Proclus: On the Existence of Evils

Trois études sur la Providence #3

by Proclus, Carlos Steel (Translator), Jan Opsomer (Translator)

Proclus' On the Existence of Evils is not a commentary, but helps to compensate for the dearth of Neoplatonist ethical commentaries. The central question addressed in the work how can there be evil in a providential world? Neoplatonists agree that it cannot be caused by higher and worthier beings. Plotinus had said that evil is matter, which, unlike Aristotle, he collapsed into mere privation or lack, thus reducing its reality. He also protected higher causes from responsibility by saying that evil may result from a combination of goods. Proclus evil is real, and not a privation. Rather, it is a parasite feeding off good. Parasites have no proper cause, and higher beings are thus vindicated as being the causes only of the good off which evil feeds.

Genres: Philosophy

168 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Proclus Lycaeus (/ˈprɒkləs ˌlaɪˈsiːəs/; 8 February 412 – 17 April 485 AD), called the Successor (Greek Πρόκλος ὁ Διάδοχος, Próklos ho Diádokhos), was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, one of the last major Classical philosophers (see Damascius). He set forth one of the most elaborate and fully developed systems of Neoplatonism. He stands near the end of the classical development of philosophy, and was very influential on Western medieval philosophy (Greek and Latin).

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min]

I found this slim volume languishing in some dusty corner of a local used book store. Having written my bachelor's thesis on the problem of evil many moons ago, I foolishly thought maybe reading some Proclus would rekindle my love of philosophy. In this treatise Proclus makes many maneuvers that we would today recognize as belonging to the time-honored tradition of the privation theory of evil. For instance, he denies that evil can subsist independently of the good that serves as its substrate (i.e. parupostasis or parasitic existence). This denial is so thoroughgoing that causation, efficient or otherwise, do not even apply to evil phenomena (their origin is "uncaused, unintended in a way and indefinite ). Nor can we, according to Proclus, speak of evil as existing in nature as a whole over and above particular (and particularized) natures. Lastly, the later analytic distinction between "natural evil" and "moral evil" is formulated in terms of a "deficiency" in the intellect, in soul and in nature or body. Proclus somehow makes himself sound even more dogmatically optimistic than later monotheistic philosophers who operated within the ambit of the privation theory of evil. For him, no particular soul can ever knowingly will evil (or willingly know evil, formlessness cannot be known). In many ways, Proclus is led to theorize evil as an inevitable by-product of the procession of the Good. But for me, what stands out in this treatise more than anything else is Proclus' energetic defense of matter. In his words, matter is neither good nor evil but necessary. Even more daringly, he floats the proposition that "evil existed in the soul prior to its descent into matter" [33]. This line alone would have no doubt inspired the likes of Schelling, who in his Freedom Essay, famously argued for a kind of "moral pre-destination" that occurs to individual souls in the bosom of godhood.

[Kexuan Yang]

Proclus argued, that evils are parasitic existences: they are not non-existences per se, since that is impossible, but they are non-existences mixed with existences. Evils have no teleological causes, and something is evil in so far as it fails its teleological cause. That sounds like a stereotypical privatio boni ontology, but Proclus was more nuanced than you may expect him to be: he denied that evils lie simply in privations since for Proclus privations are necessary for lower level of beings. He also denied that evils lie in matter or in Plato's indeterminate dyad. Rather he posited evils in some mixed forms in confusions with each other, so nature as a whole cannot be evil since nothing can contradict with the whole, but particular natures can be evil when confused with other particular natures.

I agree with Proclus that some confusions must happen for the existence of evils. But I may not call bodies evil, as Proclus did. Bodies might be ugly or deformed, but that is not evilness. Evilness might happen only in beings that are sensitive to the end of something. In one of the songs by the Chinese singer An Youqi (most likely written by herself) there is one line saying something like "if I were you, what languages can teach me the courage of detachedness, to erase all traces and lose memories without remembering you; but I cannot become you, have no gaps to be found and all my hearts are filled with memories". I may be speculative here to identify evilness as the movement of the free will (not as the organ of "choice", but as the organ to grasp the end) towards detachedness and "to erase all traces and lose memories" as one symptom of evilness. I may be more speculative then, though my conclusions will be merely tentative. One may consider a person as a circle consisting of various levels and the levels closer to the centre (if one adapts the ontology of people like Yannaras) are constituted by one's relationship with higher beings (for instance, one may say that the core of a person is constituted by one's relationship with God, one's reason by one's relationship with other persons and one's understanding by one's relationship with sensible beings, etc.), and evilness happens when one, as Schelling said, detaches from the core and drawing to the periphery, by abstracting oneself from relations, understanding oneself as an "individual" lack of determinations and the consequent darkness of the core as a "gap" that grants "individual freedom". Then one will live on the periphery and vulgarise what is deeper in the core. That might be more original than merely confusion and taking partial goodness as goodness itself: it is a particular kind of confusion that involving an identification of what is abstracted as one's own self. And therefore Schelling is correct to identify it as elevating the self-will above the general will. (People usually say that universals are abstract and individuals are concrete. That is not correct. If an individual is constituted by one's relationship to everything else than what is most general is most concrete and when one identifies oneself as an isolated individual one performs some abstractions.) I agree with Proclus to call evilness a weakness, given that one has to react against something (to "erase" traces and to "lose" memories) to detach and this necessity is itself a manifestation of some weakness. (So I may doubt the very conception that theoretical activities are passive and practical activities are active. Theoretical activities are receptive, but for a being whose end is to receive why is reception passive?) But it is not weakness in the typical sense that "I cannot achieve what I currently will".

Proclus and Gregory of Nyssa are the only two late antique authors that I know who did not ontologically downplay the ontological seriousness of evils and noticed the tension that evilness can be powerful and that the higher beings can commit more serious evils. Proclus explicitly considered a type of evil being as being deprived of goodness but not yet deprived of power. This line is later radicalised by Schelling and Solovyov (especially in Solovyov's iconic figure of the Anti-Christ). Schelling defined freedom of will as the capability to choose between goodness and evilness. That is a bad definition, since to choose evilness does not lie in capability, but in incapability. Schelling's own writings may condemn this definition. First, in System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling himself deducted the space and direction as constituted by the self's reflection on one's own movement. So here movement comes first and one understands movement as "movement against a direction" only in a derivative sense. If one applies Plotinus than Movement can only be movement towards Goodness and detachment is non-Movement. Only when one abstracts from ends can one consider two directions as simply symmetric without any distinctions. Second, in the Freedom Essay Schelling cited Luther's doctrine of the bondage of the will approvingly, described arbitrariness as a "moral disease" and a morally perfect person as someone with no way to retreat. One has to ask why this ideal person still has the capability to choose evilness. Schelling criticised Leibniz' example that coldness is a mere privation of temperature by asserting that something cold still has a phenomenologically positive content. That is correct, but the "phenomenological equivalence" does not involve different levels of being only one one abstracts phenomena from some ontology. "2+2=5" is as ordered as a string as "2+2=4" is, but this equivalence is only an equivalence as strings. If one takes what the strings are for into considerations, then "2+2=5" is less ordered because it is disharmonious with what the string is for. Schelling also accused Neo-Platonism of pandemonism. That is also unfair: for finite beings, as Hölderlin says, "immer bestehet ein Maas", and that is not evilness per se.