William Blake, The Good and Evil Angels, 1795–?c.1805
The old doctrine that evil is merely the deprivation of the good, and therefore does not exist in itself, needs to be corrected and supplemented in the sense that it is not so much the deprivation as the perversion of the good (with the codicil, formulated by Ivan Illich, corruptio optimi pexima, “there is nothing worse than a corrupt good”). The ontological link with the good thus remains, but the question remains of how and in what sense a good can be perverted and corrupted. If evil is a perverted good, if we can still recognise in it a corrupted and distorted figure of the good, how can we combat it when we are confronted with it today in every area of human life?
The corruption of the good was familiar to classical thought in the political doctrine that each of the three virtuous forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and democracy (the government of the one, the few or the many) – degenerates fatally into tyranny, oligarchy and ochlocracy. Aristotle (who saw democracy itself as a corruption of the government of the many) used the term parekbasis, deviation (from parabaino, to move or step aside, pará). If we now ask ourselves what they have deviated towards, we find that they have, so to speak, deviated towards themselves. The corrupted forms of constitution resemble, in fact, the healthy forms, but the good that was present in them (the common interest, the koinon) has now turned towards the self and the particular (idion). Evil, then, is a certain use of the good, and the possibility of this perverse use is inscribed in the good itself, which thus comes out of itself, moving, as it were, alongside itself.
It is from this perspective that we need to read the theorem of corruptio optimi pexima that defines modernity. The gesture of the Samaritan, who immediately goes to the aid of his suffering neighbour, goes beyond itself and is transformed into the organisation of hospitals and care services which, although aimed at what is believed to be good, end up becoming evil. In other words, the evil we face is the result of the attempt to turn good into an objective social system. Hospitality, which everyone can and must give to their neighbours, is thus transformed into hospitalisation managed by the state bureaucracy. Evil is thus a kind of parody (here too there is a pará, a sidestepping deviation) of the good, a hypertrophic objectification that forever displaces it from us. And is it not precisely such a mortifying parody that progressivism of all kinds is now imposing on us everywhere as the only possible way for people to live together? The “administrative state” and the “security state”, as political scientists call them, claim to govern the good, to take it out of our hands and objectify it in a separate sphere. And is so-called artificial intelligence anything other than a displacement of the “good of the intellect” out of our hands, as if, in a kind of exacerbated Averroism, thought could exist without any relationship to a thinking subject? In the face of these perversions, we must always recognise the small good that has been snatched from our hands in order to free it from the deadly machine in which it is caught, “for good”.
Giorgio Agamben: Good and Evil
The old doctrine that evil is merely the deprivation of the good, and therefore does not exist in itself, needs to be corrected and supplemented in the sense that it is not so much the deprivation as the perversion of the good (with the codicil, formulated by Ivan Illich, corruptio optimi pexima, “there is nothing worse than a corrupt good”). The ontological link with the good thus remains, but the question remains of how and in what sense a good can be perverted and corrupted. If evil is a perverted good, if we can still recognise in it a corrupted and distorted figure of the good, how can we combat it when we are confronted with it today in every area of human life?
The corruption of the good was familiar to classical thought in the political doctrine that each of the three virtuous forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and democracy (the government of the one, the few or the many) – degenerates fatally into tyranny, oligarchy and ochlocracy. Aristotle (who saw democracy itself as a corruption of the government of the many) used the term parekbasis, deviation (from parabaino, to move or step aside, pará). If we now ask ourselves what they have deviated towards, we find that they have, so to speak, deviated towards themselves. The corrupted forms of constitution resemble, in fact, the healthy forms, but the good that was present in them (the common interest, the koinon) has now turned towards the self and the particular (idion). Evil, then, is a certain use of the good, and the possibility of this perverse use is inscribed in the good itself, which thus comes out of itself, moving, as it were, alongside itself.
It is from this perspective that we need to read the theorem of corruptio optimi pexima that defines modernity. The gesture of the Samaritan, who immediately goes to the aid of his suffering neighbour, goes beyond itself and is transformed into the organisation of hospitals and care services which, although aimed at what is believed to be good, end up becoming evil. In other words, the evil we face is the result of the attempt to turn good into an objective social system. Hospitality, which everyone can and must give to their neighbours, is thus transformed into hospitalisation managed by the state bureaucracy. Evil is thus a kind of parody (here too there is a pará, a sidestepping deviation) of the good, a hypertrophic objectification that forever displaces it from us. And is it not precisely such a mortifying parody that progressivism of all kinds is now imposing on us everywhere as the only possible way for people to live together? The “administrative state” and the “security state”, as political scientists call them, claim to govern the good, to take it out of our hands and objectify it in a separate sphere. And is so-called artificial intelligence anything other than a displacement of the “good of the intellect” out of our hands, as if, in a kind of exacerbated Averroism, thought could exist without any relationship to a thinking subject? In the face of these perversions, we must always recognise the small good that has been snatched from our hands in order to free it from the deadly machine in which it is caught, “for good”.
January 21, 2025
(Source: Quodlibet.it)