Does Evil Complement Good?

"There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful."
-Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

This is my second time quoting from this book, but I could really go on forever. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde is my favourite novel, offering incredible insight into art, beauty, good, evil, sin, religion, and class.

This quote touches on an interesting philosophical concept. Could good and beauty exist without the parallel of evil and ugliness? Is it the contrast in which we discover true merit, the ability to compare that leads us to distinguish one from the other? I'm not a fan of philosophy and its roundabout tendancies, but this question intrigues me. I agree with the speaker of this quote. I believe that if we weren't aquainted with evil, then we could never appreciate the good in the world to its fullest extent.

Arguments

"History is a series of arguments to be debated, not a body of data to be recorded or a set of facts to be memorized"

- The Ancient Mediterranean World Preface: The Value of History

History is something that we carry with us together, it teaches us things and highlights important issues but it is not always absolute. Though what is reiterated is facts we can only speculate as to the reasoning behind them and learn from the past. It is often thought that history is simply a set of facts, that you just have to memorize data, but it is so much more than that. It is personal histories that create the bigger history, personal thoughts that create the things we learn - individuals have shaped the world.