestion. It functions like the fact that the world contains more houses than prisons—a fact he thought should give Bayle some pause. If most of us are settled in cosy domestic arrangements, can the world really be made up of so much crime? If most lives would be voluntarily lived over, Leibniz concluded those lives aren’t so bad.

Voltaire disagreed. He admitted that most of us would, at death’s door, choose to take our lives back. But this is a wish born from terror, fear of the unknown. Even then he thought variation was needed. People would rather die at once than die of boredom. Voltaire’s remarks could be a comment on Hobbes: if life is solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, who can complain if it’s short? But complain we do, without stint or measure. Our reluctance to leave life is not the fruit of love. It’s part of the network of fear and perversity that accompanies us from cradle to grave.

Hume denied he was expressing an opinion; ever the good empiricist, he just wished to report. Thus he both sharpened the question and recorded others’ claims. After quoting classical sources on the subject, he let Demea, the Dialogues’ voice of orthodox opinion, say the following:

Ask yourself, ask any of your acquaintance, whether they would live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life. No! but the next twenty, they say, will be better:

‘And from the dregs of life, hope to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.’ (Dryden, Aurengzebe)

Thus at last they find (such is the greatness of human misery; it reconciles even contradictions) that they complain, at once, of the shortness of life, and of its vanity and sorrow. (Hume 3, 99–100)

Hume’s own Philo reports that it was formerly very common to maintain that life was nothing but vanity and misery. Earlier ages exaggerated life’s ills. He claims that worldviews have become more sanguine.

Divines, we find, begin to retract this position, and maintain, though still with some hesitation, that there are more goods than evils, more pleasures than pains, even in this life. (Hume 3, 115)

Reading the dismal views of Hume and his contemporaries should make us wonder: if this judgment is correct, how very bleak was the seventeenth century? Hume was more resolute than most in recommending an alternative. When life becomes unbearable, he saw no objection to suicide. Despite his evident satisfaction with life, Hume faced his own death with a self-conscious cheer unrivaled by anyone but Socrates.

Kant was predictable. He believed that nobody would repeat his life as a matter of pleasure. For a hedonist, little intelligence is needed to see that reliving would be against simple self-interest. Thank heaven for the existence of duty, since nothing else would ensure the continued existence of the species. Schopenhauer’s position is equally foreseeable. He thought that we hide our misery just to save face. If we conceal the fact that our own lives confirm that “every life-history is a history of suffering,” it’s only to be spared other people’s schadenfreude. But no one who is “sincere and in possession of his faculties” at the time of his death would choose to repeat that chain of misery he has experienced. In support of this conclusion Schopenhauer continued the conversation across several epochs:

What has been said by the father of history (Herodotus) has not since been refuted, namely that no person has existed who has not wished more than once that he had not to live through the following day. Accordingly the shortness of life, so often lamented, may be perhaps the very best thing about it. If, finally, we were to bring to the sight of everyone the terrible sufferings and afflictions to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror. If we were to conduct the most hardened and calloused optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theaters, through prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, where it shuns the gaze of cold curiosity, and finally were to allow him to glance into the dungeons of Ugolino where prisoners starved to death, he too would certainly see in the end what kind of world is this meilleur des mondes possibles. For whence did Dante get the material for his hell, if not from this actual world of ours? (Schopenhauer, 1:324–25)

This is what one expects to find in Schopenhauer, at considerable length. But the view was hardly confined to him. Rather, it seemed so common that it was viewed as hard data. Its most surprising supporter may be Goethe, who is quoted in conversation with a historian.

In all times and all countries things have been miserable. Men have always been in fear and trouble, they have pained and tortured each other; what little life they had, they made sour one to the other. The beauty of the world and the sweetness of existence which the beauty of the world offered them, they were not able to esteem or enjoy. Only to a few life became comfortable and enjoyable. Most people, after having played the game of life for a time, preferred to depart rather than to begin anew. That which perhaps gave or gives them some degree of attachment to life was and is the fear of death. Thus life is; thus it always was; thus it will always remain. That is the lot of man. (Quoted in Loewith, 229)

The text leaves us uncertain. It’s hard to know whether Goethe condemned the standpoint he thought most people held, or whether he shared it. But that ambiguity hardly saves him. His remarks are amazing. For they come from a man who received, in one lifetime, all the world has to offer: love and friendship, chances to see the world and to act upon it, creative achievement and the honors that ought to accrue to it. Were you given a choice about which life to live over (and over and over), you could hardly do better. Yet the dismal judgment just quoted was not an aberration. He also wrote the prologue to Faust, a good candidate for being the greatest general statement of world-weariness in modern literature. At least in moments, his disgust with life’s evils and indifference to its goods was so great that he could imagine selling his soul for the chance to affirm not life as a whole but one single moment of it.2

Voltaire acknowledged that our stance toward life is affected by circumstance. Rousseau was the first to suggest that it may be a matter of temperament. The question of whether we’d live our lives over doesn’t seem to be affected by any particular facts about them. Rousseau’s were extremely tough, as he never quite let anyone forget. Nor was he willing to take refuge in any form of Stoicism urging that what’s truly important are not the goods of the world but our ability to be detached from them. (Rousseau’s distinctive suffering may have resulted from his having been the first thinker who wished to unite, in one person, all the things that life can give you. Goethe actually seems to have got them.) Yet the clear-sighted view of the distance between what he longed for and what he got never made Rousseau really bitter. His description of the contrast between his own attitude and Voltaire’s borders on the self-righteous, but it’s nevertheless quite right.

That discussion takes place in his letter attacking Voltaire’s poem “The Lisbon Earthquake.” The poem was received as a masterpiece of despair. While some of its elements were new, its view of the value of life was not: Voltaire simply stated, with unusual length and pathos, the melancholy litany we have already heard. Rousseau’s was the one robust dissenting voice. He insisted that life is a gift, and asked why Voltaire hadn’t noticed.

