Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

losophy: If God governs the world and if God’s economy is necessarily the most perfect
one, how can we explain evil – natural catastrophe, illness, crimes?
In the context of his investigation of economia, a form of governmental power, Giorgio
Agamben discussed one of the first formulations of this question by Alexander of
Aphrodisia, a late Aristotelian commentator of the second century: God in his providence
establishes general laws which are always good, but evil results from these laws as a collateral
side effect. For example: rain is obviously a good thing, but as a collateral effect
of the rain there are floods. Collateral effects – the bad effects of the divine government
– are thus not accidental, but define the very structure of the action of government.
Furthermore, it is through these collateral effects that the divine government becomes
effective.
A millennium and a half later, in his Théodicée, Leibnitz attempted to resolve the same perennial
question in a somewhat different manner. His intention is similarly to reconcile
the apparent faults and imperfections in the world, which he does by claiming that the
world is optimal among all possible worlds: “to show that an architect could have done
better is to find fault with his work […] [if] a lesser evil is relatively good, so a lesser good
is relatively evil”. Leibnitz unfolds a conception of God in the creation and management
of the world as a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem in the calculus of
variations. The world must be the best possible and most balanced world because it was
created by a perfect God. God governs by determining and choosing, among an infinite
number of possible worlds, that one for which the sum of necessary evil is at a minimum.
In Leibnitz’s complex divine economy evil exists by definition at its minimum possible
level. If evil is managed at its minimum level, then all evils are in fact always lesser evils.
The statement that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” was famously parodied by
Voltaire in Candide when he has a Leibnitz-like character, Dr. Pangloss, repeat it like a
mantra.
A Calculating Machine for the Reduction of Evil
Different aspects of the “lesser evil” argument were secularized into the modern articulations
of ethics and politics. Foucault argued that it is on the basis of “economical
theology” that modern power – the government of men and things – has taken the form
of an economy: “We pass from an art of governing whose principles were derived from
the traditional virtues (wisdom, justice, liberality, respect for divine laws and human customs)
[…] to an art of governing that finds the principle of its rationality […] in the state”.
22 He argued that from the end of the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, the
legacy of pastoral power was assimilated into the practice of government—a biopolitical
form of power exercised upon a population to regulate and manage its health, felicity, reproducibility
and productivity, while the pastoral power over the individual – particular
providence – has evolved into disciplinary technology that subjectivizes the individual in
various institutions and buildings: the prison, the military barracks, the school, and the
hospital.
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN