Reflections on Narcissism and Capitalism

     Christopher Lasch was writing in the late 1970s about a culture in which recognition was becoming detached from durable participation in shared practices and determined by traits like visibility, performance, impression management, and expert systems of evaluation (therapists, advertisers, bureaucracies, media institutions). His central claim was not that people had become more vain in some timeless moral sense, but that the capitalist environment was beginning to reward a form of selfhood oriented toward adaptability over rootedness, presentation over contribution, and recognition over responsibility. The “narcissistic personality” in his account is someone who must constantly monitor how they are perceived in order to secure affirmation in unstable environments where long-term membership (in craft communities, extended families, civic associations, even stable workplaces) can no longer be relied upon as sources of identity or esteem.

     Now social media intensifies this dynamic by radically lowering the threshold for visibility while simultaneously making recognition quantifiable (likes, shares, followers), continuous (24/7 feedback loops), comparative (algorithmic ranking), and monetizable (influencer economies, brand-building). So the self is drawn into an ongoing project of curating an image in response to metrics that are external to any shared practice ordered toward a common good. In Lasch’s terms, what was once an adaptive disposition becomes socially stabilized. The performance of selfhood is no longer a response to cultural conditions but rather becomes a precondition for social participation. And this is where my earlier thesis about system-generated needs becomes relevant. One increasingly needs things like a professional profile, a social presence, or a personal brand to access employment, networks, or influence.

     Now, how does this connect with narcissism as understood by two other influences on me, Sigmund Freud and Alice Miller? Freud’s account of narcissism distinguishes between primary narcissism, that is, the infant’s initial libidinal investment in itself as the center of experience; and secondary narcissism, which means the withdrawal of libidinal investment from external objects back into the self, often in response to frustration or insecurity. From this perspective, narcissistic traits emerge when stable object-relations (attachments to others, institutions, shared practices) fail to provide reliable recognition or security, prompting the ego to seek affirmation through fantasy, self-display, or control of perception.

     Alice Miller, especially in The Drama of the Gifted Child, emphasized the developmental conditions in which the child learns that love and recognition are conditional upon performing roles that satisfy parental or social expectations. The resulting “false self” is organized around managing the responses of others rather than expressing integrated needs or commitments. Miller is trying to describe the situation of a child whose primary caregiver (often, but not necessarily, the mother) requires the child to meet the caregiver’s emotional needs. The parent’s own fragility, insecurity, or need for admiration means that love is not given freely, but is contingent upon the child being pleasing, successful, emotionally attuned to the parent, non-demanding, or otherwise affirming of the parent’s self-image. Now the problem for the child is not simply that this is unpleasant. It is that the child’s survival depends upon preserving the relationship. So the child cannot afford to register anger, neediness, confusion, resentment, or even spontaneous joy, if these threaten the parent’s equilibrium. Instead, the child develops what Miller calls a false self, a mode of being organized around anticipating the reactions of others, managing impressions, and performing the role that secures love. From a psychoanalytic perspective, narcissism here is not grandiosity but a defense against abandonment: If I can become what you need me to be, I can preserve the bond on which my existence depends.

     Now notice the structural convergence: Lasch describes a social order in which Freud describes an ego under conditions of insecure attachment, Miller describes a child adapting to conditional recognition. Social media environments arguably reproduce, at scale, conditions analogous to Miller’s developmental scenario: recognition becomes contingent upon performance; visibility depends upon satisfying opaque evaluative criteria; self-presentation must be adjusted to secure approval. So the traits Lasch associates with a narcissistic culture (anxiety about self-worth, dependence on external affirmation, difficulty sustaining long-term commitments) can be interpreted, in Freudian or Millerian terms, as adaptive responses to environments in which recognition is unstable and mediated by systems that reward performative self-disclosure. In that sense, social media does not simply “cause” narcissism. It selects for, amplifies, and normalizes modes of self-relation that are already adaptive within accumulation-oriented, mobility-driven societies, the very societies Lasch was analyzing before the relevant infrastructures existed.

     The result is a feedback loop. Institutional instability encourages performative selfhood; performative selfhood is rewarded by platform economies; platform economies further destabilize durable practices of membership. And the anthropological concern returns. Forms of selfhood oriented toward recognition through visibility may be poorly suited to sustaining the long-term commitments upon which shared practices – and thus human flourishing – depend.

. . .

And the narcissistic personality type, in turn, reproduces the capitalist social structure.  In social systems where recognition is conditional, competitive, and mediated by public evaluation (e.g., labor markets, media systems, and platform economies), individuals may come to frame their sense of self around the management of perception rather than participation in shared practices ordered toward common goods. Strategies of self-presentation become necessary for securing, status, belonging, or even employment. Over time, shared practices such as teaching, artistic creation, care-giving, or political engagement may be reinterpreted as opportunities for self-performance before target audiences. When participants approach these practices as stages for securing recognition, their internal goods are subordinated to external goods such as visibility, income, or prestige. In this way, personality structures formed in response to conditional recognition help promote social relations that reward performance, mobility, and commodification, thereby reproducing the regime that rendered such structures advantageous. Our deeper human needs which can only be fulfilled in community are neglected.

    Within consumer capitalism, identity may become a primary medium through which recognition is sought and negotiated. Claims grounded in race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or profession may aim, in principle, at justice or inclusion within common goods; yet within media- and platform-driven environments structured by amplification and virtue-signaling, the articulation of identity can also function as a form of self-presentation. Political engagement may thus be mediated less through sustained participation in institutions capable of collective deliberation and action than through declarations, symbolic alignment, and online visibility. Under these conditions, identity becomes, in addition to anything else, a form of narcissistic expression, contributing at times to the reproduction of social systems that reward visibility over durable membership in shared practices and leaving capitalism safe from deeper opposition. A symptom covering up the wound to human nature.

     From a Marxian perspective (I am not a Marxist, but the man understood aspects of capitalism that we should not forget) such dynamics may be understood in terms of prevailing forms of social consciousness. The categories through which agents interpret themselves and pursue recognition reflect the structure of relations within which they must act to secure livelihood or belonging. Even oppositional activity may therefore be conditioned by the narcissistic traits that govern ordinary participation, taking forms optimized for virtue signaling and audience engagement. Critique may become visible, even stylized as anti-capitalist, while circulating within system-mediated arenas that remain compatible with, or beneficial to, the regime’s ongoing operation. This is one of the secrets of how capitalism in the end absorbs seemingly critical movements within its larger culture (e.g., the 60’s rebellion, which was permeated by the narcissism of which I speak). In this sense, dominant forms of self-understanding both arise from and help stabilize the underlying relations of production and coordination. It reproduces the regime not through coercion alone but through the practical consciousness of those who must live in it. In Lasch’s terms, the system is stabilized less by false belief than by the socialization of selves equipped to navigate it. Which brings him quite close, though by a different route, to Marx’s insight that prevailing forms of consciousness reflect the relations within which people must act to live.

