This is hilarious, and I'm sure took a lot of time to put together.
Likely isn't receiving the upvotes it deserves because the humour is so niche, and well, LessWrong is more logic and computer science-y than philosophy at the moment.
Thank you!
PS: Would love to see more posts in the future that incorporate emojis, example:
Apollodorus: anybody wonder why the vegetarians are online so often? If they love the natural world so much, I say they should be getting more mouthfuls of grass than anybody!
[ ✅9, including Asimov, Spinoza and others].
Socrates: The same can be said of you and your whining Apollodorus, but of course you are always exempt from your own criticisms!
[😂31, including Pythagoras, Plato and others.]
Anselm: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for the existence of God, which this tweet is too small to contain. 🙏😇
1
Susan Nieman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2015), visualized as a social media feed:
hates his Ptolemaic astronomy class
If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.
launches the Enlightenment
Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.
likes Manichaeism
God could no more create a most perfect world without evil than He could create a square circle. If we were omniscient and could see the whole of creation over the whole of time, we would realize its perfection. Over time we will learn the connections between sin and suffering, and better understand God’s wisdom.
invents Calculus
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee:
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good;
And in spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
If plagues or earthquakes don’t break Heaven’s design, why should we think the cruel acts of men would?
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Lisbon destroyed by earthquake, fires, tsunami; tens of thousands killed; God’s benevolence thrown into doubt.
Best of all possible worlds, my ass.
This is a sign and a warning. Don’t be sorry for the victims, but be thankful for the mercy shown to the survivors who now have a lesson in God’s promised end to worldly treasures.
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of nature; everything degenerates in the hands of men. Please come to my book signing.
invents transcendental idealism
I’m starting to distrust the intuition that says virtue and reward are systematically, necessarily connected. All human moral effort seems an attempt to fulfill this intuition, but it fails, and so requires faith in a Divine judge to set the scales right in the end.
Come to think of it, if we knew that there was a necessary connection between virtue and reward, that would be the end of virtue, as it would just be subsumed by self-interest. What makes an action virtuous is that we do it because it is right, not because we expect fortuitous consequences.
invents deontological ethics
Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Try this one on for size: ‘Act as though the principle of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.’ What do you think?
God is either willing to remove evil and cannot; or he can and is unwilling; or he is neither willing nor able to do so; or else he is both willing and able. If he is willing and not able, he must then be weak, which cannot be affirmed of God. If he is able and not willing, he must be envious, which is also contrary to the nature of God. If he is neither willing nor able, he must be both envious and weak, and consequently not be God. If he is both willing and able — the only possibility that agrees with the nature of God — then where does evil come from?
God gave us a great gift, the gift of free will, but that necessarily included the freedom to do wrong. God, in order to be just, as we know God to be, must meet wrong actions with bad consequences. So there is no incompatibility between there being evil and cruelty in the world and there being a just and good God in charge of it all.
So either there is a competing evil agency up against God’s power, or God Himself planned man’s fall from grace, and that this fall should be contagious, that it should ceaselessly and endlessly produce all imaginable crimes over the entire face of the earth — in consequence of which he prepared all the misfortunes that can be conceived for the human race — plague, war, famine, pain, trouble — and after this life a hell in which almost all men will be eternally tormented in such a way that makes our hair stand on end when we read descriptions of it.
I admire Pope and agree with him. No philosopher has been able to explain moral and physical evil. Bayle only taught us to doubt, but he also makes us doubt ourselves in our doubting. Yet it is cruel to respond to a Lisbon earthquake by speculating that maybe it is part of a greater good. (Still, if people did not themselves do such evil to one another, we could well tolerate a Lisbon earthquake now and then.)
Voluptuousness and philosophy produce the happiness of the sensible man. He embraces voluptuousness by taste. He loves philosophy by reason.
When you look at the inner perfection of mechanism and delicate beauty of a plant that preserves itself throughout the turns of the seasons, it is impossible for anyone to believe that this is just the result of natural laws — one immediately discerns the hand of the Creator in this.
You know what really gets my goat? The Creator gave us eros, or in any event eros is such a magnificent and uncanny thing that even without the Creator, it would tend to make anybody worship the Divinity. But then, in this ‘best of all possible worlds,’ we get syphilis. And where did it come from? Not from fallen sinners getting their just deserts, but from innocent Indians living in a state of nature overseas.