I cannot help noticing, in conclusion, a very strange opposition between you and me in the subject of this letter. Rewarded with glory, and disabused of vain airs, you live freely in the breast of abandon…. Nevertheless you find nothing but evil in the world. And me, in obscurity, poor, alone, tormented by a suffering without remedy, I meditate with pleasure in my retreat and find that all is well. From where do these apparent contradictions come? You yourself have explained it—you rejoice, while I hope, and hope embellishes everything. (Rousseau 5, letter to Voltaire, August 18, 1756)

Rousseau was correct: the opposition is strange. Voltaire had his share of troubles, but they were, as Hebrew idiom puts it, troubles of rich men. His jeremiads didn’t correspond to the blessings life gave him. Are those beside the point—perhaps even counter to it? Rousseau argued that those who live as nature intended estimate life itself differently.

I daresay that 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. (Ibid.)

Voltaire’s conclusions were skewed by his samples. Instead of the sick, reflective aristocracy whose lives Rousseau had begun to diagnose, Voltaire should have looked to honest working people. Unlike the philosophes, they would gladly repeat their lives. Rousseau’s letter contained an edge of resentment, and an appeal to simple folk that can become tedious, but he raised the right question. What allows some of us to affirm life in the face of disaster while the rest of us shuffle between cynicism and despair? You may call the question psychological as long as you remember that the answer may be mysterious; it can be called grace. What will be decisive is also a matter of description: how the world is seen long before it becomes an object of judgment. The bon mot about optimists and pessimists is tired but not false: even a stupid glass of water can be seen in radically different ways. Is optimism a matter of attitude?

Relations between philosophy and psychology are more than ever in need of investigation. No philosopher ever refuted Socrates’ claim that the task of philosophy is self-knowledge. Indeed, much of philosophy’s history can be seen as attempts to find a model for it. Hume’s Treatise, Kant’s first Critique, Hegel’s Phenomenology, and Wittgenstein’s Investigations offer very different pictures of what knowing the self might come to. Perhaps the only thing uniting them is a passionate determination to avoid the “merely” psychological. Rather, all maintained that the explorations of the soul they offered must be something else. The hostility toward psychologism in a field concerned with self-knowledge is deep and striking. For all the great differences between them, one thing uniting Rousseau and Nietzsche is disdain for other philosophers’ distinctions between philosophy and psychology. Neither cared in the least about distinguishing between the self-knowledge that’s the province of philosophy and that which comes from other kinds of reflection. In calling himself a psychologist, Nietzsche was almost as provocative as Rousseau was in writing the Confessions. For if what’s at issue in the problem of evil is related to temperament, psychology would be the heir of metaphysics.

His Twilight of the Idols begins with the claim:

In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless…. Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound—a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life. (Nietzsche 6, 29)

Nietzsche thought the judgment that life is worthless revealed more about the judges than about life itself. Perhaps all the sages were decadents, old men too weak for life and literally sick of it? If so, they sought revenge. By positing a world beyond this one, they spoiled this one for the rest of us. “Why not a Beyond if not as a means of befouling the Here-and-Now?” (ibid.). Those who condemn this world just reflect their own impotence. The sage’s response is nothing if not clever: it’s a cosmic version of the fox’s decision that the grapes were sour.

Instead of saying simply ‘I am no longer worth anything’ the moral lie in the mouth of the decadent says: ‘Nothing is worth anything—life is not worth anything.’ (Nietzsche 6, 87)

Nietzsche thought that the problem of evil wasn’t given but created—by those who were unequal to life. They thus created an ideal world to oppose to the real one. Values became inverted; in the light of the ideal world, the real world was despised. The clearest example of this process is Christianity, which saw the natural world as the locus of everything wrong: the misery we constantly suffer as punishment for the harm we constantly inflict. The supernatural world is the opposite, a negation of this one that redeems all its ills. But Christianity was just the lucid expression of a much wider view. Nietzsche called it Platonism for the people, but he didn’t even think the standpoint was confined to Platonists. The longing for a life other than this one characterized most past sages. Nietzsche’s deepest longing was to overcome them.

One thing at issue was a move from theory to practice, reflection to consequence, conviction to courage. What allows us to make it? Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy captured early Greek thought:

Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it—the only satisfactory theodicy! (Nietzsche 1, 43)

Nietzsche’s own work brought theodicy to life, moving among metaphysics, ethics, and psychology in ways that bound them irrevocably. After Nietzsche, proving that life is good should be beside the point. Anybody tempted to do so should be able to show it, for no other theodicy counts. (Anybody arguing the opposite should, presumably, be asked to consider how far he is prepared to go in meaning it.) Greek gods, argued Nietzsche, were willing to share human lives. That kind of theodicy makes theoretical justification redundant.

Nietzsche’s eternal return turned a salon game into a method. Whether the world is a world that should be willed is no longer the question. Can you will it? Earlier sages could not. Their loathing and self-loathing were too close to disentangle. The world was despised by despicable people, who beguiled all the rest of us with life-destroying concepts. Who has the strength to will the world? Nietzsche used the question to reveal the essence of cultures as well as individuals. Consider the lives of the Olympians. Greek gods suffered the kinds of experiences you can imagine taking up and calling life interesting: betrayals of love and honor and power, treasures lost and stolen, plans failed, promises broken. The smaller sorts of heartbreak that really only matter when you’re mortal. Given world enough, and time on your hands, you might choose to repeat them—again and again. By contrast, what Jesus took up was so fearful and awesome that not even eternity may suffice to redeem it. Imagine the choice now: you will give all of yourself out of love for the Other and in return have your flesh slowly tortured, your person despised. Could you will such a life—or would it be truly God-forsaken?

Nietzsche thought that such a life-world could be willed only by a deeply sick soul. Here conceptions of God and of Creation mirror each other too reciprocally to be separated. The picture of life and that of the God who gives it determine each other without end. Early Greeks lived in a world so rich with glory that in it, “lamentation itself became a song of praise” (Nietzsche 1, 43). What better gift could they give their gods than a never-ending share in it? When Christians imagine their god descending to dwell among them, the only life they can offer might make the most selfless among us long for another world.