Theses on Capitalism and Human Nature

 

Thesis 1: Human beings flourish through participation in shared practices ordered toward common goods. Human flourishing cannot be reduced to biological survival or preference satisfaction but depends upon participation in practices through which persons are recognized as members of a shared form of life. These include the exercise of virtue, meaningful (non-alienated) labor, political action in Arendt’s sense, and relations of mutual care or love. Such practices presuppose bounded forms of association within which persons can be known, act together, and share responsibility for the material and normative conditions of their common life.

 

Commentary:

This is the anthropological premise drawn from Aristotle, Aquinas, Berry, and Arendt. It grounds the later claim that scale matters for the realization of distinctively human goods.

 

Thesis 2: Subsistence-oriented macro-economies tend to embed economic power within dense networks of shared practice. Where economic activity is ordered toward the reproduction of a shared form of life rather than toward expansion, production is governed by limits set by land, season, household labor, and the need to sustain durable relationships over time. Economic interdependence typically coincides with shared social membership, raising the non-economic costs of domination and thereby constraining exploitative relations within the community.

 

Commentary:

This does not deny the possibility of exploitation (e.g., Sparta was a subsistence economy), but locates its likelihood in the degree to which economic interdependence coincides with or diverges from communal membership (contrast with Amish communities).

 

Interlude.

    I need to clarify what I mean by subsistence economy. A subsistence economy is not one that merely satisfies the biological requirements of survival, but one that is ordered toward securing the material conditions necessary for the ongoing reproduction of a shared human form of life across generations. Such an economy aims at sufficiency relative to the practices through which persons become capable of participation in common goods including the cultivation of virtue, the transmission of knowledge, the exercise of craft, artistic expression, political deliberation, familial life, and relations of mutual care. In this sense, subsistence must be understood at both a biological and a cultural level. Biological subsistence requires the provision of food, water, shelter, clothing, and bodily security sufficient to sustain life. Cultural subsistence, by contrast, requires the provision of those material supports without which participation in the practices constitutive of human flourishing would be impossible: tools for literacy and education (e.g., paper, books, printing technologies), means of artistic and symbolic expression (e.g., instruments, pigments, performance spaces), artifacts of memory and tradition (e.g., archives, libraries, liturgical objects), tools adequate to craft and intellectual work, and technologies that support health, communication, or environmental stewardship at scales compatible with communal governance. Within a subsistence-oriented economy, technologies are evaluated not solely according to their capacity to increase productivity or consumption, but according to whether they sustain or displace the practices through which a community maintains its shared life. A printing press, for example, may be wholly compatible with subsistence insofar as it supports literacy, education, and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. By contrast, technological systems like the smart phone that reorganize attention, labor, or social interaction in ways that subordinate communal practices to the imperatives of scale or accumulation may undermine the very forms of participation that subsistence seeks to secure. Production is governed by limits set by land, season, household labor, craft competence, and the need to sustain relationships over time. The people upon whom one depends economically are typically the same people with whom one must raise children, share tools, bury the dead, resolve disputes, celebrate marriages, and survive bad harvests. Economic power is therefore embedded within a dense web of non-economic relationships. You cannot easily exploit someone whose continued cooperation is necessary for your own family’s survival through the winter and whose judgment of your character matters in domains that cannot be exited by contract (marriage alliances, reputation, mutual aid, etc.). In such a setting, power is constrained by what Alasdair MacIntyre would call the requirements of ongoing practices, or what Wendell Berry would simply call “membership.” Thus the aim of a subsistence economy is not the indefinite expansion of productive capacity, but the maintenance of a material basis sufficient for memory and learning, artistic creation, craft competence, family formation, political action, and the cultivation of mutual responsibility. It seeks to provide what is necessary not merely for human survival, but for the continuation of recognizably human ways of living together.

 

Thesis 3: Large-scale agrarian and feudal economies institutionalized class domination through control of land. In early empires and feudal regimes, access to subsistence was mediated by juridically enforced obligations to landholding elites who extracted surplus through tribute, rent, or labor service. Exploitation was structurally embedded but mediated through relatively stable relations of personal dependence, often accompanied by customary obligations of protection and stewardship.

 

Commentary:

Here Marx’s insight into class opposition holds at the level of structural description, though power remains territorially anchored and socially intelligible.

 

Thesis 4: Capitalist economies are structurally oriented toward continual accumulation. Expand or perish. Get richer or perish. In market-based systems, surplus must be reinvested to maintain competitive position. Economic activity becomes ordered not toward sufficiency or status maintenance but toward the indefinite expansion of productive capacity. Technological innovation is rewarded insofar as it enhances productivity, reduces labor costs, or expands market opportunities and thus conditioned by this imperative.

 

Commentary:

This introduces the systemic imperative often described (misleadingly) as “growth,” better understood as constant accumulation under competitive pressure, typically concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

 

Thesis 5: Technological development reflects capitalist imperatives rather than autonomous progress. The trajectory of technological innovation is shaped by the economic systems within which it is financed and deployed. Accumulation-oriented economies tend to prioritize technologies that enhance efficiency, control, or scalability, whereas alternative institutional arrangements might direct comparable scientific capacities toward ecological stability or community-level autonomy. (The form the Internet took, for example, embodies at every level capitalist imperatives, though it was developed as a university research-sharing tool. Other technologies are not developed in capitalism that might be developed in a subsistence economy.)

 

Commentary:

This integrates Marx with Lewis and Langdon Winner: technology is not neutral but embodies prior judgments about ends. It is not too much to say that technology is social and economic power objectified.

 

Thesis 6: System-generated needs become conditions for how we conduct our lives and communicate. As participation in education, health care, economic exchange, and civic administration becomes dependent upon technological infrastructures, access to system-generated goods (e.g., digital platforms, connectivity) ceases to be optional and becomes a precondition for acting within shared practices.

 

Commentary:

At this point, maintaining or expanding such systems appears indistinguishable from promoting human flourishing itself, rendering critique difficult.

 

Thesis 7: The distinction between serving human flourishing and reproducing the system that defines it becomes progressively opaque. Where agency depends upon integration into complex infrastructures, investments in system maintenance are justified as necessary for participation in common life, even where systemic expansion may erode the communal practices through which flourishing was originally understood. (e.g., social media a recent example, etc.)

 

Commentary:

System reproduction becomes self-legitimating.

 

Thesis 8: Geopolitical security compels participation in accumulation-oriented systems.

Where technological capacity functions as a principal determinant of military and geopolitical power, political communities must pursue continual economic and infrastructural expansion not merely from preference for domination but from prudential concern for autonomy. Otherwise, a polity risks becoming “the Indians” to other expanding powers.

 

Commentary:

This is a dilemma I cannot find a way out of.

