Can Ideas Be Bad?

As forms of intelligibility, ideas disclose thought—as questions, doors to the understanding, to awakening, to “spiritual light.” In this respect all ideas are good. Can there then be no bad ideas? How might it make sense to speak of ideas that are constitutively bad? 

For one thing, bad ideas would account for the possibility of evil. They would imply that it is not enough to follow an idea to be right. This lesson concerning freedom helps us see in what sense an idea can be bad: an idea is bad where it “fell”—as an angel might—to the status of mental closure. We could then conceive of a hierarchy of ideas involving degrees of decay of ideas into oblivion; or degrees of degeneration of genuinely open questions (questions open to positive infinity, or the infinite perfection of being) into open answers (answers open to negative infinity or infinite regress as progressive alienation from perfect being).  Yet we could also conceive of ideas that are constitutionally bad, even demonic, insofar as they shut the door to thought. The idea as form of thought would have its dark counterpart in an idea serving as form of mindlessness, or as mind-numbing form.  One example is the idea that there is no God. This idea tells us that life is fundamentally unintelligible.

A second example is the idea that there is no way back to God, or the idea that man is fallen in a world utterly devoid of divine providence. This is a bad idea, leaving us inventing meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. This is the dawn of the machine-making man (homo faber), or the man projecting his purported meaninglessness into the pretense of meaning, the principal idea of modernity.

Having admitted that there is such a thing as a bad idea, we are now faced with the question of its origin. Where do bad ideas come from? In traditional theological terms, they come from a primordial instantiation of “betrayal” of thought or mind, as a form of intelligibility, or an angel fallen into oblivion, to serve as instrument of forgetfulness of intelligible being, and so of the perfect goodness of being (being is purely good where it fully satisfies our desire for knowledge).

The empire of bad ideas would then be built upon a single brick, much as the Church has long been said to be built upon a single rock (Peter) mandated by the Living Word, the Word abiding eternally in God even as it enters a world otherwise lost in the grip of bad ideas. The foundation of the empire of bad ideas will then stand as the enemy of the Church understood in its proper or original sense as “assembly of men called out by God to return to God.”

If Platonism taught us that ideas are eternal forms of intelligibility entailing a luminous father or Idea of all ideas, that same Platonism remained ambiguous in the face of the question of bad ideas and so of evil. Only a formal revelation of the Idea of all ideas could provide adequate anchorage for addressing bad ideas without inviting them to overwhelm us, or without casting people into a state of dire perplexity. The Bible provided such an anchorage, confirming the soundness or common-sense validity of Platonic intuitions in the face of evil. While ideas are all originally good, they do leave open the possibility of obscurantism, or of a fall into darkness, in the sense that the light of intellection—which is one with its own form—shines in a darkness that seemingly grasps or envelops it. Bad ideas would then entail a delusive appropriation of “the light of the mind,” or a transposition of Form into a kaleidoscopic stream of compulsion, or of mutually compelled mirages rooted in the utter absence of reflection, which is to say into utter perdition. Public exposure of such a Hell threatens to be not only detrimental to the philosophical education of men, but destructive of political order. This is why a public account of and exposure of evil begs for an authority standing over and above political order, as its heavenly, transcendent source of vitality or strength.

The Bible allowed pagan people to take seriously the possibility of Hell and so to look into the dark without being swallowed by it. In so doing, the Bible allows everyone to partake in heroism, even as it does not render expendable the philosophical challenge of interpreting and thereby promoting the ordering of the low in light of the high, or lower forms of existence in light of others that better reflect intelligible being. 

Biblical revelation stands as authoritative guarantor of justice. As such it must be welcomed by all Platonists at heart. For the aid that the Bible offers us is in no guise an alternative to philosophy but a public confirmation of the justice, even sanctity of the philosophical life.

Far from having silenced ancient Platonism, Christianity has announced the legitimacy of its mandate to judge or order ideas in the light of their essence. But now, just as the thriving of Christianity has been a blessing for genuine Platonists, so has the decline of Christianity brought Platonism into ill repute under the sway of an anti-Platonist and anti-biblical discourse limiting men to identifying evil with mechanically delimited problems, or problems that are supposed to be address by machines, including people behaving mechanically, or in the element of compulsion. The Platonic life of reflection has ostensibly yielded—in conformity with an old prophecy of Giambattista Vico—to the barbarism of reflection: reflection in the element of compulsion, and so a rationalism that, as Edmund Husserl began intuiting, was but a sham imitation of natural reason.

Where evil is assumed to be limited to what is visible, as opposed to including the invisible ground of the visible, natural reason is silenced by crowds swearing by the dogma that the doors to heavenly intelligibility must remain shut at all cost—“lest the light enter to spoil the devil’s party,” responds the child who has not yet learned to be ashamed of calling naked kings naked. The only evil that we are permitted to address and judge is now a finite one, one bound ineluctably to a mechanical universe that makes no allowance for irreducible freedom of the mind. Indeed, the mind must be limited so that the body be free. Yet what happens when the ancient call to moderate bodily passions on the ground of immoderate thought is subverted in the name of freedom? What happens when the mind is moderated to allow for immoderate behavior? What happens is, in a word, anarchy or the worse form of tyranny. What happens is “the barbarism of reflection,” or the instrumentalizing of reflection to silence the mind, to shun the mind, to cut it off from the body and so to cast the body into Hell’s fire, if an old theological image of speech is still permitted. 

All this and more is made possible by bad ideas, not simply by people following them in the element of compulsion, as they must. Faced with the madness of a society ruled by bad ideas we should not blame people, then, but the ideas they are enslaved to. However, the blaming will feed into the bad ideas as long as we do not admit the transcendence of ideas or as long as the judging of bad ideas is not conducted in the element of reflection open to divine intelligibility. But this is what is meant traditionally by “natural reason” or the voice of God in human nature, notwithstanding Adam’s fall.

As long as we persist in fighting evil on historical grounds, as if our problems were merely historical, we shall live to feed death, to paraphrase Hegel. Inevitably we would then fuel the rise of a tribal warfare that technological progress is allowing to extend globally. And all this would be in the shadow of bad ideas.

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