The Idea of Evil E-Book

Peter Dews

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 561

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This timely book by philosopher Peter Dews explores the idea of evil, one of the most problematic terms in the contemporary moral vocabulary.

• Surveys the intellectual debate on the nature of evil over the past two hundred years
• Engages with a broad range of discourses and thinkers, from Kant and the German Idealists, via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Levinas and Adorno
• Suggests that the concept of moral evil touches on a neuralgic point in western culture
• Argues that, despite the widespread abuse and political manipulation of the term ‘evil’, we cannot do without it
• Concludes that if we use the concept of evil, we must acknowledge its religious dimension

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

List of Abbreviations

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 Kant: The Perversion of Freedom

Chapter 2 Fichte and Schelling: Entangled in Nature

Chapter 3 Hegel: A Wry Theodicy

Chapter 4 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Suffering from Meaninglessness

Chapter 5 Levinas: Ethics à l’Outrance

Chapter 6 Adorno: Radical Evil as a Category of the Social

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

This paperback edition first published 2013

© 2013 Peter Dews

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2008)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 The idea of evil / Peter Dews.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-4051-1704-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-1183-4630-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

 1. Good and evil. I. Title.

 BJ1406.D49 2007

 170–dc22

2007012577

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Photo © Simon Norfolk / Millennium Images.

Cover design by Nicki Averill Design & Illustration

List of Abbreviations

KSA XII

Friedrich Nietzsche,

Kritische Studienausgabe

, volume XII, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari

LPHI

G. W. F. Hegel,

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction

, trans. H. B. Nisbet

LPR I

G. W. F. Hegel,

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

, volume I:

Introduction

and

The Concept of Religion

, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart

LPR II

G. W. F. Hegel,

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

, volume II:

Determinate Religion

, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart

LPR III

G. W. F. Hegel,

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

, volume III:

The Consummate Religion

, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart

PhR

G. W. F. Hegel,

Philosophy of Right

, trans. T. M. Knox

WW I

Arthur Schopenhauer,

The World as Will and Representation

, volume I, trans. E. J. Payne

WW II

Arthur Schopenhauer,

The World as Will and Representation

, volume II, trans. E. J. Payne

in memory of

François Châtelet (1925–85)

and Tony Manser (1924–95) –

for whom philosophy was custodian

of an undiminished world

Preface

As my friends and family know only too well, this book has been a long time coming. I must thank Richard Bernstein for planting the seed, by asking me to contribute to a Hannah Arendt Symposium while I was teaching at the New School for Social Research, in the autumn of 1996. The topic, ‘Evil and Responsibility’, resonated. Over time I became aware that I could use the idea of evil to access strata of our modern moral and existential orientation that often lie concealed, and to prise open significant rifts in the geology of the culture.

I would like to thank Alan Schrift for providing me with an excellent opportunity to pursue my thinking further, as a visiting professor in the Center for the Humanities at Grinnell College. The weekly faculty seminar on ‘Modernity and the Problem of Evil’, which I led there in the autumn of 2001, produced some tough, but amicable exchanges of views, and I am grateful to all those who participated. I am also grateful to Dorothea von Mücke, who invited me to spend a period in the spring of 2003 as Distinguished Visiting Max Kade Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University. There I had the luxury of teaching an intense, rewarding graduate seminar on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and of thinking and writing late into the night about the theory of evil. Mark Anderson, who had succeeded as Chair of the Department by the time I arrived, went out of his way to provide office space and facilities, and I would like to record my thanks to him for being so accommodating to a philosophical interloper.

Over the past decade my thinking about evil has been exposed to the scrutiny of several generations of Essex graduate students. I am grateful to them for their alert engagement, and also to my department and its members for steadfastly protecting a micro-climate that encourages philosophical scope and adventurousness, as well as rigour. The University of Essex accorded me a year’s study leave in 2002, which enabled me to lay some of the foundations of this book, and an award from the same institution’s Research Promotion Fund, in the spring of 2006, gave me additional time to work on some of the chapters. Michael Schwarz of the Archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin was tremendously helpful in email correspondence, and I would like to thank the Archive for permission to quote from the transcript of Adorno’s notes for his seminar on Schelling’s ‘Die Weltalter’, from the Winter Semester 1960–1. Philomena and Bernard Wills kindly gave me the use of their flat, close by the sea, for several spells of concentrated writing. And Robert Farrow provided vital assistance, at just the right moment, with the finalization of the manuscript.

Among friends and colleagues with whom I have profitably discussed issues addressed in this book, I must mention Andrew Bowie, Paul Davies, Alexander García Düttmann, Karl Figlio, Katrin Flikschuh, Raymond Geuss, David McNeill, Mark Sacks, Gareth Steadman Jones, Mike Weston, and Joel Whitebook. A number of people have been kind enough to read all or part of the manuscript in draft, and I am immensely thankful to them for making the time to do so, and for providing such helpful critical comments. They are Nick Bellorini, Maeve Cooke, Sebastian Gardner, Béatrice Han-Pile, Wayne Martin, Stephen Mulhall, Jacqueline Rose, and Nicholas Walker. I also received important advice from the report of Blackwell’s anonymous reader. I owe a special debt to Paul Hamilton who has followed this project with generous interest nearly all the way through, and has helped to keep me going with his enthusiasm, even during times when I felt I had reached a dead end. Finally, I must thank Maude Dews, and Jacob, Luan and Philomena Wills for not allowing me to take myself too seriously, even on this topic; and Clair Wills for her loving support, which makes everything possible.

