For ages, philosophy has strived to explain the origin, essence, and manifestations of evil. As the opposite of ‘good’, evil signifies the ‘absence of good’ or a ‘deficiency of good’. The negative element of evil, which is itself mysterious, is that it causes humans to despair and become ‘sinful beings’. The reason evil is philosophically problematic is, above all, because evil itself drives humans into suffering.
Evil manifests in various forms in the world. There is incomprehensible evil like natural disasters, evil committed unwittingly like ignorance, and evil that seems inevitable like ‘structural evil’. Regarding healing, what we must focus on are the various forms of evil wrought by humans. This is because such evil wounds people and directly inflicts suffering upon them.
While it is true that evil brings suffering to humans, evil and suffering are not strictly interchangeable concepts. This is because suffering does not always entail evil. From the perspective of Epicurus (341–270 BC), who understood suffering as an unpleasant emotion, suffering might be judged as misfortune and evil. However, suffering such as physical pain or that arising from extreme situations, functioning as a self-defense mechanism, clearly possesses positive aspects.
Regarding the origin and nature of evil, Augustine (354–430) argued that since perfect being is desirable in itself—the ‘highest good’—evil does not truly exist as a substance but only as a phenomenon of ‘lack of being’. In other words, evil can only exist attached to a deficient good; it cannot exist independently. Therefore, the evil that appears to us is neither true being (substance) nor absolute nothingness; it is solely a form of ‘relative nothingness’—an imperfect lack of being (contingent existence).
So what is the direct cause of this non-substantial evil? Philosophy traditionally locates its cause in human ‘free will’. From an ethical perspective, when human free will is exercised negatively, it is defined as ‘moral evil’; particularly when it stems from humanity's flawed nature, it is termed ‘fundamental evil’. In other words, moral evil or fundamental evil signifies an undesirable state rooted in human nature.
In this regard, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) asserts that ‘evil resides in the freedom that permits untruth’. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) goes a step further, defining evil as 'banality arising from the absence of thought'. That is, the root of evil lies in our ‘inability’ to think and judge correctly, not in any external, grand reality of evil.
Given this reality of evil, we need the habit and training of thinking and judging correctly in our daily lives to overcome it. Communication for healthy human relationships is also crucial. This is because the phenomenon of evil arising from flawed relationships undeniably exists. The misguided desire to possess others is the most common manifestation of evil stemming from inappropriate relationships. Such inappropriate relationships produce, on the level of knowledge, a lack of dialogue and communication, and on the level of will, power, and domination.
