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need to read into them some much less ambitious, more specific
interpretation. We are so well practised at doing this that we
the instigators 141
supply the meaning without hesitation, and commonly without
being aware that it was needed. As Elizabeth Anscombe points
out, it is never intelligible to praise something if you cannot say
what is the good of it, unless that thing is one of the final, basic
human needs which provide an explanation for the praise of
anything else. What, then is so good about evil?
If the answer to this question at some stage is The good of it is
that it s bad this need not be unintelligible; one can go on to
say And what s the good of it s being bad? to which the
answer might be condemnation of good as impotent, slavish
and inglorious. Then the good of making evil my good is my
intact liberty in the unsubmissiveness of my will.7
Satan, in fact, is intelligible because he is not original at all in his
views on liberty; he sees it as a good just as everybody else does,
and uses the notion of its being good to praise it. That notion has
not vanished into its opposite by some startling logical trick in
the inversion of opposites. Opposites have not, indeed, been
inverted; the war-cry merely exalts one good liberty over all
others with which it may conflict. And the sense which liberty
has here is that rather melancholy one which it has sometimes
been found to have in human politics; namely, liberty to rule
others, to have one s own kingdom.8 It is only his own freedom
which interests him. At the other end of the scale, impotence
and slavery are still evils, which is just what they were before.
Satan s value-judgment is not the magnificent start of a totally
new game. It is a familiar move in the old one, a move which still
leaves room for the questions which occur to him, such as Is
your dignity really more important than your entire happiness,
along with that of all your followers? and if so, why? Answers to
such questions are not read off by each individual from his per-
sonal and conclusive formula. They are worked out painfully
again and again by all of us in a shared situation, where similar
142 wickedness: a philosophical essay
clashes arise for all, and no compromise is finally satisfactory.
Neither dignity nor liberty can be erected into a supreme value,
settling all conflicts. That would give a morality every bit as naive
as the conventional one it is designed to replace. And tragedy
cannot subsist with a naive morality. For tragedy, the moral as
well as the physical force on both sides must be felt; there must
be real loss, whatever the outcome. We make nonsense of Paradise
Lost if we insist on thinking of Satan as simply a noble liberator or
an unfairly oppressed individualist.
Yet today we are drawn to think in this way, and this distort-
ing tendency illustrates our whole problem about the under-
standing of evil. We find it hard to hold before our minds both
Satan s genuine grandeur and his fault. Since the Romantic
Movement, the idea has grown that perhaps the fault itself is the
real source of the grandeur, that its sheer magnitude makes it
intrinsically splendid. I have just met this suggestion with the
prosaic, non-Romantic reply that most of the grandeur actually
depends on the familiar good qualities which still remain
notably on virtues such as courage and the rest on the mere
scale of the conflict, which is not of Satan s creating. If one
constructs a morality in which courage and independence are
the only significant virtues, it is certainly possible to consider
Satan as a straightforward hero. But this is to destroy the tragedy.
Its central paradox would then vanish, and its hero would simply
be noble, persecuted and unfortunate. We would get no light
from him on the psychology of wickedness, because the idea of
wickedness itself would then have vanished from the world and
only bad faith would remain. We have seen the difficulties of this
kind of view, and we now notice how it would wreck the drama.
If we abdicate the right to judge between motives if we refuse
to put ourselves in the place of a dramatic character and ask
whether he ought to have let them move him we lose all con-
cern about his choice, and can learn nothing from it. The story
of Satan is there so that we can understand his motives, not so
the instigators 143
that we can honourably refrain from thinking about them on the
grounds that we are in no position to judge him. His motives are
of great interest. They should not be assumed to be those of
liberators like Garibaldi, on the one hand, nor of honest indi-
vidualists like Nietzsche, on the other. Instead, they are the kind
of motives which are adequate for the instigation of a great
crime, though not (as we have seen) for actually committing it,
since great crimes demand many hands and therefore many
motives. Their centre is the violent hatred and rejection of all
that seems to be superior to oneself, and their familiar names are
pride and envy.
3 THE EMPTY CENTRE
These motives are negative in that they are essentially destruc-
tive. They are of course positive in being strong. The dae-
monic force of those people who are able to lead multitudes
to appalling acts is real; the thesis of this book never questions
that. It is still, however, negative in two closely related
senses because its aim really is destruction, and because
there goes with it a lack of other interests and motives, an
emptiness at the core of the individual, which apparently
accounts for the peculiar force with which the chosen, purely
destructive aim is pursued. It really does not seem to be a
matter of wanting something destroyed because it stands in
the way of some other aim, but of pursuing other aims
because they allow opportunities for destruction. Thus, all
accounts of Hitler s activities agree about the centrality of his
obsession with anti-semitism, and this was expressed repeat-
edly in a way which endangered other apparently essential
aims. For instance, even towards the end of the war, when
Germany was in real danger, transports taking Jews to the
extermination camps were still given priority over urgently
needed supplies for the army, and subject governments in the
144 wickedness: a philosophical essay
conquered territories were continually urged to anti-semitic
activities rather than to those which might be relevant to the
war-effort.9
This motivation is so extraordinary that people have difficulty
in believing in it, or, if they admit its existence, in accepting that
it could be powerful enough to produce the acts which appear to
flow from it. We must consider this whole question in the next
chapter. It may help, however, to approach it by way of a rather
fuller discussion here of what constitutes an adequate motive.
Hannah Arendt s remarks about Eichmann are of great interest
here:
Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would
have been further from his mind than to determine with Rich-
ard III to prove a villain. Except for an extraordinary diligence
in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no
motives at all.10
4 THE CASE OF IAGO
But as it happens, Iago too has been held to lack motive.
Coleridge described his soliloquy as the motive-hunting of
motiveless malignity ,11 and many other critics have joined
the motive-hunt and tried to bring it to a better conclusion. The
difference between the two cases is very interesting. The point
about Eichmann is of course not the absence of any motive, but
the difficulty of finding one which distinguishes his career
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