It may have been one of Hegel’s lectures that provoked Nietzsche’s beloved Heine to scorn: “Berliner dialectics couldn’t even kill a cat; how could they effect the death of God?” (Heine, 509). Nietzsche, like Heine, believed that earlier discussions were harmless. By mid–nineteenth century, calling God a human projection was almost trite. Nietzsche thought we needed stronger stuff. He was fond of Stendhal, who wrote that God’s only excuse is that He doesn’t exist. But to say that we killed Him is very far from saying we invented Him and finally owned up to our little fiction—the view of many a thinker before Nietzsche. He brought theodicy to a different kind of conclusion. God isn’t merely absent, nor did He—pass away. He’d been on trial for some time, and judgment day was overdue.

The ‘father’ in God has been thoroughly refuted; ditto the ‘judge’, the ‘rewarder’. He does not hear—and if he heard he would still not know how to help. Worst of all: he seems incapable of clear communication: is he unclear? (Nietzsche 4, 66)

After centuries of waiting for an answer less murky than what Job got from the Voice from the Whirlwind, humankind had had enough. Unafraid of images—all the horror of the Crucifixion, the dismembering of Dionysus—Nietzsche was obsessed with a god that dies.

Nietzsche was graphic, but not entirely explicit. After centuries of theodicy one might decide to let the defense rest, call in the verdict, and condemn the accused to execution. But Nietzsche was of two minds about whether we had just cause. The priests in his story were at least as culpable as the Being they served. He thus left questions of guilt open. For guilt is a concept Nietzsche sought to revise. He insisted that the consequences of God’s death had not been measured. Earlier formulations of the problem of evil could agree on a question: How can there be justice and meaning in Creation when good people suffer? Nietzsche subjected all of these terms to radical questioning. Neither justice nor meaning nor good nor suffering would ever look the same. The death of God means that their senses must shift. Nietzsche made us conscious both of the religious origin of the problem of evil and of the fact that abolishing religion cannot solve it—except at the price of world-destroying nihilism.

It’s easy to see that the loss of God entails the loss of grounding. Without a Creator to put it there, meaning can no longer be part of the world. But the cheerful humanist response is one Nietzsche could not share. To acknowledge that old values had no foundation, and continue to maintain them all the same, seemed to him bad faith. Not even Kant could abandon the idea that morality should be reflected in nature, though he denied that it was grounded in it. Nietzsche thought that to look toward nature for signs to guide us is a relic of slave morality: we want to be commanded. Earlier thinkers walked up to the opposition between reason and nature, but they couldn’t really face it. Nietzsche makes the opposition clear. Real and rational are not merely unrelated; they stand with daggers drawn. One of them must give in.

There is no mediation between is and ought. Life and morality cannot be reconciled; one always condemns the other. Nietzsche thought that two millennia provided variation on one kind of surrender. The real was condemned by the rational, again and again.

For confronted with morality (especially Christian or unconditional morality) life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral—and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. Morality itself—how now? Might not morality be a will to negate life; a secret instinct of annihilation, a principle of decay, diminution and slander—the beginning of the end? Hence the danger of dangers? (Nietzsche 1, 23)

For morality, the existence of suffering is a condemnation of life itself. Nietzsche suggested we try the other alternative. Humankind became sick by letting suffering serve as an argument against life. Why not let life serve as refutation of suffering?

Nietzsche shared the goal of the thinkers we saw in chapter 1. Like them he sought to redeem reality, not simply to acquiesce in it or cry against it. But the difference between them is enormous. For Nietzsche, reality must be redeemed not from any intrinsic failings but from the curse placed on it by the ideal. Humanism, the attempt to retain traditional ideals within an atheist framework, maintained the curse against reality. It just abandoned the forces that give curses power. By continuing to oppose an ideal of life to the reality of it, humanism continues to condemn life with every breath.

The problem of evil is thus the problem of evil itself.³ It’s a problem humankind brought on itself by creating ideals that put life in the wrong. If we created the problem, we should be able to resolve it, when we recognize the depth of transformation we must undergo. The problem of evil was meaningless suffering. Pain that makes sense is not hard to bear. Making sense of it involved finding both good cause for it and good consequences of it. So we invented sin and redemption. Sin gave pain an origin, and redemption gave it a telos. Humankind prefers masochism to meaninglessness. We took the blame for suffering on ourselves in order to give life meaning. Christianity held such sacrifice to be so profound that it projected the act onto God Himself. Volunteering for torture to save humankind was the early Christian paradigm, and later souls did to spirit what the saints did to flesh.

Nietzsche sometimes described guilt as an act of revenge: moral denunciation was the product of slaves determined to spoil for others the life they could not enjoy. More interesting passages describe martyrdom in the service of meaning as something that almost made sense. Indeed, it did make sense, which is why the demand for sense itself must be altered.

Except for the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, had no meaning up to now. His existence on earth had no purpose; ‘What is man for, actually?’ was a question without an answer; there was no will for man and earth; behind every great human destiny sounded the even louder refrain ‘in vain!’ This is what the ascetic ideal meant: something was missing, there was an immense lacuna around man…. suffering itself was not his problem, but the fact that there was no answer to the question he screamed ‘Suffering for what?’ … The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse which has so far blanketed mankind—and the ascetic ideal offered man a meaning! … Within it, suffering was given an interpretation; the enormous emptiness seemed filled; the door was shut on suicidal nihilism. (Nietzsche 5, 162)

The ascetic ideal divided suffering in two and thereby gave it meaning. If the natural evil you suffer results from the moral evil you do, all your suffering is intelligible. Modern thought tried to restructure the relation but retained the demand for sense. The view of natural evils as punishment for moral evils could not survive the Lisbon earthquake. The impulse to disconnect them entirely, and to mark the disconnection by abolishing the very term ‘natural evil’, was thus easy to follow. Still the urge to relate moral and natural evils remained powerful even for those who naturalized both. Rousseau took the idea that you suffer for your sins, and built it into natural law. Though he praised Rousseau’s account, and often presupposed it, Kant’s separation of natural and moral evil was more decisive. He was consequently tormented by how to relate them. In the end he left us with little but the claim that reason has a need for them to be related—a claim that skeptics could argue was the place where the problem began.

After Kant the focus shifted. The demand that we reject theodicy by considering human, not divine, responsibility increased in force. Until we have eradicated the evil that’s in our hands, why worry about the evil that isn’t? Even Hegel’s attempt to make philosophy become theodicy turned to human history. Nietzsche’s work radicalized the modern attempt to take increasing responsibility for the world. For Nietzsche, we are responsible not only for particular moral evils but for the very concept of evil itself.

