A few years ago, around 2018, I had a conversation with philosophy professor Diego Bermejo, from the University of Deusto, who had come to Cambridge for some research. I said that the problem of theodicy is an important problem in theology and he answered that theodicy is not a problem of theology, but the problem of theology. That moment was to me like a flash of illumination. Perhaps I have exhaggerated about that statement, but it fits well in my identification of evil with metaphysics. In this context the problem of theodicy puts in check not only God, but the world itself. The question “why is there evil?” questions not only the existence of God, but even the existence of this world. The existence of this world is impossible to conceive if we take seriously into consideration all evil that is in it. In this context, metaphysics, with its certainty about the existence of being, becomes a decision to ignore this radical difficulty, it becomes an acceptance and a legitimation of the existence of evil. I conclude that metaphysics, which is any whay of thinking and perceiving that relies on its own structures as something inescapable, is evil itself. As a consequence, the concept of “understanding”, which needs the objective existence of what gets understood, is metaphysical and evil as well, because it looks for grasping power, control, framing, caging, structuring.
I am not referring to the efforts of understanding that are carried on in science. In science, understanding has a limited horizon, because science doesn’t claim the same a-priori universality that is claimed by metaphysics. Science is based on metaphysics as well, but in science, as Dario Antiseri says in his book Perché la metafisica è necessaria per la scienza e dannosa per la fede (1980), metaphysics works just as hypotheses that never turn into final universal conclusions; in philosophy the problem of metaphysics is that it considers itself not as hypotheses, but as sets of structures that are taken for granted.
Now we can consider that the question “why is there evil?” is aimed at some fundamental understanding of something. This means that the question is suggested by some metaphysical tendency that is into us, a desire to find a solution to the problem of evil by getting the understanding of something. In other words, the question about evil is suggested and guided by evil itself, it is evil that is still trying to control us by driving us into its style of questioning and reasoning, a style that looks for control, for metaphysical conclusions.
Again, this does not mean that, for example, that scientific research about cancer is a bad thing. As I said, science works in the limited horizon of experience and experiments. Metaphysics in philosophy, instead, wants to work in a horizon that is supposed to be theoretically universal, which means infinitely more universal than science.
Once this mechanism gets revealed, destructured, it comes out that the way we have to escape from this entanglement in metaphysics, in objectivity, is subjectivity, which means art, emotions, contemplation, listening, as our primary and essential instruments to manage and interiorize our relationship to existence. Secondarily, we need metaphysics all the same, because our humanity, in this present history, cannot do without using the verb “to be”. We can make a synthesis by saying that we want to cultivate a permanent dialogue between subjectivity and objectivity. This criterion applies also to our relationships with other subjectivities, because they can be as well a metaphysical presence, which matches Sartre’s ideas “Hell is other people”.