Peter DewsLondon

Introduction

There are plenty of excellent reasons why no decent, thoughtful, progressive-minded person should have anything to do with the idea of evil. It is a notion, after all, that stands out in our modern moral lexicon by virtue of its potent, frequently dangerous, emotional charge. It hints at dark forces, at the obscure, unfathomable depths of human motivation. It seems to stand contrary to our widespread optimism that the behaviour of our fellow human beings can be accounted for in social and psychological terms, and so made amenable to improvement. If we understand the factors that condition people to do wrong – the twists and turns of personal history, the circumstances, oppressive or favourable, into which they are born – then presumably we will be able to alter them. Education and social intervention will eventually reduce the human penchant for harm and destruction. Against these assumptions, the idea of evil hints at some refractory element within us, some perversity lying beyond our control. It suggests the unwelcome conclusion that there may be sources of human behaviour, and so features of human society, which are resistant to betterment, to an enlightened effort to improve the cultural and material conditions of individuals and communities.

What is more, the label ‘evil’ often functions as an intellectual and ethical shrug of the shoulders. We do not need to question or ponder any longer: we just know that this human being, or that social or religious group, has an irrational commitment to chaos and moral mayhem. There is no requirement even to try to understand a different point of view (which is not the same, of course, as accepting its validity) – we must simply contain those who hold it, marginalize them, possibly even eradicate them. The invocation of ‘evil’ allows us to reduce the complexities of politics and history to the opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The idea of evil, precisely because of its intense semantic charge, its mobilizing force, lends itself to exploitation in the hands of theocrats and rabble-rousers – not to mention cynical and unscrupulous politicians.

The most notorious example of this abuse in recent history is doubtless the phrase ‘axis of evil’, uttered by George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002, four months after the 11 September terrorist attacks.1 President Bush employed the phrase to group together North Korea, Iran, and Iraq – three countries which he accused of developing, or seeking to develop, nuclear armaments and other weapons of mass destruction. As critics were quick to point out, these states had very little in common. The suggestion that they could be understood as engaged in some kind of alliance made scant sense. But it reflected the feeling of the American people that they were under some horrendous, unprecedented threat, menaced by a conclave of maleficent powers that had already achieved one grievous strike, and might be preparing for more. Bush’s speech, made after the conquest of Afghanistan, and the installation of a hand-picked interim leader, marked the beginning to the propaganda build-up for the invasion of Iraq, which was launched just over a year later. It prepared the way for the United States to attack a leading Arab country, on a set of pretexts that turned out to be entirely false, and in contravention of international law. The bolstering of the image of the United States as a superpower fighting global evil in the name of freedom was an essential element in the legitimation of this enterprise (as Bush declared in his Address, ‘I know we can overcome evil with greater good’).

The intense reactions unleashed by Bush’s speech, and the sharp-etched memorability of the key phrase itself, are surely connected with the peculiar role which the concept of evil plays in our moral vocabulary. To contemporary Western ears, at least, the term has an inherently antiquated ring about it. It seems to be a relic, a hangover from a worldview which even many people who – still today – think of themselves as religious would regard as an embarrassment. It suggests a vision of the universe as the stage for a battle of supernatural powers, which human beings may ally themselves with, but which they cannot ultimately control. It threatens the modern, enlightened conception of the world as moving towards a just and peaceable future, one which can be shaped by human will and intention. Bush’s State of the Union Address dangled awkwardly between these possibilities. The President concluded by asserting that ‘evil is real’ – a claim which is not easy to decipher, but which seemed intended to suggest that there are indeed menacing forces at large in the world, working at a level deeper than individual human agency. But, at the same time, he reiterated the claim that it is ‘freedom’ which will overcome evil.

The question that confronts us, then, is: why should the archaic vision of a battle of moral forces have such resonance for many members of modern societies? Part of the attraction of the concept of evil, I would suggest, is that it offers an experience of moral depth which otherwise so often seems lacking in our lives. It does so in two interconnected ways.

Firstly, we belong to a culture that has become habituated to relativity, to pluralizing its notions of the good. Our liberal political order is based on the premise that we are each entitled to pursue our own conception of the best life, but that we have no right to impose this conception on others. Yet it is difficult to match this tolerant, multivalent conception of the good with an equally relaxed view of what is morally bad. Multiculturalism struggles hard to process the dissonances which arise when the practices of minorities violate the norms of liberal individualism. Or, to put this the other way round, modern liberalism, not to speak of its postmodern offshoots, often has a bad conscience about its own implicit universalism. It is reluctant to put its cards on the table, for fear of appearing to promote some particular conception of the good. But there always comes a breaking point.

Predictably, only hours after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on 11 September 2001, commentators began to clamour that the condition of the humanities in the American academy had deprived intellectuals of the will to identify and denounce blatant evil. On 15 October, a noted proponent of fashionable scepticism about principles and foundations, the critic and cultural commentator Stanley Fish, felt compelled to publish an article in the New York Times. He had been provoked by a journalist who telephoned him to ask whether 11 September meant the end of postmodernist relativism.2 Fish denied that postmodernism leaves us with ‘no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back’. Giving up on the ‘empty rhetoric of absolute values’, as he called it, needn’t enfeeble our response. Like any community, Americans can invoke ‘the particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend’. Unfortunately, Fish did not confront the consequence of his argument – that the community of jihadists could do just the same. Of course, Fish could always respond that the mistake made by religious warriors is that they take their worldview to be absolute, rather than simply as an expression of their history and culture. But then he would have to add that this is only a mistake from ‘our’ point of view – interpreted from within, by their own criteria, religious viewpoints which claim unconditional validity can be self-sustaining. From our (self-consciously relativist) standpoint we have to admit that, from within the enemies’ standpoint, the violence inflicted on us is justified, and that our outraged reponse is less legitimate than their destructive anger against us. These embarrassing philosophical tangles suggest that, even in our pluralistic world, the ‘absoluteness’ implied by the idea of evil requires us to erect an unbreakable barrier – that not every practice or form of action can be morally defused by being set in its social and cultural context. Sometimes we feel compelled to draw the line, to respond with horror and denunciation to acts which violate not just social and moral convention, but our elemental conception of the human.