In moments he sounds like Feuerbach gone to the opera, a sort of humanist for aesthetes. If he were, his message would be simpler: redemption lies in our hands. We need only take on the role of Creator we once gave to God, making objects redolent with meaning as we thought He made worlds. Life has no meaning? Very well, then, let’s give it some. That’s what it means to be modern. God is dead? He’d been getting feebler every decade. Did you expect Him to last forever?

But this is not Nietzsche’s standpoint. It belongs to those Last Men for whom Nietzsche’s message will seem mad. And the Last Men are unspeakably vulgar. For a philosopher who thought life justified as aesthetic phenomenon, vulgarity is a philosophical reproach. But it’s not the only possible reproach to this do-it-yourself meaning. Nietzsche insisted that the move to the modern was neither natural nor inevitable. The demand to displace God and call it maturity will thus not be enough. Both his denial of progress and his claim that God did not simply wither away require something stronger. If God died at our hand, we cannot take His place without further ado. We must undergo a process of divinization ourselves.

Nietzsche spent a lifetime wondering which god to become. Many of his texts suggest Dionysus as the clear favorite. But why call his intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo, or write Zarathustra in the style of the Gospels, choked with allusions to the Sermon on the Mount? Let us say he couldn’t decide it with precision. He was clear, however, that religion cannot be merely abandoned. We cannot get rid of its power until we get rid of the needs that created it.

So far, this is almost Marx. To see why Nietzsche would dismiss a Marxist solution as coarse and pointless, we must think about time. The metaphysical wound created in the struggle between reason and reality cannot be healed by the future so long as the pain of the past remains. This pain creates resentment and all its bitter consequences. To think that suffering can be redeemed by the demonstration that it’s necessary for future good is not only to be instrumentalist; it shows you know nothing about pain. Time itself does not heal; it only buries. Nineteenth-century discussions of the problem of evil turned to history, in part, because history is unbearable. The future is still undetermined. If it’s not easy to face it with hope, it’s not hard to face it with confidence. But past horror and sorrow threaten to overwhelm us with rage and despair. Both Hegel and Marx tried to redeem the past by showing it to be a necessary bridge to the future. If this worked, ordinary human beings would be enough for salvation. Superhuman ones are needed because salvation is not a matter of reparations. You cannot do anything to make good that which is not. Nor can the past be repaired. The stumbling block is that which was. In the chapter of Zarathustra called “On Redemption” Nietzsche explained:

To redeem the past and to turn every “It was” into a “Thus I willed it”—that would be what I call redemption! I teach you will, my friends—this is the name of the liberator and bearer of joy! But learn this as well: the will itself is still a prisoner. Will liberates—but what is the name of that which still puts the liberator in chains? “It was”: this is the name of the will’s gnashing teeth and misery. Powerless against that which happened, it is a bitter observer of all the past. (Nietzsche 3, 142)

We cannot will backward. This fact drives the will to rage and revenge. Move on and think about the future. Advice that is trite as psychology gets no deeper if you make it into metaphysics. This is not redemption of pain but repression of it. And Nietzsche is too good a psychologist to ignore what becomes of pain repressed.

The question that began as elevated diversion became the key to redemption. Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return is meant to save your soul. The eternal return is “only a thought experiment,” as is sometimes suggested, if you call heaven and hell thought experiments too. For the Christian, life is justified in light of the afterworld. All events in his life’s narrative gain their meaning through the ending: did they lead to heaven or hell? The ease with which Providence became progress served Nietzsche as warning. Theological conceptions condition our experience. Only a deliberate countertheology is powerful enough to combat them. Proof is beside the point, for the claim that history has no end is as easy to prove as the claim that it has one. Neither will ever be known. Both are standpoints that frame our lives. In one case, life has meaning through a telos that is other than itself. The significance of each moment derives from moments that came before and after it.

Nietzsche could have attacked this conception without offering another. Why not forget time altogether? Meaning might be found in every moment. Why did Nietzsche ask us to suppose that every moment recurs? First, he believed that when joy is genuine, we cannot let it go. Joy demands eternity. If you will an instant you will the world as a whole, for the urge to call Verweile doch to a passing moment is not one that can be contained. (Stay awhile. For an hour? A weekend?) Second, the eternal return is needed to replace cosmological conceptions whose staying power proved remarkable. Kant abolished God from the realm of discourse, but Hegel thought Him more present in modern philosophy than ever before. Years after Hegel wrote that God was dead, Marx was still certain that religion was the place for criticism to begin. And in the midst of all the furor, Heine could not write a history of philosophy without writing a history of religion at the same time. If God was murdered, and analyzed to death, why did His shadows remain?

Nietzsche thought we could not forsake God because we cannot forsake the past. If there were gods, cries Zarathustra, how could I bear not to be one? True redemption isn’t humble. It won’t rest content with willing the future. As genealogist, Nietzsche knew how thoroughly the future is conditioned by the past. If we cannot create the past, we are not real creators at all. Earlier attempts at imitatio Dei were halfhearted. If you cannot will the world as it was in the beginning, you will be poisoned by your own impotence.

The will must be entirely active. Any Stoic can accept his fate. Nietzsche challenged us to love it. The presence of contingency demands that fate be loved as a whole. If you never know which events will turn out to determine your life, all of them are significant. Terrible moments and trivial ones must equally become objects of will. Giving up the problem of evil means giving up the opposition that created it. This means abandoning the contrast between the ideal that evil should not exist and the real which reminds us that it does. To do this would be to will evil itself, both that which we do and that which we suffer.

Nietzsche’s defense of willing the evil we do cannot be discussed fully here. For the present I will only note that radical elitism lightens the burden of theodicy. If you don’t feel bound to redeem everybody’s suffering equally, half the work is done before you start. But though the menace implied by his praise of blond beasts caused no end of trouble, his discussion of the evils we suffer is in fact more extensive. The two are closely connected, but his praise of the evils we suffer may be in the end more puzzling. What does it mean to will your pain?