 

Thesis 9: The pursuit of communal limits may entail strategic vulnerability. Communities that limit accumulation to sustain the anthropological conditions of flourishing risk subordination by rivals organized for technological and economic expansion.

 

Commentary:

Security through (technological and economic) power conflicts starkly with flourishing through limits.

 

Thesis 10: National democracies embedded in globalized systems apparently lack the capacity for structural reform. While elections remain meaningful at the level of policy administration, capital mobility and technological competition constrain the range of economically viable options available to any single polity, orienting democratic governance toward managing systemic imperatives rather than collectively determining them.

 

Commentary:

Elections determine managers of the deck, not the course of the ship.

 

Thesis 11: The restoration of community-based economies depends upon resolving the tension between scale and security. This may require either protective security islands (the Amish), global institutions capable of limiting competitive accumulation, or arrangements that decouple defensive technological capacity from the systemic imperative of economic expansion.

 

Commentary:

These options appear to exhaust the principal structural responses to the dilemma.

 

Thesis 12: In technologically advanced capitalist systems, power increasingly takes the form of systemic control over the conditions of agency rather than direct interpersonal domination. As technological development becomes embedded within accumulation-oriented economic systems, the expansion of human power over nature tends simultaneously to expand the power of some human agents over others by enabling the design and governance of infrastructures upon which participation in social life depends. In such contexts, domination may operate not through coercive command but through the structuring of environments, incentives, and technical systems that shape the range of actions available to participants, rendering the exercise of power less visible as interpersonal rule and more pervasive as the management of the conditions under which agency is possible at all.

 

Commentary:
This reflects Lewis’s claim in The Abolition of Man that the “power of Man over Nature” becomes, in practice, the power of some men over others mediated by technology. In accumulation-driven systems, this power is exercised not primarily by sovereigns or ruling estates but by those who design, finance, or regulate the technological infrastructures through which ordinary social practices are conducted. The result is a form of domination compatible with formal equality and procedural democracy, yet capable of shaping human action at a deeper level than earlier, more overtly juridical forms of control.

 

 

Thesis 13: Where economic and technological systems are organized at scales incompatible with community-level participation in shared practices, the erosion of the social conditions required for human flourishing tends to manifest in the commodification of core human capacities and the destabilization of familial and communal forms of life.

     When labor, attention, sexuality, artistic expression, and even identity itself are increasingly mediated by market exchange and system-level coordination, activities once embedded within networks of mutual recognition and shared purpose may be reorganized as services, performances, or consumable experiences. The displacement of work from practices ordered toward common goods into roles defined by market demand may contribute to forms of alienation in which the exercise of skill and judgment is subordinated to externally determined metrics of efficiency or profitability. Familial and communal relationships may be strained by patterns of mobility, time-discipline, and precarity associated with competitive labor markets, while cultural production risks becoming oriented toward visibility and monetization rather than the transmission of meaning across generations.

 

Commentary:
In such conditions, the “pillars” of human life — stable households, intergenerational continuity, meaningful work, shared ritual, and the cultivation of character — may become increasingly difficult to sustain. As Christopher Lasch observed in his analysis of the culture of narcissism, social environments that reward performance, flexibility, and self-presentation over durable commitment may encourage adaptive strategies oriented toward self-optimization rather than membership. The resulting pathologies need not be interpreted as failures of individual virtue alone, but as responses to institutional contexts that render long-term responsibility and mutual dependence economically or socially costly.  The issue is not simply that traditional forms of life have been abandoned, but that the structural conditions under which they might be sustained have been progressively weakened by systems that reward mobility, abstraction, and scalability over rootedness and continuity. The damage is not only economic, but anthropological, affecting the capacities through which persons become capable of fidelity, trust, craftsmanship, and love.

    It is not that people cease to value love, fidelity, craftsmanship, or responsibility; it is that the institutional environment makes acting on those values increasingly difficult and rewards alternative strategies better suited to survival or advancement. So the “damage” to the pillars of humanity appears less as decadence than as a shift in the kinds of selves the system selects for.

    And that dovetails with my earlier theses. If human flourishing depends upon practices sustained within bounded communities, and if large-scale accumulation systems systematically reorganize life in ways that make such participation impossible, then the emergence of self-forms oriented toward performance rather than membership may represent not cultural decline alone, but structural misalignment between human nature (anthropological reality) and institutional demands.

      Taken together, this connects with the opening anthropological claim: that human flourishing depends upon participation in shared practices through which people recognize one another as members of a common life ordered toward goods not reducible to preference satisfaction or market exchange. Where economic and technological systems are organized at scales that render such participation difficult or impossible to sustain, the capacities through which these practices are realized – fidelity, trust, craftsmanship, political responsibility, and relations of mutual care – may be progressively weakened. (I believe to have observed this weakening from my great grandparents, members of a viable farming community, to my generation and beyond.) The resulting transformation in forms of selfhood Should not be attributed to a decline in morals alone, but reflects adaptive responses to institutional environments that reward mobility, performance, and exchangeability over long-term commitment and interdependence (cf. Macintyre). In this sense, the erosion of familial and communal forms of life may be understood not as the abandonment of human nature, but as the consequence of social arrangements in which the conditions required for its realization are increasingly difficult to secure.

 

 

postscript. I believe "original sin" should be interpreted as being caught in regimes of power that distort original human nature. Of course, the original sin is wanting to escape reality, human reality, natural reality, divine reality, for the purpose of aggrandizing the self (in the form, historically, of power over others, their labor, and the command of the surplus wealth produced by it.) Human beings are created for participation in an order not of their own making: the natural order (our embodiment and limits); the community order (mutual dependence); and, in theological terms, the divine order (goods that transcend preference). Original sin, on my reading, is not simply that individuals are prone to be selfish and greedy, but that the human will is tempted to refuse creaturely participation in favor of self-determination or “autonomy”: i.e., to seek security, permanence, or mastery by reorganizing the world in ways that promise independence from vulnerability, dependence, or finitude. Historically, this has often taken the form of

power over others; appropriation of their labor; command of surplus; the attempt to stand outside reciprocity.

     If the desire to escape dependence or contingency is widespread (as both classical theology and modern psychoanalysis would suggest), then regimes of power may arise that institutionalize this impulse, not only permitting but rewarding forms of agency oriented toward control, accumulation, and insulation from shared limits. Thus the distortion becomes no longer merely personal but social: institutions may come to embody strategies for managing vulnerability through expansion; technological development may promise control over natural processes; economic systems may reward those who successfully detach security from membership.

    So I want to say that original sin manifests not only in disordered individual choices but in the creation and maintenance of social arrangements that seek to overcome the conditions of creaturely dependence through the concentration of power and control. In this sense, the temptation “to be as gods” can be read as the attempt to secure flourishing by standing apart from the limits and mutual obligations that make it possible.