But secondly, the confrontation with moral phenomena that strain our powers of comprehension forces us to reconsider our habitual notion of human action as motivated by self-interest. To do evil, as the term is often understood these days, is to do more than pursue one’s self-interest, even by morally unacceptable means. It is to be involved in some wilfully pain-inflicting, destructive, and – often – self-destructive enterprise, to be driven by forces that lie deeper than the familiar repertoire of unappealing human motives, such as greed, lust, or naked ambition. Confirmation of this widespread intuition can be drawn from a perhaps surprising source. In A Theory of Justice, the set text of normative political theory in the last third of the twentieth century, John Rawls devoted a passage to the categorization of negative moral worth. Here he distinguished between the ‘unjust man’, the ‘bad man’, and the ‘evil man’. The unjust man, Rawls declared:

seeks dominion for the sake of aims such as wealth and security which when appropriately limited are legitimate. The bad man desires arbitrary power because he enjoys the sense of mastery which its exercise gives to him and he seeks social acclaim … By contrast, the evil man aspires to unjust rule precisely because it violates what independent persons would consent to in an original position of equality, and therefore its possession and display manifest his superiority and affront the self-respect of others … What moves the evil man is the love of injustice: he delights in the impotence and humiliation of those subject to him and relishes being recognised by them as the author of their degradation.3

Rawls does not seek to clarify philosophically how a human being could come to love injustice. Indeed, it is clear from his brief account this it is not any injustice the evil man loves, but only the kind which offers him the gratification of exercising an extraordinary, transgressive power. And this possibility is hard to square with Rawls’s advocacy of what he presents as the Kantian assumption that human beings, fundamentally, are not just calculatingly ‘rational’, but ‘reasonable’.4 Yet simply to read his laconic, matter-of-fact description is to catch a glimpse of the dizzying perversity of the human soul. On the rebound, as it were, such insights force us to reconsider the human potential for positive moral motivation – our capacity to strive towards the good as well as to wreak physical pain, mortification, and destruction.

This moral dialectic was an important facet of Bush’s State of the Union Address, though one which drew far less attention in the media. The confrontation with evil, Bush suggested, had the power to shake his nation out of its hedonism and self-seeking: ‘For too long our culture has said, “If it feels good, do it.” Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: “Let’s roll.” In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like.’ The shock of evil is seen as bringing out a depth of commitment and sacrifice in human beings that the pervasive promotion of hedonism by the surrounding culture, and the tranquillizing, trivializing effects of the mass media, positively discourage.

Of course, the most corrosive scepticism is called for here. We now know how short-lived the new sense of existential precariousness was, and how easily it could be harnessed in support of a new armed imperialism. It was not long before the number of civilian deaths caused by the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US and its allies outstripped by a shocking multiple the number killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The lives and deaths of many of those who perished on 11 September were movingly commemorated in the page of photographs, accompanied by brief personal portraits, that appeared in the ensuing weeks, day after day, in the New York Times. The invading countries could not even be bothered to count the civilian victims of the bombing, conquest, and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Surely this proves that any introduction of moral categories – let alone the language of good and evil – into political discourse, indeed into our thinking about history and society in general, should be shunned as hypocrisy? If modern, enlightened citizens need to reflect on questions of moral motivation, especially in a political context, they should make use of a vocabulary compatible with our predominantly secular, naturalistic view of the world. The language of psychoanalysis, for example, seems to offer at least the promise of a certain depth of insight into the perverse complexities of human motivation.5 Or perhaps we should just admit that the urge to be cruel and to destroy is an inbuilt propensity of some human beings.6

Yet, despite all these compelling reasons for caution, there has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in – and use of – the concept of evil in recent years, especially amongst avowedly secular philosophers and cultural critics.7 It is not easy fully to account for this. Part of the explanation may be that, after the extinction of the residual, countervailing hopes attached to the ideals of socialism and communism, there is now little to relieve our evaluation of the twentieth century as a dark century, an ‘age of extremes’, the era of total war and mechanized murder. After the brief surge of (Western) optimism that followed the disintegration of the Communist bloc, the world appears to be spiralling down into conflicts, which can no longer even be glossed – however misleadingly – as the expression of global rivalry between two post-Enlightenment visions of emancipation. The wars of the twenty-first century, it seems, will be driven by the forces of imperialism, ethnic rivalry, religion, and the scramble for dwindling resources.

Many of the seeds of this connection between the moral and political catastrophes of the twentieth century and the concept of evil were sown by Hannah Arendt, in the 1950s and 1960s, in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism, and in her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann – one of the most philosophically suggestive pieces of reportage ever penned.8 It was Arendt who, in these texts, made two moves whose consistency is still a matter of hot debate. She defined a new meaning for the Kantian term ‘radical evil’, and introduced an unforgettable phrase, ‘the banality of evil’, into the English language.9 At around the same time Emmanuel Levinas was publishing his first major contributions to a rethinking of the fundamental questions of ethics. His own biography, Levinas subsequently claimed, was ‘dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror’,10 of the Hitlerian world in which ‘lies were not even necessary to an Evil assured of its excellence’.11 Yet it took many years for the impact of his work, along with that of Arendt, to make itself fully felt. The orientations of philosophical thought in Europe in the final third of the twentieth century were not at first receptive to it.