Though he called himself a Stoic at least once, Nietzsche was usually at pains to distinguish his conception from a Stoic one. Accepting suffering is not enough. His works are full of great one-liners about the value of pain: how profoundly you can suffer determines your nobility; whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day; do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the “creature in man”, for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified—that which necessarily must and should suffer? And our pity—do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses? (Nietzsche 4, 154)

But which god was it who took on the deepest suffering—not merely accepting but choosing it? His praise of suffering can easily raise the question: If you like suffering all that much, why don’t you just go out and be a Christian?4 Why not Christ himself? Nietzsche’s later work is full of fantasies about the option.

Thinking about Nietzsche provokes impieties in every direction. If he could never quite decide which god he wished to become, he was equally uncertain about the value of divine humility. While his praise of great suffering could veer toward the Christlike, he urged an acceptance of the given that is second to none. To will the world in all its detail requires a dizzying mixture of exaltation and submission.

What exactly is the difference between willing the world forever and calling it the best of all possible ones? Nietzsche’s work tried to overcome theodicy by offering a bolder version of it. Kant allowed us to imagine creating laws of nature. Nietzsche urged us to become creators of the whole world, not just the good parts; the past as well as the future. Loving the fate you cannot change may be a sign of good taste. But the very elegance of the attitude Nietzsche calls life-affirming leaves his view suspicious. Did Nietzsche cherish a view close to Leibniz’s after all—a sort of hyper-Stoicism, slave morality for aristocrats?

Of course Leibniz believed in truth, and if foundations are your worry, you may find this difference decisive. To call this world the best possible is to say there could have been others. For Nietzsche, necessity and accident turn out to converge. Praise of one and praise of the other are less in conflict than they seemed. All the more reason to fear that his views end in titanic submission. At least hypothetically, Leibniz’s view left room to imagine other worlds. Nietzsche’s may deny us even that.

To insist that this world is the only one available is not to start on the road to theodicy but to refuse to take it. A theodicy does more by way of justification. It must show why things that seemed to be reproaches against the world are not. Leibniz was roundly attacked for doing so little on this score, but even he made concessions. To be reconciled to evils, he knew, we needed to hear more than the general claim that they’re necessary. So he sometimes argued they were necessary for particular goods. Leibniz reminded us that in order to perceive light, there has to be shadow, that a life containing nothing but sweetness would be cloying. One must wonder about his choice of example. This sort of thing may help reconcile you to bad weather, or publishers’ rejections. Not even Job’s friends would try it on hard cases.

Nietzsche did make general claims that seem eerily Leibnizian: happiness and unhappiness are sisters, even twins. On occasion it could be rousing: if you don’t embrace unhappiness, you will never know happiness, but at best merely comfort. When picking examples, he tried to talk tough. He knew that what must be faced is not just unpleasant but actually evil, the sort of thing that led other eras to celebrate triumphs with autos-da-fé. Now Leibniz sometimes bit bullets too. He insisted that this world was the best one even if it turned out to include the burning of unbaptized babies in hell. Usually, however, he avoided hard cases as Nietzsche did not.

But despite his attempt to pick outrageous examples, Nietzsche’s paradigms of suffering sound more like weltschmerz than anything else. And weltschmerz may be acceptable where suffering is not. You may be willing to embrace pain in the course of a life that is richer than one where you feel very little at all. But your willingness may stop at the sort of pain that annihilates great souls instead of ennobling them. (To say that they wouldn’t have been annihilated if they’d been greater is to beg too many questions, which Nietzsche sometimes does.) To put the problem differently: one can’t help suspecting that Nietzsche sometimes imagined himself on the wrong side of the auto-da-fé. Embracing the evil involved in watching (not to mention causing) suffering is another matter than embracing what’s involved when you’re consumed by it.

Leave—for the moment—such objections aside. Suppose Nietzsche’s view is talking about suffering, not weltschmerz, and suffering from the standpoint of one who actually suffers. This suffering will be applauded as a condition of greatness of soul. But isn’t this the sort of instrumentalist redemption he elsewhere attacks? Is suffering significant only as a means to greater ends?

Nietzsche often returned to the metaphor of childbirth. For the Greeks, he argued,

[e]very individual detail in the act of procreation, pregnancy, birth, awoke the most exalted and solemn feelings. In the teachings of the mysteries pain is sanctified: the “pains of childbirth” sanctify pain in general—all becoming and growing, all that guarantees the future, postulates pain…. For the eternal joy in creating to exist, for the will to life eternally to affirm itself, the “torment of childbirth” must also exist eternally…. All this is contained in the word “Dionysus.” (Nietzsche 6, 109–10)

Christianity, Nietzsche concluded, needed to find a meaning for the pain of childbirth. Common senseless suffering was too hard to bear. Christianity discovered its meaning by looking backward to causes. It concluded that procreation must be evil, since it leads to suffering like that. A freer, noble, Hellenic worldview reverses the process. It found the meaning of suffering by looking toward the future. Thus suffering became necessary and exalted, for it belongs to the process of creation itself.

With such metaphors Nietzsche came so close to Christian views that sanctify suffering that it is hard to tell them apart. But that objection is mild next to problems posed by the metaphor itself. For were all suffering like suffering in childbirth, it would always make perfect sense. The pain is so brief, the end is so good, that a lifetime of misery in return for eternal paradise is scarcely a better exchange. Childbirth is the paradigm of meaningful suffering—in simple and straightforward terms. It’s a paradigm that informed Nietzsche’s discussion even as he recognized that the problem of evil concerns meaningless suffering. And so it leaves untouched the question: What if evil creates nothing?

At times, Nietzsche’s claims can appear crudely instrumental: evils provide poets with topics as the Trojan War provided the gods with entertainment. Nietzsche wasn’t alone in viewing tragedy as the highest form of human narrative. Unlike others, he simply refused to shrink from conclusions: if there’s going to be tragedy, there’s got to be raw material for it. Your pain is a model. If you don’t find a way to use it, a better artist will. Even when put less crudely, Nietzsche’s claims can look instrumental. To say that suffering is needed to ennoble your soul seems still to give it meaning by making it something other than it is.

