| This question <43|43> overall <55|57> Hans: <38|57>. |
| Question 59: Why did God create something as imperfect as nature and humans? (And what does this have to do with the topic at hand?) Compare chapter 1 in Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. |
| [56] Hans: Did God create something imperfect? Reflections on Message [43]. |
| The writer's insistence that the world is perfect almost seems to me to be a matter of age. Many of us grow up thinking that the world is perfect, that all the bad in the world is only a means to bring out the good: all one has to do is to “wipe off the excess.” |
| As one grows older it is hard to deny that the world is full of senseless suffering, of bads which cannot be justified by their good sides. Historically, several ways arose to evade this painful truth. The stoic pretends this makes no difference; the sceptic denies it. Religion puts the resolution of life's injustices into an afterlife. Idealist philosophy separates the pure ideals from dirty reality which has to work itself up to this ideal state. Hegel's philosophical system culminates in a static state in which all the contradiction are “sublated” and everything is turned into harmony. By the way, a nostalgia for the harmony of ancient Greece, which the author of message [43] shares, has been an important factor in the history of Western Philosophy. |
| The question why dirty reality exists in the first place is answered this way: only by going through dirty reality can the ideals develop themselves. In other words, by creating an imperfect world, God gets to know himself. |
| On a practical plane, humans have always tried to subjugate other humans to do the dirty work. In modern society, if you have money, you can relegate the dirty work to others. |
| What if we give up the illusion that the world makes sense? Is there then any hope, or does the world sink into a directionless morass? There seem to be some positive forces in the world. The things which are good are spread around, because they are more widely applicable, because they benefit more people and more things in general. And the things which are bad grind to a halt by their own inner contradictions. This is how one can explain how the many good things came about which the world has, without imposing a outside “teleological” goal on history. |
| On the more practical plane, the masters sink into idleness while their slaves, by their dirty work, discover that nature's tendencies can be elicited for human purposes. |
| Literature (but these are difficult:) Start perhaps with Bhaskar's “Plato Etc.”, Verso 1994, pp. 1-4. Some of it is also dealt with in Bhaskar's “Dialectic, the Pulse of Freedom”, Verso 1994, but this may not be recognizable to the beginner. |
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