On the one hand there occurred, during the 1960s and 1970s, an astonishing florescence of French thought, providing the philosophical lingua franca for the cultural mood-swing known as postmodernism. Within this intellectual ambit, developmental or progressivist philosophies of history went into crisis. In the famous formulation of Jean-François Lyotard, it was no longer possible to believe in the ‘grand narratives’, whether liberal or Marxist, which had determined the orientation of politics ever since the French Revolution.12 Yet, along with other likeminded thinkers, Lyotard was remarkably sketchy and unpersuasive in his account of why these grand narratives had failed. The inclination of postmodernists was to suggest that the Western commitment to rationality, itself an offshoot of Western metaphysics, was the fundamental problem. The inherently universalizing impetus of reason was bound to coerce and crush the inherently pluralistic forms of human association, cultural practice, and embodied meaning. But this was always an unconvincingly one-sided diagnosis. It took some time, but eventually it became clear that the remedial celebration of the spontaneous, the anti-rational, and the particular had led into a moral and political cul-de-sac. Empires are particularistic, and despots habitually unreasonable. Postmodernism, it turned out, was tacitly relying on a safety cordon of liberal toleration in its vision of the peaceful co-existence of incommensurable perspectives.13

According to a second major trend in European thought, one more prevalent in Germany, this postmodern naivety was the result of a foreshortened conception of reason itself. Instrumental rationality has indeed attained a dangerous preponderance in modern society and culture and, left to its own devices, it is a principle of domination. But reason in its other guise, as deployed in the socially indispensable task of communicating and reaching agreement across boundaries and barriers, has a different dynamic. This has expressed itself historically in the development of that universalistic moral outlook which is our only hope for preventing a repetition of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Furthermore, in the eyes of many German philosophers, postmodernism was fatally compromised by its adoption of the critique of modernity to be found in Nietzsche and Heidegger – two thinkers whose style of thought showed unmistakable affinities with the authoritarianism, not to say totalitarianism, which postmodernism was supposed to undermine. The philosophical project of grounding reliably a universalistic morality, and liberal-democratic norms, was a far more appropriate response to the record of the twentieth century than celebrations of the heterogeneous and the local, no matter how generous the impulse behind them might be.

Jürgen Habermas, doyen of Critical Theory, and the pre-eminent German philosopher of the postwar generation, was the leading representative of this view in Europe. Much of his philosophical work, from the 1970s onward, was devoted to providing a grounding for the universalism he advocated. But Habermas’s approach was also mirrored by a resurgence of normative moral and political theory in the English-speaking world. In both cases the primary source of inspiration was often the thought of Immanuel Kant. Yet the Enlightenment moral philosopher who enjoyed such a revival of influence in the final decades of the twentieth century was often a pale after-image of the historical original. This was a Kant largely shorn of his interest in the phenomenology of moral experience, and the inner conflicts of the free but finite acting subject, a Kant apparently unconcerned with the immense gap between what morality, on his account, demands of human beings, and what humanity, on the whole, appears capable of achieving. In short, this was normative theory travelling light, insouciant about its conditions of application. Self-styled Kantians seemed reluctant to consider the implications of the fact that human beings, as rational, self-reflective agents, are necessarily oriented towards moral norms, that moral ideals are intrinsic to their identity, and yet that they consistently fail to realize those ideals, or even deliberately work against them. This was not, of course, simply a result of distaste for or disinterest in the subject matter of wrongdoing and malice. For an approach to moral theory which established such a strong equation between freedom and moral autonomy was bound to have difficulties in accounting for the imputable, and so presumably free, choice of immoral courses of action. Despite the many pages which Kant himself devoted to wrestling with the ensuing problem of evil, the issue barely surfaced in the work of Habermas and other representatives of the Frankfurt School, or in that of the most distinguished Kantian moral philosophers in the English-speaking world.14

It would not be entirely wrong to infer from this that postmodern thought was better equipped to address the question of evil. Undoubtedly, the great forerunners of postmodernism, Nietzsche and Heidegger, had a profound sense for the dynamics of the relevant phenomena. But the hostility to moral categories that typifies their work, and in Nietzsche’s case the explicit attempt to supersede the concept of evil, limits the serviceability of their thought for an attempt to transcend the contemporary impasse.

What is the nature of this deadlock? The basic opposition between postmodernist and universalist thinking, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, mirrors very closely the oscillation analysed by the French philosopher Jean Nabert in his Essai sur le mal, first published in 1955.15 One of profoundest treatments of the topic in postwar European thought, Nabert’s book opens with a direct appeal to the phenomenology of evil: ‘Neither the foresight of the coolest kind of thinking, nor the most cynical calculations of politics, nor familiarity with history, will ever prevent the beginning of a war from arousing in us the feeling that the destiny of humanity has escaped, once more, from the guardianship of the will.’16 It is the sense of fatality, of desperate ineluctability, associated with man-made disaster, which Nabert underlines in his opening pages. But, at the same time, as Nabert’s reference to the failure of the will reminds us, we do not regard such occurrences as though they were simply natural catastrophes. On the contrary, we experience them as forms of what he terms ‘the unjustifiable’ (l’injustifiable). No matter how historically inevitable the acts that bring suffering and destruction may appear to have been, we respond to them as that which absolutely should not have occurred. Human possibility should have followed another path after all.