If Nietzsche had an answer to this worry, it was aesthetic. He knew we have yet to understand the phenomenon of tragedy. Aristotle’s discussion of catharsis came too close to suggesting that we watch it out of schadenfreude. But Nietzsche thought tragedy produced real joy.

There is no such thing as pessimistic art. Art affirms. Job affirms. (Nietzsche 9, 435)

If tragedy affirms life, it serves as a model as nothing else can. Nietzsche said it gives metaphysical comfort. For only art can turn horror into something sublime. It does so by refusing to make sense of it. Tragedy offers form in place of meaning. The tragic worldview declined after Socrates introduced the idea that beauty and intelligibility go together. Plato followed him by banning tragedy because it was an unreasonable genre. Why should his republic permit stories full of causes without effects and effects without causes (Nietzsche 1, 84–89)?

Nietzsche wrote that life could be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. This amounts to giving up the demand that it be intelligible. For the aesthetic is exactly that which has no meaning. Here music served him as constant example. Any attempt to state the meaning of a piece of music is less false than off-key. Music makes apparent what all great art reveals: to speak of its meaning is more than mistaken. Meaning can be expressed independently, but the meaning of tragedy is not even unstatable. Ditto, the meaning of life. As in a work of art, it will be present in every note and line, every moment and every measure—or it will not be present at all. To insist that life is justified as art is not to find a new way of giving life meaning but to demand that we stop seeking it.

So Nietzsche claimed that to will one moment is to will every moment. For to will a moment is to will it for itself, not for anything to which it points or from which it follows. Initially, you might think Faust’s bargain too cheap. Shouldn’t he have demanded at least a year? Nietzsche always returned to Faust’s longing to affirm just one moment in time. This is not a Leibnizian point: you cannot pick and choose your sequences, will pleasure without pain. Rather, whenever you will sequences, you will things that have meaning through causes and consequences. To will one moment would be to affirm it without seeking its meaning. If you could do that, you could affirm the world as a whole.

So willing your suffering is aesthetic through and through. If the quality of the story is all that matters, explaining all your misery by reference to Prometheus is simply more attractive than explaining it through the Fall.

That man should freely dispose of fire without receiving it as a present from heaven, either as a lightning bolt or as the warming rays of the sun, struck these primitive men as sacrilege, as a robbery of divine nature. Thus the very first philosophical problem immediately produces a painful and irresolvable contradiction between man and god and moves it before the gate of every culture, like a huge boulder. The best and highest possession mankind can acquire is obtained by sacrilege and must be paid for with consequences that involve the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended divinities have to afflict the nobly aspiring race of men. This is a harsh idea which, by the dignity it confers on sacrilege, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall in which curiosity, mendacious deception, susceptibility to seduction, lust—in short, a series of preeminently feminine affects was considered the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan notion is the sublime view of active sin as the characteristically Promethean virtue. With that, the ethical basis for pessimistic tragedy has been found: the justification of human evil, meaning both human guilt and the suffering it entails. (Nietzsche 1, 71)

How would you prefer to imagine the forebears who got you in trouble? Kicked out of God’s kingdom in shame and confusion, bent over clutched fig leaves and seeking others to blame? Or proud and defiant, conscious and bold? Put like that, the answer looks easy. Remember, you are to imagine absolutely nothing, without form and void. Which beginning can you will from it, which origin of woe? It’s hardly even a question, until you remember the end of the story: Prometheus chained to a boulder, his liver devoured. (Earning one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow is, after all, something to which most of us have become accustomed. Marx went so far as to call it fundamentally human.) If Nietzsche wished to abolish meaning the way art abolishes meaning, he must insist that stories are whole: who wills the beginning, wills the end. This is a test.

ON CONSOLATION: FREUD VS. PROVIDENCE

Nietzsche’s work revealed the resonance of the problem of evil. Long after it was found to be unsolvable, we could not let it go. Its sources were too deep, its orbit too wide. Too many needs fueled it; too many concepts were conditioned by it. It was simply too big to be defeated by argument—or even by the death of its leading protagonist. Nietzsche confirmed that the problem of evil may engage you most in the moments when you reject its most central premises. Indeed, he thought that the demand to abolish religion itself arose from religious impulses. Beyond Good and Evil described the death of God as a religious sacrifice. Freud called Nietzsche the most self-knowing man who ever lived. But the fact that he was conscious of his religious impulses made them no less religious. Nietzsche’s very obsession with the death of God was a way to ensure His survival. The richness of his work, and all the ambiguity indicated it, left many paths open. In Zarathustra he created a prophet. Freud refused to be one.

Even more than Nietzsche, Freud created the most widespread assumptions that determine contemporary thought on the subject. Two centuries of thinkers’ hacking away at the truth-value of statements about Providence were less effective in undermining belief in them than two decades of psychoanalytically oriented culture. For belief in Providence arose not because it seemed to fit the evidence but just because it didn’t. A simple believer like Justine knows as well as a sophisticated theorist like Hegel: you’re most inclined to argue that there’s reason in the world in the moments you’re afraid there isn’t. Hence even after Nietzsche, you could take the world’s resistance to the reasonable not as refutation but as challenge. Of course the ways of Providence are hard to fathom; that’s the point where labor started. The very fact that work continues, despite the poverty of its results, seems to show we’re on the right track. We may never understand how everything that happens, happens for the best, but that’s no cause to stop trying. For mustn’t there be a reason why such efforts have persisted against all the evidence that defies our hopes?

Freud offered a reason, and it wasn’t very attractive. Our massive attempts to seek sense in misery are fueled by childhood fantasies and feelings of loss. Since these experiences are at least as universal and persistent as the belief in Providence itself, they’re the right sorts of thing to explain it. Not until the belief in Providence was uncovered as a function of universal needs could we begin to let it go. For nothing works so well in getting someone to give up a position as making him feel ashamed of it. Kant and Hegel said we seek to be at home in the world. Freud took the homeless metaphor seriously and said that we were infantile. We really do long to go home—possibly all the way home—but we can’t. The metaphor lost the depth and wit it had in Kant’s work, and the dreamy effulgence it acquired with the Romantics. We are not, as Hegel put it, adventurous mariners on stormy seas—just lost children seeking protection we never really had. Earlier empiricists condemned the architect. Freud sought the source of the assumption that somebody owes us a home. The very longing to be at home in the world must be based on a model of Creation. Only a notion of a Creator, who does things according to intentions, gives rise to a theodicy problem at all. For homes are the products of conscious, indeed beneficent thought. Of course we long for a world to feel at home in. Freud makes the desire seem not deep but embarrassing.