Identity Politics and Reason

       If reason aims not merely at the defense of what one already believes but at understanding what is, then the ability to inhabit, even temporarily, a plurality of serious perspectives is essential to its exercise. To reason well is not only to construct arguments from within one’s own framework but to test those arguments by asking how they would appear from within alternative, intellectually responsible positions. This requires a willingness to enter into the conceptual and moral outlooks of others without immediately reducing them to error or bad faith. A thinker who can seriously consider Ivan’s moral refusal, Nietzsche’s tragic affirmation, or a scientific naturalist’s account of reality, without collapsing them into caricature, is better positioned to see both the strengths and limits of his own commitments. In this sense, plurality is not a threat to reason but one of its conditions, since it exposes assumptions that may otherwise remain invisible.

      By contrast, if “identity” comes to mean the maintenance of a closed epistemic circle in which one’s beliefs are insulated from challenge by remaining within an echo chamber of like-minded views, this can become hostile to wisdom. Such insulation may protect a sense of coherence or belonging, but it also reduces the likelihood that one’s judgments will be tested against serious alternatives. For example, a political community that discourages engagement with opposing viewpoints may find its members increasingly confident yet less able to justify their positions beyond the group’s internal language. Similarly, an academic or social milieu that treats dissent as disloyalty may inadvertently weaken the very commitments it seeks to preserve by preventing them from being examined in the light of competing accounts. In this way, an identity understood as epistemic enclosure can limit the scope of inquiry, whereas engagement with a range of thoughtful perspectives can deepen understanding and support more resilient forms of belief.

      In that spirit I love thinkers like Nietzsche who challenge my views. I am sure I am closer to wisdom by engaging with serious thinkers who reject my core beliefs. They are my partners and even friends, not my enemies.

      Identity politics, identity culture, whether MAGA or “progressive” (or whatever form of political correctness) is the death of reason.

Moods, Feelings, and Attitudes. Love and Morality

 I distinguish attitudes (Einstellungen) from feelings and moods, while not denying that feelings and moods can sometimes disclose real features of the world. Feelings and moods are typically episodic and fluctuating. One may feel anxious, joyful, resentful, or calm in response to particular events or even without any clearly identifiable cause. Moods, especially, can color how the world appears for a time: in grief, everything may seem heavy or pointless; in delight, even ordinary surroundings may appear radiant. In this sense, feelings and moods can reveal aspects of reality, for example by attuning us to danger, loss, or beauty that we might otherwise overlook. They are not simply distortions, even if they can, like thoughts, mislead.

       An attitude, by contrast, is not a passing state but a more enduring orientation that shapes what counts as meaningful or significant in the first place. To have an Einstellung zur Seele, for example, is not to feel warmly disposed toward others at a given moment, but to be set toward them as beings whose suffering and flourishing matter. This orientation informs the language one uses, the expectations one has, and the practices one sustains. It determines whether another person’s pain appears as something that calls for response or merely as an observable fact.

     Feelings and moods often arise within such attitudes. The same event may evoke very different emotional responses depending on the attitude from which it is encountered. A child’s cry may provoke concern in one who is oriented toward care, irritation in one who is exhausted, or indifference in one who is detached. Think of airplane passages who openly express their disapproval of a crying baby as opposed to one who deeply believes there must be a place in the world for babies (not necessarily on an airplane). The feelings differ not only because of the event itself but because of the stance through which it is interpreted. In this way, attitudes can condition the emotional landscape by setting the background against which particular experiences are judged.

    Because attitudes are deeper, more stable and practice-shaping, they can sustain patterns of response over time. They may also determine which features of reality are noticed as morally important. From within an attitude formed by love, vulnerability may appear as a claim upon us; from within one shaped by distrust, it may appear as a weakness to be exploited. Feelings can then reinforce or challenge these stances, but they do not by themselves establish the framework within which such interpretations make sense. So while feelings and moods can reveal something about how things are –  for instance, alerting us to danger or drawing our attention to beauty –  attitudes operate at a deeper level by structuring the field in which such revelations occur. They influence not only how we feel but what we are able to recognize as significant. This may help explain why certain moral judgments, such as the affirmation or refusal of the world, are not reducible to passing emotional states but are tied to more fundamental orientations toward reality that reason can examine but not simply produce.

    Attitudes, in Wittgenstein’s sense of Einstellungen, are not private inner states that individuals generate for themselves, but socially inherited orientations toward reality that are sustained within practices of language and culture. A culture provides not only words but forms of life in which certain ways of responding become intelligible and natural. Raimond Gaita’s idea of a “gift of culture” points to the fact that our capacity to see others as worthy of care, to recognize vulnerability as morally significant, or to experience certain events as momentous or sacred, depends upon having been initiated into practices that hold these attitudes in place. Language does not merely describe these orientations but helps to constitute and transmit them, so that words such as “welcome,” “promise,” or “forgive” carry meaning only within patterns of interaction that embody trust and responsiveness.

       Pregnancy and birth offer a clear example. In a culture shaped by an attitude of love toward new life, the language surrounding these events may include terms like “expecting,” “mother,” “child,” or “blessing,” and practices such as celebration, preparation, and communal support may accompany them. These linguistic and cultural forms orient participants to encounter the unborn or newborn as someone to be welcomed and protected, rather than as a biological occurrence to be managed. The attitude expressed in such language shapes how the situation is experienced: the vulnerability of the infant appears as a call for care, and the transition to parenthood as a meaningful responsibility. Through participation in these practices, individuals learn not only how to speak but how to see, so that the love-worthiness and claim of the child become apparent without requiring explicit argument.

     By contrast, where cultural practices and language do not sustain such an orientation, the same biological events may be framed in more technical or instrumental terms, and the significance of new life may not appear in the same way. This illustrates how attitudes are inherited and passed on through shared forms of life. They are practiced in rituals, narratives, and everyday interactions, and through these means they become available to subsequent generations. In this way, culture and language form and cultivate of attitudes that disclose goods such as care, responsibility, and welcome, and reason may later reflect upon these attitudes without having produced them independently.

    These cultural gifts are also fragile, because the attitudes they sustain can be thinned or displaced by alternative orientations expressed in language and practice. A culture shaped by reductionism may come to describe pregnancy primarily in technical or managerial terms, and an emphasis on autonomy understood as unconditioned self-determination may frame dependence or vulnerability as constraints to be overcome rather than as calls for care. Literary figures such as Milton’s Satan have sometimes been taken as archetypes of a stance that prizes independence above all else, even at the cost of relation. Within such a framework, practices like abortion when treated as a routine form of birth control may be understood less as tragic responses to conflict than as instruments for maintaining personal freedom. This shift in language and expectation can alter how new life is encountered, making what once appeared as a claim for welcome instead appear as a problem to be managed. In this way, attitudes formed within cultures of love and responsibility may erode if the practices and vocabularies that sustain them are replaced, illustrating how the transmission of such orientations depends upon shared forms of life that can be reshaped over time.

