Is Evil Unintelligible?

The consistency of Neoplatonism and theodicy

Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash

In Eric Perl’s book Theophany, exploring the Neoplatonic philosophy undergirding Dionysius the Areopagite’s metaphysics, he makes an argument to the following effect (ascribing the line of reasoning to the Areopagite—an exegetical issue I remain agnostic about): Because evil, according to Neoplatonic principles, is a pure negation of being, and being is coextensive with intelligibility, it follows that evil is unintelligible. Moreover, because it is unintelligible, there can be no explanation for it, because explanations by definition make the phenomenon they are intended to explain intelligible.

The argument has an intuitive appeal, but methinks it moves too fast and trades on a certain ambiguity in what it means to make something intelligible, or to give an explanation.

The sense in which Perl is clearly right is this: On Neoplatonic principles, we cannot make the intrinsic nature of evil intelligible, because, by definition, it has no intrinsic nature: it is a pure negation of being, and as such has no “form,” no “genus,” no “species,” and so forth. So far, so good. The problem is that it does not follow from something being intrinsically unintelligible in this way that it is therefore unintelligible simpliciter. This is because there’s a certain sense in which we can make the ‘existence’ of pure negations intelligible to ourselves indirectly, by giving an explanation in terms of positive realities or facts that jointly entail the pure negation.

To illustrate, consider the ‘existence’ of holes. I can truly say, of my bagel, that it has a hole in it. And it would make no sense for someone to say that because the hole in my bagel is not a something, but rather a pure absence, that I therefore cannot in any way make the fact of there being a hole in my bagel intelligible to myself, or to give an explanation for it. The explanation is simple: At some point during my bagel’s creation, a circular portion in the middle part of it was removed by a baker. Voila! I have given an explanation for the purely negative fact of there being a hole, an absence, in my bagel—I have made this intelligible to myself. Of course, I have not made it intelligible to myself in the sense that I now can grasp the intrinsic structure, form, or nature of the hole, for it has none. But that’s perfectly fine: The ‘existence’ of the hole has still been made intelligible to me as the purely negative consequence of a series of positive facts and causes.

Similar considerations apply to other ‘negative facts’: The fact that there is no elephant in my room right now is explained by listing all the positive realities that are in my room right now with the addendum “and that’s all”; the fact that my water glass is empty is explained by the positive reality of my having drunk all the water in it due to thirst; and so on.

The same, then, applies to the ultimate negation, the ultimate absence, the ultimate negative fact: evil. Although we cannot make intelligible to ourselves evil’s intrinsic structure or form, since it has none, it seems intuitive that we can make evil intelligible to ourselves in this more generic, indirect sense. This is at least clear in the case of particular evils: The malice in someone’s heart, for example, may be explained by a series of choices the individual made throughout their life, the joint consequence of which was the absence of good-will in their heart.

And this is important because Perl claims that evil’s unintelligibility means that no theodicy, no potential explanation for the (non)presence of evil in the world, can possibly work. If what I have said so far is right, however, then Perl is mistaken here. For a theodicy need not make evil intrinsically intelligible to us in order to make it indirectly intelligible. We may tell an explanatory story involving a series of positive facts or causes that jointly entail the presence of evil, without giving evil some intrinsic structure or form.

Perhaps more could be said in favor of the view that evil is unintelligible in both senses, but currently, I cannot see why we should think this, and Perl (in spite of his brilliance, and the brilliance of his book) has not done enough work to motivate such a view.