Matter and Evil

The problem of evil, one of the central ethical and ontological problems in Neoplatonism, is discussed in Chapter 11. In Ennead I.8, Plotinus presents matter as utter deficiency, as the absence, lack, or privation of the good, and thus as radical evil. In De malorum subsistentia, Proclus explicitly responds to Plotinus and argues that evil does not exist since non-being does not exist. This means that evil is not opposite to the good because the good has no opposite, and opposites belong to the same genus. Therefore, in its elusive and indefinite nature, evil should be characterized by the rethought and redefined concepts of privation, subcontrariety, and parypostasis. In its inescapable deficiency, then, evil is the privation and subcontrary of the good that exists parypostatically; that is, as elusively present in its absence as the misplacement of being and the displacement of the good.