    Shared forms of life, including the thoughts, emotions, and attitudes that are sustained within them, do not merely register reality but help determine which of its aspects are disclosed as significant and which are obscured or ignored. An orientation formed within practices of care may bring vulnerability, dignity, or responsibility into view, while one shaped by distrust or instrumentalism may narrow what appears as morally relevant. In this sense, our inherited attitudes can disclose goods that would otherwise remain unnoticed, but they can also distort or even cancel aspects of reality by reducing what is encountered to a thinner set of relations. This does not entail that all such orientations are equally valid or that truth is relative to culture, because attitudes formed within love are self-authenticating in the sense that they sustain the conditions under which our moral concepts retain their point. From within an orientation of love, the claim that people must not be treated as mere things appears not as a local preference but as a recognition of something that makes a claim on us, that limits our will. Cultural practices and languages that preserve such attitudes enable participants to perceive goods that are presupposed in shared moral life, whereas those formed through privation may undermine the very practices in which these goods are intelligible. Thus the dependence of moral perception on inherited attitudes need not lead to relativism, but may instead explain how certain stances disclose reality more fully by maintaining the framework within which judgments about justice, care, and dignity can be meaningfully made.

     Morality is not optional because the concepts through which we understand one another as persons are woven into the shared practices that make human life intelligible at all. To speak of promises, injuries, trust, betrayal, care, or responsibility is already to participate in a framework that distinguishes between what ought to be done and what ought not. One may question particular norms, but to deny that any moral claims are binding is to undermine the very language in which such questioning takes place. Moral skepticism therefore risks incoherence, since it presupposes the significance of truthfulness, fairness, or harm even as it attempts to dismiss them. The experience of love is foundational in this respect because it orients us toward others as beings whose good matters in itself, rather than merely as objects of use or observation. Within relationships of care, the vulnerability and dignity of the other appear as reasons for action that are not optional without ceasing to treat the other as a person. In this way, love sustains the conditions under which moral judgments can be meaningful, and the recognition of such judgments does not depend upon individual preference but upon an orientation that makes sense of our shared forms of life. Without love and the practices that sustain it, no morality.

The Limits of Reason and Wittgenstein's Einstellung zur Seele

I want to try to connect what I wrote about the limits of reason concerning the ultimate questions of life to what I take to be a foundation of reason – what Wittgenstein called Einstellung (attitude), as in Einstellung zur Seele / attitude toward a soul. It is easy to confuse it with something too psychological, like a mood or opinion, when it is doing deeper work.

     When Wittgenstein speaks of an Einstellung  (for example, an Einstellung zur Seele) he is not referring to a belief that one holds after reflection, such as “I believe that human beings have souls.” He is pointing instead to a way in which one is always already oriented toward another person, or toward the world, that shows itself in one’s spontaneous responses, language, expectations, and practices. It is closer to what is meant when we say that a compass is “set” toward the north, or when someone is described as being “von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt.” In such cases, what is in view is not an inference or conclusion, but an attunement or alignment that governs how things appear as meaningful at all. (I owe my understanding to Gaita.)

    An Einstellung zur Seele means that I do not approach another human being as a complex organism to which I then attribute an inner life by hypothesis. Rather, I see him immediately as someone who can suffer, rejoice, hope, or betray. I speak to him, not merely about him. The structuring principle of my interaction, shown in words such as “promise,” “forgive,” “hurt,” or “trust,” presupposes this almost fixed orientation. Language itself grows up holding this stance in place. It would be odd to say that I infer the presence of a soul and then decide to treat him accordingly; my treatment expresses the stance that makes sense of such concepts in the first place.

     This connects with Raimond Gaita’s insight that certain moral realities, such as the dignity of a person or the horror of cruelty, are visible from within love in a way that is not accessible from a detached standpoint. From within an Einstellung formed by love, the claim that a person must not be treated as a mere thing may appear self-evident, not because it has been demonstrated, but because the stance itself discloses what is at stake. But where love is absent, one may understand the words but fail to see their point; the world may appear as a field of manipulable objects rather than as a community of persons. (Trump)

       In this light, the earlier discussion of the limits of reason in affirming the world can be seen as turning on differing attitudes toward reality as such. To be oriented toward the world in trust, gratitude, or love is not to have concluded that it is good, but to be set toward it as a place in which goods are possible and meaningful. To be oriented in distrust or refusal may make the same affirmation appear morally obtuse. Reason can examine the coherence of these stances and the practices that sustain them, but it may not be able to generate an orientation of affirmation or protest from neutral premises. The affirmation of the world may therefore depend, in part, on an attitude formed within relationships of care and beauty, much as the recognition of another’s soul depends upon an orientation that is expressed in the language and practices of love rather than inferred from observation alone.

     A simple illustration might be the difference between how a loved parent and a clinical stranger perceive the same child. A mother hears her infant cry in the night. She does not register this first as a physiological signal emitted by a small organism and then logically infer that something like pain or fear may be present. She hears it immediately as a call, as distress, as the suffering of someone who matters. She goes to the child, picks her up, speaks to her, comforts her. Words such as “hurt,” “scared,” or “needing me” are not conclusions drawn from observation but belong to the stance within which the child is already encountered as a being with an inner life. Her orientation toward the child is what Wittgenstein would call an attitude toward a soul, and the language of care grows up within that orientation. A stranger, by contrast, might hear the same cry in a hospital ward and describe it in neutral terms as a sound of a certain intensity or frequency. He need not deny that the child suffers, but his relation to her does not spontaneously take the form of concern or responsibility. The difference is not primarily one of factual belief but of stance. From within the mother’s orientation, the child’s vulnerability and dignity appear as obvious and morally significant; from outside it, they may be acknowledged without carrying the same immediate claim.

      Something analogous may apply to the affirmation of the world. From within an orientation formed by trust and love, the world may appear as a place in which goods are possible and worth preserving, and its being may seem worthy of affirmation even in the face of its evils. From within a stance shaped by betrayal or deprivation, the same affirmation may seem unwarranted or morally naïve. In both cases, reason can articulate and examine the claims that are made, but the basic orientation from which the world is encountered as affirmable or as hostile may precede the arguments offered in its defense or rejection.

       An attitude for Wittgenstein is not a belief arrived at by argument but an orientation or stance toward reality that is formed through experience and sustained within forms of life, often through language. When a child grows up within relationships of trust, care, and beauty, language comes to be learned within an environment in which the world is experienced as intelligible, responsive, and worth engaging. Words such as “home,” “friend,” “promise,” or “future” acquire their sense within practices that presuppose security and rootedness. In this way, an orientation of affirmation may develop that does not take the form of an explicit conclusion but of a lived sense that reality is, at some basic level, good or hospitable. Conversely, where love and other essential goods are absent, language may grow up within practices marked by insecurity, violence, or deprivation. In such contexts, the same words may carry different resonances, and the world may appear as threatening or indifferent. An orientation of distrust or refusal may develop, not through theoretical reasoning but through the patterns of life within which meaning is formed. From within a loving orientation, the goodness of being may appear as something self-evident, not in the sense of being provable but as a background condition against which other judgments make sense. From outside that orientation, such affirmation may seem unwarranted or even morally suspect.