It is this almost paradoxical sense of the unjustifiable, Nabert argues, which slips through the gap between the predominant tendencies of modern thought. A normative idealism, centred on the concept of the responsible, self-determining subject, can only understand the unjustifiable in its acutest form – moral evil – as a failure to live up to our own standards, a deplorable lapse of volition. Lacking an adequate explanation for this failure, and of its apparent compulsiveness, normative idealism is all too ready to fall into the arms of its ostensible opponent, naturalism. And naturalism, in a wide variety of guises, is only too ready to take the strain. Indeed, as Nabert’s description makes clear, any philosophical view which – for understandable reasons – denies the purely rational and normative any independent effectivity in the empirical world, perhaps even dismisses the ideal as an illusion, can be regarded as a form of naturalism. This includes forms of thought which, in the last decades of the twentieth century, were most likely to have been characterized as postmodernist: ‘will to power, love of power, the sexual instinct, sympathy with its limitations; there is no instinct which does not lend itself to an interpretation of history, and of the glaring gap between the endless increase in the goods of civilization and the real condition of morality in the individual and in humanity’.17 Yet, though it may provide a compelling explanation for our persistent moral failure, a thoroughgoing naturalism of whatever kind – Nabert insists – simply cannot account for the experience of choice, or for the dismay we feel in the face of what we are unable to dismiss merely as ‘explosions of instinct’.18 Indeed, in our efforts to confront the unjustifiable, we find ourselves oscillating between two equally inadequate responses: ‘If it is, in fact, inconceivable that a freedom in command of itself could wish evil with the degree of continuity which experience reveals, it is no less so that nature could demonstrate its power with a regularity which renders freedom illusory.’19 Hence, according to Nabert, ‘We see thought hesitating between two contrary interpretations of man and his history, oscillating from one to the other, as if it were a question of choosing between a freedom whose integrity no failure can alter, and a causality always overrun by nature.’20

For of those who have no feeling for what Nabert means by ‘the unjustifiable’, there may not be much point in reading any further. For the rest of this book proceeds on the premise that Nabert has formulated (or rather, reformulated) a crucial insight, one which contemporary philosophy is in grave danger of forgetting. My argument will start from the assumption that, unless we are seeking to understand a potential which is deeply rooted in the structure of human agency, and yet results in actions and processes that, from an ethical perspective, absolutely should not be, then – for all the cogent reasons outlined above – we should not invoke the idea of evil. For any other approach to ethical issues, the notions of wrongdoing, moral failure, perhaps transgression, should be sufficient, if not simply the concept of a clash between the natural and the normative. It appears, though, that in recent years an increasing number of thinkers have begun to feel the limitations of such categories. For they do not take account of the fact, recognized by Kant, that the source of moral normativity – and not unalterable facts of nature or society – is at the origin of our repeated failure to live up to moral demands. A proper reckoning with our history, it is felt, as well as due regard for the phenomenology of the moral life, seem to call for a return to the idea of evil, no matter how problematic and emotionally laden it may be. Evil is somehow chosen, not a matter of lapse or default.

Yet we find there are typical limitations to these contemporary returns of the concept of evil. Firstly, there is the relentless concentration on the Nazi Holocaust as the paradigm of evil, a focus which is often accompanied by the use of the Kantian term whose meaning Arendt transformed: ‘radical evil’.21 The most obvious weakness of this approach is that it leads to ultimately fruitless attempts to distinguish between ‘radical evil’ and some lesser, common-or-garden variety. Frequently, this is done –following Arendt’s own suggestions – by arguing that the Nazi programme of totalitarian control and mass murder (and perhaps also its equivalents in other political arenas) embodied a pursuit of evil for its own sake, rather than the pursuit of a delusional good by grossly immoral means. Behind it lay nihilism, rather than self-interest.22 The twentieth century would therefore have introduced a new form of wrongdoing – wrongdoing committed not for any of the familiar range of ugly human motives, but sheerly in order to violate the moral law, or in order to demonstrate the superiority of the human will to any normative constraint.23

However, as numerous commentators have replied, there is simply no way to establish the absence of a misguided conception of the good in such cases, or to show that such evil did not result from horrific, culpable, self-deception. As John Milbank has argued, ‘the suppression and finally liquidation of the Jews was not articulated in nihilistic terms, but could be viewed as “rational”, given that one’s objective was to secure a German power absolutely untainted by socialism and the influence of international commerce, and a German identity based on cultural uniformity and the demotion of the Christian and Biblical legacy in favour of a Nordic one.’24 This is not to deny, of course, the special status of the Holocaust, the privileged, paradigmatic role of industrialized mass murder in revealing deeply embedded tendencies of modernity. But any attempt to claim that the Holocaust exemplifies a unique, unparalleled form of evil, which shatters our confidence in humanity in a way no other historical event has done or could do, can only end in circularity or special pleading.25 Furthermore, the indexing of evil, in its supposedly most radical or virulent form, to an era that is now well over half a century ago has the effect of a kind of consolation. Ever-increasing historical distance allows us to reassure ourselves that the worst is behind us, to entertain the thought that some progress may have been made. It allows us to voice expressions of confidence in a morally better future.

This leads us on to a second deficiency of the focus on totalitarianism and genocide, one which occurs in many self-declared ‘humanist’ responses to the horrors of the twentieth century. Here the problem is not so much the claim for the historical emergence of a new form of positive evil, as a failure to take the difficulty of finding a remedy seriously. To give one example, in the concluding chapter of his book, Facing the Extreme, Tzvetan Todorov, a prominent ornament of the North Atlantic liberal intelligentsia, undertakes to draw some general conclusions from his investigation into the moral life of the concentration camps. Along with many other writers on this topic, Todorov observes that human nature itself has not changed. What has changed, however – expanded enormously – is our technological capability, with which our moral imagination has simply failed to keep pace; ‘fragmentation of the world we live in and the depersonalisation of our relations with others’ have ‘increased immeasurably a potential for evil probably not so different from that of earlier centuries’.26 The prospects do not look good: ‘This development is tragic because one cannot imagine it ever ending; the tendency towards increasing specialisation and efficiency has made its indelible mark on our history, and its devastating effect on what is properly the human world cannot be denied.’27 But, despite this prognosis, Todorov’s conclusion is remarkably upbeat: ‘a code of ordinary moral values and virtues, one commensurate with our times, can indeed be based on the recognition that it is as easy to do good as to do evil.’28