The Future of an Illusion put the view baldly: religion is a universal obsessional neurosis of humanity, stemming from the Oedipus complex. It will inevitably be abandoned at the moment we acknowledge that we can’t retain our youth. To be sure, abandoning illusions will cause pain. It hurts people to admit they are

no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism was destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life’. We may call this ‘education to reality’. Need I confess to you that the sole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step? (Freud 1, 233)

For any other question at all—even one that affects us so little as the question whether whales lay eggs—we demand more proof than we have for Providence. What leads us to clasp so strongly claims so unsupported by evidence? Having posed the question that way, Freud found the answer simple. The intensity of belief in Providence derives from the intensity of the terror and helplessness felt by the child. These emotions are so powerful that he invents an even more powerful father to whom he can cling throughout a lifetime. The “oceanic feeling” of oneness with the universe, sometimes a spur to religious emotion, may be experienced by a few. But infantile helplessness and need for a father’s protection are felt by us all, and

the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of fate. (Freud 2, 20)

Fate, for Freud, is our word for untamed nature, and it is always superior to us. Civilization is an attempt to defend us against nature and remove all its terrors. It begins by anthropomorphizing: projecting will and intention into the blind and impersonal forces that threaten us makes them less distant and frightening. We can thereby feel “at home in the unheimlich.” The powers remain superior to us, but at least we can react to them. And who knows? Perhaps the same tricks and negotiations that sometimes succeed in controlling hostile forces in the social world will function in the cosmos at large. So we try to bribe and appease the forces we’ve projected onto nature just as we try to influence the human powers that be.

We are so desperate to find a way of controlling the terrors that beset us that we invented guilt as a keystone of explanation. We prefer a system of self-punishment to remaining in the dark. Here Freud followed Nietzsche and added his own brilliant set of reflections. Primitive man beats his fetish when he meets with misfortune; civilized man beats himself. Israel’s commitment to its role as the favorite child of a divine father didn’t waver in the least when it met one misery after the next. Rather, it invented the prophets. They claimed that its suffering resulted from its guilt, and gave it a list of commands to avert future misfortune. Since the list was so long, the likelihood of the commandments’ ever being followed by the entire people was very slim. Thus Israel could continue to feel in control of its suffering in principle while continuing to suffer nevertheless.

In so doing, it followed a universal process Freud thought emerged with the Greeks. Their gods were invented to serve three functions: to exorcize the terrors of nature, to reconcile us to the cruelty of fate, and to compensate us for the suffering that civilization itself imposes. But the functions gradually shifted. Nascent science revealed internal laws within nature, allowing us to substitute natural for supernatural explanation. And all the burnt entrails and entreaties notwithstanding, the gods seemed to be utterly inept at fulfilling their second function, controlling our fate.

As regards the apportioning of destinies, an unpleasant suspicion persisted that the perplexity and helplessness of the human race could not be remedied. It was here that the gods were most apt to fail. If they themselves created Fate, then their counsels must be deemed inscrutable. The notion dawned on the most gifted people of antiquity that Moira (Fate) stood above the gods and that the gods themselves had their own destinies. And the more autonomous nature became and the more the gods withdrew from it, the more earnestly were all expectations directed to the third function of the gods—the more did morality become their true domain. (Freud 1, 198)

Freud knew that none of these considerations constitutes an argument against belief in an order of cosmic justice. One can continue to believe in some version of Providence despite Freud’s description of the source of belief, just as one can continue to maintain it despite Hume’s description of its irrationality. The difference is only, as it were, psychological. After we uncover the process through which we develop those beliefs

our attitude to the problem of religion will undergo marked displacement. We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it would be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant and down-trodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe. (Freud 1, 215)

Our beliefs may not be false, but they are certainly humiliating. In Civilization and Its Discontents, written three years later, Freud was even more devastating. It hurts to realize that the majority of humankind lives with a worldview structured and determined by infantile terror.

The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers in order to meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!” (Freud 2, 23)

Notice the rough way Freud rides over distinctions among natural, moral, and metaphysical evils. From the point of view of the affected individual, all these are just instances of a simple fact:

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. (Freud 2, 23)

This is the perspective of the child, who has not yet learned to make the distinctions we use to try to bring our suffering under control. We are threatened with misery from three directions: our own bodies bring pain, eventually decay and dissolution; the external world rages against us with merciless forces of destruction; other people make us suffer. Freud called the last the most painful because we experience it as gratuitous. Surely cruelty at the hands of beings like ourselves could be avoided, if earthquakes and tempests cannot? He believed the one to be as inevitable as the other. Most interesting is his view that they are two species of a common threat to our purposes—the happiness that comes from the satisfaction of needs embodied in the pleasure principle. Freud thought that we share the same, straightforward view of the purpose of life. We wish to become happy and remain so. But

[t]here is no possibility at all of its being carried through; all the regulations of the universe run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’. (Freud 2, 25)

From the point of view of the pleasure principle we remain undiscriminating babies. An earthquake and a war equally thwart our intentions and may cause us equal pain. All suffering is, finally, a matter of sensation that exists just as long as we feel it. It should follow that any activity which decreases painful sensations is ipso facto good. Some means of palliating our miserable reality is clearly indispensable. Freud refrained from making recommendations. The reduced sense of happiness he thought may be possible will depend on the economics of the individual libido. In contrast to religion, which holds one form of coping with suffering to be valid for everyone, Freud preached tolerance. He thought each must discover the best way to be saved.

Intoxicating substances and simple mania are, Freud wrote, the most effective means of coping with suffering. For both produce the greatest degree of independence from the external world. They allow us to withdraw at any time from painful reality and find refuge in our own. Their effectiveness is also their danger. This limits their use in the social economics of libido. Though Freud thought they will always have a place in civilization, the injury and waste caused by intoxication and madness led us to seek more useful forms of flight. In particular, we invented culture.