      This suggests that the question of whether the world is worthy of affirmation cannot be settled by argument alone, because the very capacity to see it as affirmable may depend upon an orientation formed prior to explicit reasoning. Reason can examine, criticize, and articulate these orientations, but it may not be able to generate them from nothing. Thus the limit encountered in our discussion may not lie in a failure of logic but in the fact that affirmation or refusal of the world is bound up with fundamental stances toward reality that are shaped by love, trust, or their absence. In this way, the tension between Ivan’s protest and the affirmation implicit in ordinary love may reflect not only competing arguments but differing attitudes toward the world that reason can illuminate but not finally judge.

      Though limited to inside the beam and invisible from outside, attitudes embodying love (and goodness, beauty, all connected) are self-authenticating and authoritative in a way attitudes born of privation or negation cannot be. One way to put this is that an Einstellung formed within love does not merely add a favorable emotional coloring to an otherwise neutral perception, but discloses goods that are internally connected to the practices and concepts that make our moral (and religious) language intelligible at all. When someone is “set” toward another in love, he does not simply feel warmly disposed; he is oriented so that the other’s vulnerability, dignity, and claim upon him are immediately apparent. Concepts such as “care,” “promise,” “betrayal,” or “cruelty” have their sense within this orientation. They are learned and sustained in relationships of trust and responsiveness. From within such a stance, the recognition that it would be wrong to treat the other as a mere object appears as something that needs no further justification, because it is bound up with what it means to take the other seriously as a person.

     By contrast, an attitude shaped by privation or negation may narrow or occlude these goods without supplying an alternative framework in which our moral concepts retain their point. One might come to see the world like Trump, seeing others primarily as threats, resources, or competitors. This orientation can be described and perhaps even defended in terms of survival or advantage, but it tends to hollow out the very practices in which notions like trust or responsibility make sense. It does not so much reveal a deeper layer of reality as reduce what is encountered to a thinner set of relations. In this sense, attitudes formed within love are self-authenticating not because they are immune to criticism, but because they sustain the conditions under which our moral judgments can be meaningful at all, whereas attitudes formed by deprivation often undermine those conditions. Their authority lies in their capacity to disclose goods that are presupposed in our shared forms of life, even if that disclosure is visible most clearly from within the stance itself.

        This hopefully helps explain why the limit I ran up against in my thoughts in response to Ivan Karamazov may not be a defect in reasoning so much as a feature of the kind of question I was asking. If our most basic moral concepts such as dignity, innocence, betrayal, care, justice have their sense within an attitude formed by love, trust, and responsiveness, then the capacity to see the world as affirmable in spite of its evils may depend upon an orientation that reason alone cannot produce. On the one hand, from within such an orientation, the goodness of being may appear as something that is not inferred but taken up in practice, much as the humanity of another person is not deduced but acknowledged in how we speak and act. Reason can clarify what is implied by that stance and defend it against incoherence, but it may not be able to generate it from neutral premises. On the other hand, an orientation shaped by deprivation or negation may make the same affirmation appear morally obtuse, because the goods that love discloses are not experienced as binding. Such unfortunates look at the world as a dog watches TV, without having the capacity to understand all they see. In that case, arguments for the world’s goodness may seem like attempts to rationalize what is, rather than to respond to what is disclosed as worthy of care. Reason can articulate the tension between affirmation and protest, but it may not be able to decide between them if the very perception of what counts as a good is tied to differing attitudes.

      So the limit of reason in affirming the world may arise because the judgment that the whole is worthy of affirmation presupposes a stance toward reality that reason examines but does not itself establish. Just as the recognition of another’s soul depends upon an orientation expressed in the language of love, the affirmation of being depends upon an orientation in which the goods disclosed by love are taken as authoritative. Reason can illuminate and criticize such stances, but it cannot compel them in the way it compels assent to a demonstration. In this way, the boundary I encountered may reflect the dependence of certain moral judgments on fundamental attitudes that are formed within lived practices rather than derived from argument alone.

  

Thoughts on Ivan Karamazov and Why Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is so Deep

  A summary of Ivan Karamazov's thinking from The Brothers Karamazov.  He does not argue that God does not exist. Rather, he argues that even if God exists and even if all suffering is somehow redeemed in the end, he cannot accept a world built at the cost of innocent suffering. He focuses especially on the torture and abuse of children because they cannot be held responsible for their fate. Even if God were to reveal that every tear and every act of cruelty was necessary to achieve a final harmony, Ivan believes that no future happiness or explanation could justify such suffering. A universe purchased at the price of one innocent child's tears is, for him, morally unacceptable. He therefore does not reject God so much as "return the ticket" to creation, refusing to consent to a world whose beauty and order depend upon such a price.

  Ivan is not obviously wrong, which is why Dostoevsky lets him speak at such length. I want to try to make further sense of it here.

      As I have read, I think, in the German Bishops’ Catholic Catechism, the thought that the world cannot be affirmed as it is forces the question on us of whether an afterlife, or some form of ultimate justice and mercy, is necessary if affirmation of the world is to be morally permitted. For if one says that the world as it is, including all the unspeakable horrors, past and present, may still be affirmed as good, this appears to imply that the suffering of its victims is in some way ultimately justified or redeemed. But if there is no final rectification of injustice, then those who were tortured, starved, raped, murdered, or extinguished before they could flourish have simply been irreparably wronged, and their wrong is final. In that case, the judgment that it would have been better never to have been born is not only psychologically intelligible but may be morally justified. To affirm a world in which many have cursed the day they were born for the sake of my loveable life could seem egoistic. Ivan’s refusal would then appear as a rational moral judgment that a world in which radical injustice is finally unredeemed is not worth affirming. If no justice comes, no restoration occurs, no mercy heals, and no life is returned, then the existence of such a world appears morally indefensible from the standpoint of its victims, at least.

      One is then driven toward one of two positions: either affirm the world without redemption, eternal justice, or afterlife, accepting that suffering is final, injustice may be irreversible, and some lives are simply crushed, which is what Nietzsche seems to call for when he calls for affirmation of life as it is; or affirm the world because injustice is not final, mercy may be ultimate, and every tear may yet be answered, which is the eschatological path toward resurrection, restoration, and eternal justice that Dostoevsky presses. Nietzsche’s rejection of the “other world” is not merely an attack on superstition but a refusal to allow affirmation to depend upon redemption beyond this life, whereas the bishops’ position (if memory serves; perhaps I also read that in a book of Hans Küng) is that without the hope of ultimate justice, affirmation becomes a betrayal of the innocent. In this sense, belief in redemption would not be a consolation prize but the condition for loving the world without injustice. To affirm the world as it is may therefore commit one either to Nietzschean tragic affirmation or to eschatological hope, since otherwise the victim’s curse that the day of their birth should perish may stand as morally warranted. This does not yet amount to an argument for an afterlife, but it does imply that love of the world may require the world to be more than it appears to be.