Polytheism makes more sense, given the weird contradictions in the world around us — the universe doesn’t appear to have a purpose, but many cross-purposes. The idea that this universe must have a creator, who is thereby mighty and praiseworthy, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It’s just as likely to have many creators, or a creator who was haphazard and thoughtless, from the evidence available to us. For that matter, why assume it was created at all. The universe isn’t like a watch lovingly crafted by a watchmaker, but like an egg laid by an ostrich, who generates and deploys it without putting any thought into its construction or destiny at all.
I’ve been trying to think up the worst crime against nature imaginable, but I’m having a devil of a time of it. All crimes seem to either be encouraged by nature or surpassed by it. I still have hope of one day outdoing the devil himself in evil, but I don’t think I’ll ever outdo God… I’ll have to be content to learn from His example and describe Him carefully in my writing, between bouts of sodomy.
Life is a monotony of uninterrupted suffering. Or rather suffering interrupted only by monotony. (Even our fondest imaginings of the afterlife divide it into suffering and monotony.) The world is likely as bad as it could possibly be and yet still continue to exist. But there is a sort of justice in this, in that we are so contemptible that this is what we deserve.
And of course there is no God.
To die quickly is a blessing. To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all.
Morality by its very nature is constantly looking at Reality and calling it wrong and unacceptable in comparison with the unreal ideal it sets up. Morality therefore stands between you and your healthy impulse to embrace life. If you want to know the nature of evil, don’t look to philosophy and theology, look to psychology and history: we invented it to serve a need, and we can remember that it is just an invented myth if we try. God is dead, but good & evil continue to wheeze on life support. Embrace all the world, including what you now call ‘evil.’
You want to know why we have these intuitions and longings about a Creator who is intensely concerned with our behavior and who metes out just or unjust suffering and rewards? It’s because we have lingering issues about our parents and have only incompetently and incompletely grown up. They’re illusions we cling to as we try to evade the responsibilities of maturity.
Imagine that you are rebuilding the world with the object of making people happy — of giving them peace and rest at last — but to do this you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one small child, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears. Would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Will you believe that the people for whom you do this would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, remain forever happy?
Hannah Arendt changed her relationship status with Martin Heidegger to “It’s complicated.”
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Nation that brought us Goethe now brings us the premeditated, methodical, industrialized murder of millions of people. World saved from those rat bastards by a people who celebrate the incineration of cities and advance the technology of mass murder to make it push-button and near-instantaneous. Philosophy again caught flat-footed by evil.
Philosophy is out of its depth here. You don’t respond to Auschwitz by trying to make sense of it, but by acknowledging and trying to cope with the senselessness of it.
In the history of the world, we see before us the concrete image of evil in its most fully developed form. If we consider the mass of individual happenings, history appears as an altar on which individuals and entire nations are immolated; we see all that is noblest and finest destroyed. But out of death new life arises, purified and rejuvenated.
This is a sign and a warning. Germany was the innovator in the creation of the concentration camp world, but she is not so different from the states that will follow her.
Would Nietzsche ask us to will this evil? Could anyone consider himself blessed if his eternal recurrence included an eternally recurring Auschwitz? Were its victims made stronger by their suffering? Whatever else Auschwitz did, it decisively refuted Nietzsche.
My life’s principle, which I was taught very early on, was to desire and to strive to achieve ethical values. From a particular moment on, however, I was prevented by the State from living according to this principle. I have nothing against the Jews, personally.
Some people went along with the horror, but others did not. Some people said ‘no, I won’t.’ Evil is not a mighty, domineering, magnificent, calculating agent — it is a petty, threadbare, cowardly, weak, and vulnerable one. This allows me to still feel at home in the world and to have a childish trust in God.
In the midst of a murderous world, reflect on murder and make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers or accomplices, and those who refuse. Over the coming years an endless struggle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward.
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Terrorists turn airliners into missiles, crash them into the Twin Towers in New York and elsewhere in a remarkably un-banal fashion; thousands killed. Those few philosophers still interested in evil still trying unsuccessfully to grapple with the Holocaust, surrender the discussion to postmodernist provocateurs and pundits.
By the way, in case it hasn’t been clear throughout, I’ve been playing fast and loose with chronology, and have mixed actual quotes with paraphrases. Neiman’s book puts all of these philosophers, from various time periods, into a sort of conversation with each other (something I thought was pretty cool and I wish I could find more of), and I’ve just tried to somewhat whimsically illustrate it as one.
Someone really did put a magnet on our refrigerator depicting an angel in flowing gossamer next to the (unattributed) quote from Kant about how he is filled with awe when he reflects on the starry heavens above and the moral law within.