Logic and Reason and Good and Evil

as usual, our liberal friends don't get it

The Problem of Evil is said to be: “If God exists and is All-Good, why does He permit evil to exist?”

Plato is said to have solved it,

In Plato's philosophy, evil isn't a fundamental entity or a separate Form, but rather a disorder or lack of good, stemming from ignorance and the imperfect nature of the material world.

I would say that good and evil are merely artifacts of a social world of creatures like humans that obtain an evolutionary advantage by disciplining its members short of forceful intervention, like the slave-driver’s cowskin whip or the executioner’s gallows.

Do snakes and lizards know good and evil? I doubt it. Whatabout lions? Maybe. And dogs? Definitely; dogs cringe when they are judged evil by their owners, and they wag their tails when you say “good dog.” So, to what extent is the dogly knowledge of good and evil innate, and to what extent has it been trained into them by humans?

Then there’s this piece which takes apart populist nationalism, wokism, and Islamism in favor of the logic and reason of the Enlightenment, featuring this statement.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the European Enlightenment replaced religious belief with rational scientific enquiry as the epistemic basis for understanding the natural world.

Guess what: “rational scientific inquiry” is also a religious belief, that you can discover new things by rational analysis.

Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, and Kant sought to ground social institutions in reason rather than tradition, and they laid the foundations for modern political liberalism by advocating universalism, rationalism, and self-criticism.

Guess what: “tradition” is the way that humans incorporate social practices that seem to work into their culture of “the way we live.” Reason is the conscious mind at work, and tradition is the unconscious mind at work.

That was the point of Romanticism, thinkers deciding that there was something more to life than logic and reason.

The epistemic perspectives of Romantic poets, artists, musicians, and philosophers emphasised subjective experience and the inner emotional life as the only reliable source of knowledge.

Well, sorta. Here’s how I understand it. It was Schelling that created the word “unconscious” (“unbewusst” in German) and “invented” the unconscious. Was that “rational scientific inquiry” or a flash of inspiration? Google AI:

For Schelling, the unconscious is a fundamental, fertile "dark ground" of creativity, freedom, and life itself, existing beneath consciousness and providing the foundation for both nature and the individual.

Then we go to Schopenhauer and the unconscious “Will,” Wagner and his myth operas, and Freud and Jung. Notice that Freud did not suddenly erupt into the world out of nowhere and discover the unconscious. He was a creature of the philosophy that came before him.

And thus we get to science not as an exercise in logic and reason, but an unconscious act of “creativity.”

Right now I am reading a book about fairy tales by a Jungian who proposes that fairy tales are a product of the unconscious. You mean kinda like Siegi and The Interpretation of Dreams?

So I say that Good and Evil are astonishing creative discoveries of humans that enable us to live in a more peaceable world that a world without Good and Evil.

The problem with logic and reason is that they rather gloss over the contingencies of life. We do not live our lives by logic and reason, but 97 percent of the time by habit and instinct and impulse. And we can’t go back and redo our life after a mistake.

For me, the ideology of science as a product of logic and reason is dangerous, because it creates an illusion of certainty. Just apply logic and reason to the problem at hand and you will solve it. It’s that sort of certainty that led to the dreadful experiments in Communism and the dreary corruption of the administrative and regulatory state. Just construct the right policies and regulations according to the latest science and research and all will be well, Dr. Fauci.

In fact, the understanding of Good and Evil is a work in progress. And so is the development of Tradition. And when the world changes, so also inevitably do our understanding of Good and Evil and our understanding of Tradition.

Hopefully for the better.