The feebleness of Todorov’s argument is obvious. If it is as easy to do good as to do evil, then it is also as easy to do evil as to do good. The appeal to empirical moral psychology, even if enriched by historical evidence, provides no basis for assuming that, in the future, the beneficent tendencies of human beings will begin to predominate over the destructive ones, especially when our ‘tragic’ depersonalization continues apace. If the ‘hope’ that Todorov invokes is to be genuine, it must be founded on something more than a naive optimism, on simply wishing for the best. Hope must rest on some support, some evidence, albeit non-conclusive; it must draw on a reflective account of our moral experience, one that takes such experience to be more than a sum of empirically determinable tendencies. Otherwise, lamely appealing hope, simply urging humanity to make a greater moral effort, like a headmaster signing off the end-of-year report, reveals a failure to take the problem of evil seriously. For to take evil seriously one must squarely confront the gap between human propensities, the condition of the world, and what our moral intuitions demand. And the problem is that the empirical course of history, including the history of the last half-century or so, provides, even on the most affirmative interpretation, no conclusive evidence either way.

But while the privileging of the Holocaust can be seen as allowing an evasion of the problem of evil, one can also understand the gravitation of philosophers towards such monstrous crimes. For the very scale and enormity of the cruelties committed by the Nazis, and by other initiators of genocide since, challenge the habitual normativism of our approach to moral issues. The invocation of such events reawakens our half-buried sense that moral violation cannot be reduced to the infraction of a rule. As Nabert reflected:

There is no doubt that the differentiation of mental functions, accompanied by the specification of their respective norms, has encouraged the fragmentation and erosion of a primitive sense of the unjustifiable, a few traces of which we find in exceptional circumstances, as when – for example – very great miseries suddenly overwhelm an individual or a people, which one cannot understand as sanctions related to the transgression of imperatives, or when crimes go beyond the measure of what can be judged according to these same imperatives.29

In line with this thought, many writers – from Hannah Arendt onwards – have suggested that the basic notions of offence and punishment, of transgression and forgiveness, seem to lose their grip in the face of profound, far-reaching desecrations of the human.30 Or, as the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch once famously declared: ‘Le pardon est mort dans les camps de la mort’.31 It requires an event of unusual scope and force to compel us to question our post-Enlightenment approach to the human world in terms of principles, on the one hand, and of our success (or failure) in enacting them, on the other. Habitually, for the modern outlook, ‘the irrational conspires with the norm in the very constitution of the real’.32 We find it difficult to imagine, argues Nabert, that our ‘normative a prioris encounter an invincible resistance on the side of the real, one which might testify to a limit to the intelligibility of the world, lend some consistency to the idea of the unjustifiable and of evils refractory to all assimilation, and which would ultimately legitimate doubts concerning the coherence and goodness of the world’.33 Just occasionally, though, we feel we have no choice but to say – like Jankélévitch – that forgiveness, or – like Levinas – that ‘Justice’ has died.34 And it is then that we struggle to orient ourselves: an empirical event, unthinkably, has wounded the ideal.

It is easy to understand the resistance of secularist and humanist thinkers to the idea that such expressions are any more than figures of speech, metaphors for extreme – but also extremely subjective – moral experiences. For such thinkers are rightly suspicious of the traditional means by which the acute tension, the inner diremption, produced by the experience of evil has been eased – through religious belief. This is not simply a matter of rejecting religious tenets because they lack any evidential foundation, or because they refer to an empirically inaccessible dimension, other than the everyday world we inhabit. There is also the ethical consideration that any faith that the world, despite all appearances, will ultimately come good, any positing of a transcendent reality supposed to compensate for the deficiencies of the one in which we dwell, can be seen as a trivialization of human suffering. As Theodor Adorno put the matter, with paradoxical concision: ‘whoever believes in God cannot believe in God. … ’35 If the secular humanist can be accused of succumbing to the temptation to downplay the ‘moral gap’ between demand and delivery (not between ‘ought’ and ‘is’, but between ‘ought’ and ‘does’),36 then it could equally well be argued that it is the very essence of religious belief to offer a false, imaginary bridge across the chasm. Furthermore the notion that, ultimately, a benevolent God will set the world to rights seems to undermine those most irrevocable achievements of modernity – our freedom and autonomy. If the world is to be made better – as its pain and injustice tell us it must be – then surely human beings should accomplish this for themselves, or not at all. Better not to overcome evil, than to do so as marionettes in some divinely scripted play with a guaranteed happy ending.

It will be the central contention of this book that such conflicting responses to the idea of evil continue to generate deep tensions in contemporary culture. We are torn between a commitment to freedom and autonomy, and a due recognition of the intractability of moral evil, its refusal to fit into common conceptions of rational agency; between the responsibility to preserve a soberly empirical sense of human potential, and the need for an existential buttressing of moral motivation, for the impetus of transcendent hope. My aim is to explore the thought that religious belief, as traditionally understood, need not be the exclusive alternative to an obstinately secularist approach to evil (an approach which, arguably, must miss the essential nature of evil). For there may be a third possibility: to re-work formerly religious conceptions of evil, and religious versions of the hope for its overcoming, in more strictly philosophical terms. Perhaps it may be possible to articulate a basis for hope that is no longer dependent on any specific dogma or revelation, but is inherent in our moral orientation to the world. Or perhaps the experience of reconciliation, of a world in which evil is ultimately defeated, can itself be articulated in a philosophical mode. And if such projects prove impossible, perhaps there is a way for the philosopher to teach us how to live without delusory expectations – even to show that evil itself is merely a shadow cast on reality by a hope which struggles hopelessly to deny the world.

