The Sovereign Will

Talking of the spiral (last post) reminds me that the “problem of evil” has another dimension beyond theodicy (see Label Cloud for posts on that). I’m all too familiar with the philosophical solution that evil is “the absence of good.” We encounter it stated and restated in the great traditions. The problem with that view is that it doesn’t viscerally satisfy—an emphatic way of saying that something in the intuition rejects that answer. No, dammit, there’s more to it than that! Certain kinds of evil arising from passivity—like laziness—may be explained that way. People who are lazy certainly don’t move up the spiral toward the greater good; indeed they probably slowly sink. Laziness is a kind of balanced state: the will is lacking to do anything, good or evil; hence it is an absence of good. But we do encounter active evil in the world—the kind of actions where I, for one, find it almost impossible to believe that the deed springs entirely from ignorance. Positive, willful disregard of good must be present in it. I’ve experienced that. And if I have, so have others.

To focus on this a little more sharply, I would propose that good and evil deeds both require active willing. It is only our ability to form habits that deceives us into thinking that we “slip” into evil or do good because we’re “programmed” to do so. We forget that habits are formed out of voluntary activities. I type like a bandit, but I didn’t always. I began by concentrating. Thus even laziness is active—but it is habit, hence I can use it, as I do above, as an example of a neither-nor state of balance.

The very presence of a “sovereign will” automatically produces a polarized reality—because the will, to be real, has to have choices. Mazdaism, to give an example, is one of the most uncompromisingly polarized cosmologies. It projects an image of an infinite column of light in the “upward” direction, an infinite column of darkness in the “downward.” We’re in the mixing zone, as it were; maybe we're created here. The symbol of the spiral is an elaboration of that polarity, a rather creative intensification of it: the spiral suggests resistance to the vector, be it up or down. In ascent the spiral’s curvature is produced by our resistance, our selfishness; in its descent, the same curving is produced by our longing for the good; it brakes our rush to please ourselves.

Conceptualizations like heaven, purgatory, and hell correspond to real states—but they are too simple. We choose to be in these realms. They aren’t granted us, we’re not assigned to them, we’re not condemned to them. What we receive without any merit on our part is being, being of the highest order: with consciousness and with will.

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Illustration courtesy of Wikipedia, available here.