Absolute Good Exists

January 21, 2015

Reaction to our former post, Absolute Evil Exists, has been swift and robust. Many deny the post's affirmative argument. Only about 38% of comments and emails agreed. One reader said, "Well I don't know about 'absolute' but evil certainly does exist." A few other respondents complained that if the case was made for the existence of Absolute Evil, then this implied an equally strong case for the existence of Absolute Good can also be made. Absolutely! Let's examine that case.

In Paris recently, a young Muslim man, an immigrant to France from the nation of Mali, showed the world that Absolute Good abounds all around us even in midst of a destitute instance of Absolute Evil by others. Without a thought to his own life, he hid shoppers in a Jewish deli out of the way from the follow-on assassin to the Charlie Hebdo assassinations earlier on that day. Even after the gunman had already killed people during the hostage taking in the kosher deli that murderous Friday, 24-year old shop attendant Lassana Bathily hid several people in the deli’s freezer, turned off the light and told them to stay calm. Mr. Bathily then escaped from the back of the deli, was taken to the ground by anti-terrorist police, and handcuffed for everyone's safety until his identity was sorted out. Then, he handed over the very keys to the roll-up doors that enabled the police to shoot down the terrorist inside, thus saving more human lives. Four hostages were murdered, but many more survived. Their lives were saved by an instance of Absolute Good in the mind of one man, a Muslim man working in a Jewish delicatessen who decided to defy an instance of Absolute Evil. According to our ontological definition of Absolute Good, no greater act of Good is even conceivable in that given instance.

Just as our precise, ontological definition of Absolute Evil rested on the principle that ..."no greater act of evil can be conceived..." so to rests our definition of Absolute Good on the notion of 'inconceivability'. Here's another example. Is it conceivable that Leopold 'Poldek' Pferrerberg's inspiring the author Thomas Keneally to write Schindler's Ark that became the movie, Schindler's List, was anything less than an instance of Absolute Good? Is it also conceivable that the thousands of actions taken by Oskar Schindler himself saving about a thousand mostly Polish-Jews was anything less that instances of Absolute Good? What kind of thinking process would it take to come to a negative conclusion? A painfully nuanced post-modern one that's what kind! Plato had a better idea. 'The Good' enables knowledge and knowing, but it is not itself a state of being.

"With things known, the Good is not only the cause of their becoming known, but the cause that knowledge exists and of the state of knowledge (the cause of their state of being , though the Good is not itself a state of being), although the Good is not itself a state of knowledge, but something transcending far beyond it in dignity and power.” (Plato, Republic. Book VII)

It is 'The Good' that attracts the mind in anything known in a way similar to our attraction to the beauty of a sunset. It is 'The Good', therefore, that is the absolute reality attracting all other things in reality to it, not through the circumstances of the senses, but through the power of the mind alone. Modern thinkers reject this categorically. From Tolstoy to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Quine, and Kripke, the overwhelming view of the influential philosophers of the last 200 years is to reject metaphysics and with it absolutes of any kind. Ironically, they unwittingly use absolutes in the very process of their rejections. For what else can they mean but that their 'relativism' is absolute since they value it as 'The Good and 'The True''? Take the example of Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (Freddie to his pals). In a remarkable book, written when he was only 25 years old and a devoted apostle of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Language, Truth, and Logic A. J. Ayer insists that any claim not verifiable by sense observations is literal 'nonsense.' The only problem here, as Wittgenstein himself pointed out, is that Freddie's absolute claim itself could not be verified by sense observations. Small wonder that Wittgenstein distanced himself from the Vienna Circle that Freddie belonged to. Undaunted by truth, modern thinkers reject the existence of 'absolutes', and they do so absolutely. Moreover, they are totally oblivious to their internal logical contradictions in doing so. Even worse, they venomously condemn and ridicule anyone who opposes their ideas.

So, whether you're a Platonist or a modern relativist Absolute Good exists, otherwise you have no firm foundation for your thinking and we ought not to seriously consider what you claim. Cicero had it right.

There is one more connection to be made concerning the existence of 'The Good' in the absolute sense, and that is its connection to 'The Beautiful' or Absolute Beauty. But that will be the topic of the next blog here. As always your comments and objections are very welcome. That's how I learn.