These are not simply proposals for philosophical projects. The decline of physical evil as a philosophical issue from the late eighteenth century onward, which paralleled the decline of belief in a benevolent Creator, did not – as it is now common to assume – put paid to all of the issues once addressed by theodicy. As we shall discover, many of the greatest European thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were preoccupied in new ways with a range of those issues – probing the extent to which an anticipation of the defeat of moral evil, despite all we know and have learned about humankind’s powers and propensities, can be made compatible with our modern commitment to freedom and rational insight. To Kant and the great Idealists, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to post-Holocaust thinkers such as Levinas and Adorno, it was evident that, unless we pose the question in these terms, we are not seriously confronting the idea of evil.

Notes

 1 See President George W. Bush, ‘State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002’, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html

 2 See Stanley Fish, ‘Condemnation without Absolutes’, New York Times (15 October 2001).

 3 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 439.

 4 See John Rawls, ‘Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy’, in Eckart Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989).

 5 See Mary Midgley, Wickedness (London: Routledge, 1984), ch. 8.

 6 See Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 4.

 7 For a survey which includes references to recent as well as older literature, principally in German, see Ottfried Höffe, ‘Kant über das Böse’, in O. Höffe (ed.), Schelling: Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), pp. 11–34.

 8 See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1958); Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

 9 For the case that Arendt’s notions of ‘radical evil’ and of the ‘banality of evil’ are compatible, see Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), ch. 7.

10 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Signature’, in Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 291.

11 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Nameless’, in Proper Names (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 119.

12 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

13 See Peter Dews, ‘Post-Modernism: Pathologies of Modern Society from Nietzsche to the Post-Structuralists’, in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

14 In one of the few direct engagements by a distinguished contemporary Kantian with the problem posed by moral evil for the theory of agency, Christine Korsgaard simply admits that, on Kant’s assumptions, ‘evil is unintelligible’ (‘Morality as Freedom’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 171).

15 Jean Nabert, Essai sur le mal (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1997).

16 Ibid., p. 22.

17 Ibid., p. 77.

18 Ibid., p. 79.

19 Ibid., p. 78.

20 Ibid., p. 82.

21 See for example Joan Copjec (ed.), Radical Evil (London: Verso, 1996).

22 In the Preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt wrote: ‘And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil’ (pp. viii–ix).

23 For a version of this argument, see Jacob Rogozinski, ‘Hell on Earth: Hannah Arendt in the Face of Hitler’, Philosophy Today, 37: 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 257–74.

24 John Milbank, ‘Darkness and Silence: Evil and the Western Legacy’, in John D. Caputo (ed.), The Religious (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 279.

25 Emil Fackenheim’s influential book To Mend the World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994) revolves obsessively around the problem of explaining why it should be the horror of the Holocaust, and not some other immense atrocity, which has ruptured the continuity of Western philosophy, and of Christian and Jewish religious thought.

26 Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), p. 290.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., p. 291.

29 Nabert, Essai sur le mal, pp. 26–7.

30 See Arendt, ‘Postscript’, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 280–98.

31 ‘Forgiveness died in the death camps’ (Vladimir Jankélévitch, ‘Pardonner?’, in L’imprescriptible (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986), p. 50.

32 Nabert, Essai sur le mal, p. 30.

33 Ibid., p. 29.

34 ‘Who will say the loneliness of those who thought they were dying at the same time as Justice … ?’ (Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Nameless’, p. 119). See also the remark of Emil Fackenheim: ‘the destruction of humanity remains possible, for in Auschwitz it was actual’ (To Mend the World, p. xxxix).

35 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 401.

36 See John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

Chapter 1

Kant: The Perversion of Freedom

Towards the end of his lecture course on the history of philosophy, delivered in Berlin during the 1820s, the dominant thinker of the age paid homage to the achievement of a great predecessor. It was Immanuel Kant’s decisive insight, Hegel declared, that

for the will … there is no other aim than that derived from itself, the aim of its freedom. It is a great advance when the principle is established that freedom is the last hinge on which man turns, a highest possible pinnacle, which allows nothing further to be imposed upon it; thus man bows to no authority, and acknowledges no obligations, where his freedom is not respected.1

Hegel’s encomium still succeeds in conveying the original impact of Kant’s thought, the sense of a new philosophical dawn which the Critical Philosophy aroused amongst contemporaries. From the first, Kant’s philosophy was recognized as revolutionary – and in a more than merely metaphorical sense. For as Hegel, with thirty years’ hindsight, insisted in his lectures, the principle that inspired the storming of the Bastille, the principle of rational self-determination, was also the essential principle of Kant’s thinking. The contrast between Hegel’s homeland and France consisted only in the fact that the principle had been developed by philosophers in Germany, whereas across the Rhine a precipitate attempt had been made to bring political reality into line with it: ‘The fanaticism which characterized the freedom which was put into the hands of the people was frightful. In Germany the same principle asserted the rights of consciousness on its own account, but it has been worked out in a merely theoretic way.’2 Hegel is critical of the extent to which Kant’s thought still embodies what he sees as the shallow rationalism of the Enlightenment. But he deeply respects Kant’s insight into the status of autonomy, as an aspiration intrinsic to human self-consciousness in its capacity to rise above all natural determinations: ‘there is an infinite disclosed within the human breast. The satisfying part in Kant’s philosophy is that the truth is at least set within the heart; and hence I acknowledge that, and that alone, which is in conformity with my determined nature.’3

