For the people
Since I neither assume nor require my readers to be familiar with the history of philosophy, it is worth emphasising that the tensions inherent in my belief in human freedom are by no means shared by all philosophical thought.
For Spinoza (and determinism more generally), freedom is not a mystery but a purely psychological misunderstanding, rooted in the impossibility of knowing all the causes.
For Socrates and Plato, it was self-evident that evil is, ultimately, nothing but ignorance: the absence of knowledge — of the good. No one can knowingly do evil. Within the framework of moral intellectualism, evil, in the properly moral sense of the word, simply does not exist.
One particularly unusual position on these questions of freedom, evil and knowledge is Nietzsche’s.
In the article Siempre se van los mejores: The good die first, we uncovered subtle affinities between Nietzsche, Platonism and Catholic Christianity.
Attacking both, Nietzsche famously wrote:
‘Christianity is Platonism for the people.’
What is curious is that, on certain fundamental questions, his own views appear to gravitate towards the very version he labelled for the people.
What else are we to make, for instance, of the aphorism: Error is not blindness; error is cowardice?
Does it not suggest that error has a profoundly ethical — or moral — dimension?
The very audacity of asking such a question would, of course, make any seasoned Nietzsche scholar throw up his hands in horror. We would promptly be reminded of Nietzsche’s celebrated perspectivism and of his rejection of the categories of good and evil, which, we are told, had finally to be ‘overcome’.
And we would then be justified in asking what Nietzsche himself understood by cowardice.