As an effective form of compensating the frustration created by miserable reality, culture has much to recommend it. This is what Voltaire meant, said Freud, by ending Candide with the advice to cultivate one’s garden.

One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist’s joy in creating, in giving his fantasies body, or a scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly one day be able to characterize in metapsychological terms. (Freud 2, 29)

Such satisfactions are limited. Withdrawing from the world through the production of culture is a method accessible to only a few gifted people. Even for those with luck and talent, the method gives no “complete protection from suffering” (ibid.). For the joys of creating are mild in comparison with cruder, instinctual joys, and they habitually fail to help us when the body is the source of suffering. Freud thought love to be a better means of gaining independence from fate, but it offers little promise. Though more effective as a way to happiness, a life centered on loving is even harder to maintain than a life centered on science and art.

The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. (Freud 2, 33)

Did Freud offer a form of theodicy after all? His picture of the natural cycle is remarkably efficient. We are attacked from within and without by forces that cause us nearly constant pain, and we seek to flee from reality by the best available means. Drugs are too risky, love is too rare. Though culture is less effective than either, at least it is steady. So far, this could be a modern version of Stoicism. Freud added that the very steadiness of culture leads to benefits that remedy at least one source of evil. For by creating what we call conscience, it controls the more violent impulses with which people torment each other when they’re not being tormented by something else. By splitting the self into pieces and having the superego do to the ego what the ego longs to do to someone else, civilization can turn destructive forces into something useful.

Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. (Freud 2, 84)

But Freud’s economy was bleak. He knew it would not satisfy. For his system would work as theodicy only if he held civilization to be a value. In that case, producing civilization would be a worthy goal. It might even be fair exchange for the amount of suffering that goes into making it. This is just the move Freud refused to make, and he was brutally explicit about the reason: the price we pay for the advance of civilization is the loss of happiness. And since civilization itself arose as a flight from reality, it can’t even be justified as related to truth. The more civilized we become, the more we seem to suffer—without clearly gaining in knowledge. Calling what happens to you fate, and blaming it on Athena’s quarrel with Poseidon, is a way of giving meaning to your suffering from outside. Calling it Providence is a way of internalizing. Better to blame your misery on yourself than remain utterly without meaning—but the price of such meaning is immense. So Freud concluded unremitting:

Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers. (Freud 2, 111)

For many, Freud’s view came to seem self-evident. Mention the problem of evil, and any group is likely to split. Some will confess to seeking reason in the world, while others are certain that such searches reveal childish weakness of which the others should be ashamed. The division doesn’t reflect education or class background, and it seems impervious to national and religious differences. Still it’s always as sharp as it is clear and passionate. For one group, the world is so thoroughly disenchanted that the absence of reason in it isn’t worth mentioning. For the other that absence is the source of permanent frustration and pain. Members of the first group describe their loss as natural. Does that make them Freud’s adults—or Nietzsche’s Last Men?

For those influenced by Freud, reason and nature are so thoroughly different that the demand to connect them is a category mistake. If we expect justice from the world, it’s only because we project childhood structures onto the universe at large. They insist that the world is not the sort of thing that has to do with justice, and those who think otherwise are just counting their losses and nursing their wounds. This standpoint requires the idea that the world is comprehensible without normative categories.

Yet the urge to naturalize the world arose from the same process that issued in theology. Taking the spirits out of nature is a different way of making yourself comfortable than putting them into nature in the first place. Both arise from the need to make the world less unheimlich. Recall Rousseau’s project. The idea of radically separating natural from moral evil, and calling whatever is left over the human condition, was part of a search to show that events like earthquakes were events without meaning. What began as a plan to absolve God of responsibility for evil actually reduced the quantity of evil itself. Earthquakes became flat. Categorizing an event as natural gives us hope of predicting and controlling it through natural law. But whether or not we actually succeed in doing so, calling something natural is a way of making it tame. Supernatural events have depth and dimension. Even if they occur regularly, they are experienced as extraordinary. Natural events are common events. They are very literally insignificant—not representations of something beside themselves, nor signals we need to decode. We are freed from the burden of thinking about them because there is nothing in them to interpret. We can only manage our lives around them as best we can.

Ordinary events are what the order of the world consists in, not whatever is a threat to it. The more pieces of the world become ordinary, the less threatening the world as a whole. The more things can be viewed as natural evils, the less evil the world contains—until the term ‘natural evil’ drops out. An insignificant event may cause a great deal of damage, but the damage is merely unfortunate. It leaves the realm of evil to join the merely bad. The paradox is just this: the urge to naturalize evil arose from the desire to tame and control it. But the more it is tamed, the more the quality of evil disappears. This leaves us with the fear that evil wasn’t captured but trivialized. The banal doesn’t shatter the world; it composes it.

In demystifying natural and metaphysical evils, Rousseau also decriminalized them. But the more psychology strove to become a science of nature, the more the distinction between moral and natural evils broke down. The problem was dissolved but raised in different form: can we trust a world where human nature is subject to such despicable tendencies? The very naturalism that was the pride of those who sought to disenchant the world undermines hard distinctions they sought to establish. The more human beings become part of the natural world, the more we, like earthquakes, become one more unfortunate fact about it. The more evil itself seems explicable in terms of natural processes, the more nature itself is implicated. Naturalism is a way of dividing responsibility for the world as well as making us comfortable in it, in one crude blow. Few were as crude about this as Sade was: if nature can do it, so can I. But the consequences of naturalism can be overlooked only at the cost of a radical dualism few are willing to maintain. Science may have abolished the sense that the world is inhabited by forces with wills of their own, and in this way reduced the unheimlich. But the price is enormous, for all nature stands condemned. Human beings themselves become walking indictments of creation.

The older Freud was at once the most articulate proponent of naturalization and the author of one of the darker views of human nature. It is thus little surprise that principled distinctions between different kinds of evil melt away in his work. They are all merely instances of countless ways in which life is too hard for us: the whole world presents obstacles to thwart our desires. Even while diagnosing it, he returns to the prereflective stance of the child. Children meet the world as Job did. Little matter if devastation comes at the hands of marauding Chaldeans or a great wind from the desert. Each belongs to a world that is, as usual, opposed to us.