For Hegel and his contemporaries, what Kant had demonstrated was that human beings do not possess freedom as a particular capacity (the power to choose a course of action – or to refrain from action – spontaneously, without any prior determination). Freedom must be construed as autonomy, as the capacity to think and act in accordance with principles whose validity we establish for ourselves through insight. And freedom in this sense is the rational core of human subjectivity as such. For Kant, however, there are different ways of acting in accordance with a self-determined principle; not just any action is free in the full meaning of the word. If the principle we accept tells us how we should act in order best to fulfil a specific need or desire, then the motive for our adherence to the principle stems from the need or desire which we happen to have. In this case we follow what Kant terms a ‘hypothetical imperative’: a command which tells us that if we want to achieve b, then we should do a. But Kant also thinks we are capable of acting in accordance with a categorical imperative – an unconditional command always to conform to a specific principle of action. We experience imperatives as categorical, however, only when they do not enjoin us to achieve any particular end. For questions can always be raised about the desirability of an end, however intuitively appealing it may be. To regard an imperative as unconditionally binding because of its particular content would be irrational, for this would amount to saying that I should do whatever I am ordered to do, simply because I am ordered to do it. Hence, an imperative which obliges us in detachment from any determinate end can do so only because of its form. If I obey an imperative because of its general form, I am doing what any other rational being (any being capable of understanding itself as an agent seeking to act – not just randomly – but on the basis of a rule) should do in the circumstances to which the imperative responds. In such cases, it is the universal form of the imperative as such that determines the action, independent of highly variable considerations of personal desire or interest. In Kant’s terminology, pure reason itself becomes practical.4

Furthermore – and this is Kant’s next revolutionary step – ‘practical reason’, so understood, is the expression of morality. Duty in the moral sense can be defined in terms of adherence to a maxim, a subjectively chosen principle of action, which we can simultaneously will in good faith to be a universal law. In other words, when we obey the categorical imperative, we act in a manner which we can will all other rational beings to adopt in the same circumstances, regardless of their particular social identities, desires, or aspirations. Of course, if all rational beings were to act consistently on the categorical imperative, their actions would harmonize with each other, since each would be acting in conformity with the will of all others.5 As Kant expresses it, when we act morally, we think of ourselves as legislating as members of a ‘kingdom of ends’, an association in which the freedom of each individual could coexist with that of every other individual, without conflict or violence. We can see how the idea of the categorical imperative connects up with habitual expectations of what morality should achieve.

But there is a problem. In the society which we inhabit, to act on the categorical imperative does not necessarily bring us closer to happiness – indeed, in many circumstances we have reason to suspect just the opposite, since we cannot rely on our fellow human beings not treating our conscientiousness as exploitable naivety. At the same time, Kant regards the desire for happiness is an entirely legitimate, natural, and inevitable human desire, given that we are finite and embodied, as well as rational and reflective, beings. Or, to put this in another way, Kant considers that freedom cannot be fully realized if it forever pulls against the demands of our pregiven nature. Yet only if practical reason came thoroughly to imbue the way society is organized, and hence shaped our desires, could this conflict between reason and nature be overcome. Ultimately, then, Kant’s conception of practical reason entails that the world itself be progressively transformed to make the full realization of freedom possible. The achievement of collective autonomy, in the form of an ethical commonwealth, a social and political condition in which the autonomy of each person could be achieved without the sacrifice of happiness or self-fulfilment, is the fundamental project of the human species.

*

Given this exhilarating, emancipatory thrust of the Critical Philosophy, it is hardly surprising that some of Kant’s most distinguished contemporaries were dismayed when, in 1793, he published an essay ‘On the Radical Evil in Human Nature’ in the Berlinische Monatschrift. For Kant began his latest contribution to the leading organ of the German Enlightenment by contrasting the ancient belief that the world has fallen into evil, from an original state of perfection, with the ‘opposite heroic opinion, which has gained standing only among philosophers and, in our days, especially among the pedagogues: that the world steadfastly (though hardly noticeably) forges ahead in the very opposite direction, namely from bad to better’.6 Whenever Kant juxtaposes the arguments and proofs devised by philosophers with the deep-seated convictions of humankind, the comparison is likely to be to the detriment of the former. And such an unfavourable contrast is evidently intended here. If the optimistic outlook of some of his fellow intellectuals is meant to apply to moral goodness, Kant argues, as opposed to the progress of civilization, then they ‘have not drawn this view from experience, for the history of all times attests far too powerfully against it’.7

Kant’s refusal to equate moral progress with the progress of civilization must have a powerful resonance for us, living in the aftermath of the twentieth century and at the inauspicious beginning of the twenty-first, even though it may have bewildered some of his Enlightenment contemporaries. The devastating discrepancy between the two was registered early in the previous century, as artistic and intellectual movements from Dada to Freudian psychoanalysis responded to the unprecedented slaughter of the First World War; it was emphasized at its end – albeit in indirect ways – by the more melancholy versions of postmodernism. At the purely techological level, the exponential growth of productive capacity, and the power wielded through science and its applications, have far outstripped the capacity of humankind to use them responsibly. But economic and cultural development also often appear to intensify inequality and injustice, and the alienation and hostility between human groups and individuals, rather than reducing them.

At first glance, the upshot of Kant’s reflections, of his counterposing of two visions of the human moral condition, neither of which he fully endorses (although he is evidently more sympathetic to the first), might seem to be the notion that human beings are a mixture of good and bad impulses and motives, neither set of which clearly predominates in the majority of us. We might think of human beings as locked in a struggle between their somewhat unruly natural desires and the – socially imposed – constraints of morality. Much of Sigmund Freud’s thought offers such a picture of the human condition, although made more complex by the introduction of the concepts of the unconscious, repression, and phantasy. Kant, however, rejects this viewpoint: the common sense of modern secularism. We do not stand equidistant between nature and reason, and we do not begin as moral tabulae rasae