What is the nature of evil, and why does it even exist?
It is normal for a person to view his or her life and everything that happens around him or her in terms of good and evil. After all, we are beings who live in a world of norms, among which the moral first place.
If good is a positive value and therefore exceptionally attractive, then evil, as its antipode, serves as a negative value, although it is also not devoid of attractiveness. After all, there is such a phenomenon as the charm of evil.
So what is evil, and how did it come to be? The obvious answer lies in the binary device of the world. That is, everything in the world is set up as a unity of opposites, that's its substantive nature. There is being and carrying, dark and light, life and death, good and evil. Moral essence of man is also binary, from here we have different qualities of personality, in which good and evil are mixed up sometimes in the most bizarre way.
So, the first approach to the nature of evil is substantive. Evil and good are an inseparable pair, like all the other opposites in the world. That's how it works from the beginning.
The other approach to the nature of evil and its cause is subjective. Here evil is understood as a result of purely human vices, deficiencies of its spiritual system. That is, the cause of evil is declared man, and in the device of the world there is no evil.
Such an understanding of the nature of evil has that rational grain that really - the moral is associated exclusively with people. This phenomenon is unknown to anyone else, because only people assess the world in terms of good and evil. In this sense, evil is a clear generation of people.
This is the view of Christianity, for example. After all, he has no other way to solve the nature of evil, Christianity can not accept a version of the substance of evil. For then it turns out that evil is created by God. And Christian God = Good and All Grace.
Aurelius Augustine was really suffering from this problem. How to explain the existence of evil, when God is Good and cannot be the cause of evil in principle?
The answer is this: God did not create evil, but people, because of the imperfection of their nature, became the cause of evil because they can be wrong and choose from the hierarchy of values not what is needed. And they are mistaken because they are between God and animals, combining the features of both. Augustine called evil a twisted will. The will is from God, and its perversion is from the lowly, animal nature of man.
And finally, the question arises: Is it possible to overcome evil? If we recognize the substantive nature of evil, the answer is unambiguous: of course not. After all, it is impossible, for example, to mark the law of gravitation. But people can influence evil, soften it, win in each specific situation.
If we recognize the subjective nature of evil, it turns out that the overcoming of evil in the forces of man himself. In this case, Christianity, for example, believes that evil can be overcome, and good will finally triumph.