       In The Brothers Karamazov, in the exchange with Alyosha, Ivan rejects creation even on the assumption of ultimate justice in the afterlife, and this is what makes his position especially difficult to answer. He does not argue that the world should be rejected because there is no final justice, but that it should be rejected even if there is. In The Brothers Karamazov, he grants Alyosha the entire eschatological vision, including resurrection, forgiveness, universal reconciliation, the mother embracing the torturer, and all tears wiped away, and still replies that it is not that he does not accept God but that he returns Him the ticket. He therefore rejects Creation even on the assumption of ultimate justice because his objection is not merely that injustice goes unanswered but that it was permitted at all. No future harmony, however complete, can morally justify the torture of a single innocent child.  Even if justice is done, mercy is shown, and suffering is redeemed, Ivan maintains that the price was too high. 

      Many theologians think reason is helpless here and one must look toward religion. In the Orthodox tradition, one of the most direct engagements is found in Sergius Bulgakov, especially in The Bride of the Lamb and his writings on theodicy. Bulgakov argues that no future harmony can justify the suffering of the innocent in the sense of making it retrospectively acceptable as a means to an end. He insists that divine justice cannot simply “balance the books.” Instead, he develops the idea that God does not justify suffering but takes it upon Himself in the Cross. The response to Ivan, on this view, is not that evil will be outweighed by a greater good, but that God enters into the history of suffering and bears it. Redemption is not compensation but participation. This shifts the question from whether suffering can be justified to whether it can be transformed through divine solidarity.

      Similarly on the Catholic side, Hans Urs von Balthasar is perhaps the best interlocutor with Ivan. He maintains that God’s response to the world’s suffering is not a theoretical justification but the drama of the Cross, in which God undergoes abandonment and death. Balthasar emphasizes that redemption does not erase the reality of suffering but involves God’s descent into it, which alone could answer Ivan’s moral objection. Likewise, Pope John Paul II in Salvifici Doloris rejects the idea that suffering can be explained away as useful, and instead presents it as a mystery in which God’s love is revealed through solidarity with those who suffer.

      All of these theologians accept Ivan's point about it being impossible to justify the torture of one child by any greater good or final consolation (Heaven). (That is also my position.)  With Ivan they also reject the premise that Creation could only be justified by appeal to future harmony or greater goods, i.e. Heaven. The Christian answer, as they see it, lies not in justifying God's act of Creation despite evil but in the claim that God has entered into the history of suffering and will ultimately overcome it without having willed it as a means. Evil is on us alone. We have wounded Creation and God cannot undo that. But God does not abandon us or the world. Whether this works will depend on whether one finds the idea of divine participation in suffering morally meaningful. But it represents one of the most serious theological attempts to answer Ivan without trivializing his protest.

      I think the death of God on the cross always is a terrible judgment upon world we have made, then and now. If the cross is taken seriously, it means that something has gone terribly wrong: He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. The murder of innocent children - just today, the girls' school in Iran, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine - a terrible contradiction between what is and what ought to be, a contradiction that cannot be resolved from within the world. If the world were simply affirmable as it stands, then the incarnation would have been unnecessary, redemption merely pedagogical, and suffering instructive. The crucifixion, however, means that the world, as it is, cannot be affirmed without qualification, not because existence itself is evil, but because the history of the world is marked by a disorder that reaches into its moral and social structures. In this light, the cross may be understood God’s refusal to affirm it as it is, as we have made it. God submits to to the world's violence, suffers under it, and so exposes it as what it is. 

     One possible theological response to Ivan is therefore not that the world is good because it will be redeemed at the end of time, but that the world is not morally affirmable in its present condition, and that God’s own suffering in it is the sign of that. Affirmation, on this view, is not for the world as it is, but for Creation as intended and as promised. Faith affirms not the given order of history, but the possibility that what has been violated will yet be restored (without justifying any evil). This does not prove Ivan wrong, but it allows one to say that the refusal to affirm injustice may itself be shared by God, and that hope is directed not toward justifying suffering but toward overcoming it. This is how I have thought.

     Today, without really having a good reason to think I was wrong, I think differently. Indeed, one of the most famous passages in the New Testament explicitly says: “For God so loved the world….” Once one loves a particular person, such as one’s own child, the question of whether the world is morally affirmable changes from an abstract judgment about the totality of history to a concrete question about whether it is permissible to will that this person not exist. To love one’s children is to will that they exist, that they live, and that they flourish, but their existence is inseparable from the existence of the world in which they were born. Thus it makes sense: if we believe in a God who loves our children, then God must love the world. One cannot coherently will that children exist while also willing that the world not exist, since their being depends upon the world. Love therefore introduces a tension that pure moral protest does not face. Ivan may say that it would have been better had the world never been, but if one loves one’s child, it becomes very difficult to say that it would have been better had she or he never been born. (It is significant that Ivan has no children and experienced no real love from his awful father.) To will their existence is already to affirm the reality in which they exist, not because that reality is morally perfect, but because their being is good. One may still protest that the world contains injustice and innocent suffering, indeed will protest it all the more passionately given the love one bears for one’s children or other people and places - horror could befall them, we know that is a possibility from the start. But one cannot easily will that the whole be undone if that would entail the beloved child's nonexistence. Love does not dissolve the protest against the evils of the world, but it complicates it by making refusal of the world risk becoming a refusal of the beloved child. This does not demonstrate that the world is morally justified, but it does imply that love of particular beings may commit one to affirming a reality that one cannot wholly approve.

       The Cross can offer comfort by allowing one to affirm the being of the beloved without having to affirm the world as it is. If love for one’s child commits one to willing her existence, and therefore to accepting the reality in which she exists, the Cross prevents that affirmation from becoming a reconciliation with injustice. It acknowledges that the world into which one’s child is born is marked by suffering, disorder, and violence, and that these are not morally acceptable features of creation but wounds within it. In the crucifixion, God does not stand apart from the world’s history of innocent suffering, nor does He justify it by appeal to a greater harmony, but enters into it and undergoes it. This allows one to say that the love which affirms the existence of the child does not require one to bless the conditions that threaten or destroy that existence. The Cross affirms the goodness of being by sharing in its vulnerability and exposes the injustice that distorts it without declaring that distortion necessary. It directs hope not toward the acceptance of suffering as meaningful in itself, but toward the possibility that what has been violated may yet be restored without ever having been justified. In this way, the Cross can sustain a love of the world that remains faithful to the good of the beloved while refusing to reconcile itself to the evils that endanger that good.

  

       If one takes the Cross seriously, the comfort it offers to the victims of the worst forms of human cruelty cannot come from explaining their suffering, justifying it, or showing how it contributes to a greater good. Any such explanation would seem to confirm Ivan’s fear that innocent suffering is permitted as a means to some final harmony. The Cross offers something different. It affirms that God does not stand outside the history of violence as its architect or quiet observer, but enters into it as one who is himself tortured, humiliated, and unjustly killed. The victim is not left alone in suffering, nor is that suffering treated as morally necessary or spiritually useful. Instead, the Cross exposes cruelty as cruelty by undergoing it without retaliation and without endorsing its logic. It declares that what is done to the innocent is not part of a divine plan in the sense of being willed as a means, but a violation of the good by Man that God shares with those who suffer.

     For the victim, this does not remove the pain or restore what has been lost, but it may offer the assurance that their suffering is neither ignored nor justified, and that it is known from within rather than from a distance. The promise of the Cross is not that suffering was necessary, but that it will not have the final word, and that injustice will be judged without being retrospectively declared meaningful. In this way, the Cross may provide comfort not by reconciling the victim to what has been done, but by affirming that the wrong they have suffered is real, that it is condemned rather than explained away, and that the hope for justice and restoration does not depend upon accepting their suffering as deserved or useful.

Perhaps in the end Dostoevsky’s Alyosha makes the best response to Ivan. After Ivan has pushed the argument as far as it can go, there is no further argument that does not risk doing precisely what Ivan fears, which is justifying the suffering of the innocent by fitting it into a larger harmony. Any reply begins to sound like: “yes, but in the end it will all make sense.” And that is what Ivan refuses. So Alyosha does not answer the argument. He kisses him on the forehead. That drives Ivan a bit crazy because it is not a refutation, a justification, or a consolation but an act that affirms Ivan’s moral protest, the dignity of the victim, the goodness of love itself, without reconciling any of them to what has been done. It says, in effect: ‘I will not explain this. I will not justify it. But I will not abandon you or the world to it.’ If the Cross is, as we said, a kind of divine refusal to justify suffering while also refusing to abandon creation, then Alyosha’s silence and kiss may be its human analogue: an affirmation of the beloved and of being that does not pass through theoretical reconciliation. I think I am thinking Dostoevsky’s thoughts here, or trying to understand them at least, a labor that has been going on for decades. Reason may reach an antinomy but Love may remain. And perhaps that is why the last word in that chapter is not an argument, but a gesture.

I am not sure this makes sense. I wish I could ask Dostoevsky what he thinks of it. Or Jesus. 

Of course, if the world is an accident and we are on our own, as people like Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens not only believe we are but want us to be, then the whole point is mute.

       

A Reply to Ivan Karamazov

 Dear Ivan,

     Your rebellion against Creation and your brother Alyosha’s response to you have long haunted my thoughts. Here I want to make a tentative reply to your devasting reply to my little Summa article.

   Your protest against innocent suffering presupposes that innocence (it matters to me), justice and dignity matter.  But these are not external standards imposed on being; they are goods grounded in the very nature of persons. So to condemn the world in their name is already to affirm that reality contains goods worth defending. Your refusal parasitically depends upon the goodness he denies. Or?

     To will that the world not exist is also to will that there be no justice, care, love, redemption, etc. because all of these presuppose a shared reality. Refusal abolishes not only Auschwitz (standing for all the vast catalogue of human-made horrors) – would that we could! – but justice, mercy, solidarity, resistance, memory, care for the suffering, the very love you feel for the child. It abolishes love, beauty, goodness, joy, awe. It abolishes not merely the fact of human atrocities but also every act by which these atrocities are condemned, resisted, or remembered as evil. The good whose violation you protest cannot exist in the absence of the world. How would you respond to that?

      To will that the world not exist is to will that the victims never were. Not merely that they did not suffer, but that they never loved, hoped, resisted, or endured. Their suffering is real but so is their courage, their friendships, their acts of care under terror, their friendships. (I think particularly of Primo Levi or Edith Stein not existing. I am sure there were such people whom the Transatlantic slave trade couldn’t break, nameless as they are.)  I am not setting up any kind of accounting, but your rejection abolishes these goods and people along with the evils. That must be said.

     Your rejection seems to undercut moral meaning. The judgment “Auschwitz was evil” is itself a moral act that presupposes a shared reality, beings capable of dignity (of loving and being loved), and a future in which justice might matter. To abolish the world is to abolish the truth of that judgment. There would be no injustice but also no justice – or love, forgiveness, mercy, and soon.

   The possibility of rectification is also eliminated by your refusal. If the world is not worth affirming, then no future is worth preserving or improving. But moral protest aims toward reform, prevention, remembrance, care – all of which presuppose that some goods remain realizable. Refusal forecloses not only past evils but the possibility of any future good. 

     I think there is something problematic about treating non-being as preferable to violated being. Your refusal effectively claims that non-being is morally superior to being that includes injustice. But this assumes that a world without suffering is better than a world in which suffering is opposed, alleviated, and judged as wrong.That is a substantive moral claim, and not a neutral one.

      And your outrage is intelligible only if you affirm that people matter, injustice is wrong, and suffering ought not to occur. These are affirmations of good grounded in being. To refuse the world entirely risks refusing the conditions under which what is good can be realized or defended. So the trade is not simply evil vs. no evil. It is rather evil + justice + love + memory + resistance to evil vs. no evil and none of these other goods. You might still choose to refuse but the cost is not as simple as you made it appear. Your refusal appears as fidelity to the innocent. But fidelity may also consist in refusing to let their suffering be the final word about reality. Affirmation can be a commitment that injustice does not exhaust what is.

     Another argument. If you love the tortured child, you thereby will that the child flourish. But flourishing is a perfection of being, so that the refusal to affirm being risks abandoning the good of the victim along with the evil that harmed her. There is a pattern emerging: your refusal is a double-edged sword.  You treat a real and horrific part as morally definitive of the whole. But evil is parasitic upon the good. To allow evil to determine the final verdict on being is to let privation define reality.

      Here is a more pragmatic argument. If the world is not worth affirming, then no future is worth preserving. But moral protest – indeed loving your children, family, and community – typically aims at things like reform, protection, restoration, cultivation. All this presupposes that some future goods are worth realizing. If that is so, it presses against your withholding your consent to the world. Indeed, your refusal risks becoming a withdrawal from responsibility for the world. To reject the world absolutely is to relinquish the field to those who perpetuate injustice within it. Conversely, moral outrage often includes an implicit hope that things could be otherwise. Hope presupposes that Being is capable of better actualizing its (good) potentials. Your refusal risks extinguishing this horizon.

     You refuse Creation itself in toto. I think the proper object of your refusal should be those distortions of being that violate its goods.

    I don’t imagine these arguments settle the matter. I think they do show that your response to my little quaestio is not a knockdown argument.