Product Description: Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.
Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.
Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.
Relativize the Relativizers, Debunk the Debunkers Dr. Neiman has produced a competent "history of [the problem of evil in] modern philosophy" from Leibniz to John Rawls. Speaking of Rawls, Neiman obtained her doctorate studying with him. Other relevant biographical information about Neiman is that she left home in her teen years to protest the war in Vietnam, and recently wrote a piece on Culture War for the leftist Huffington Post. None of these ad hominem (feminam?) observations disqualify "Evil," but they set it in context.
My problem is that throughout the book, Neiman refers only to "the problem" of evil. A problem is a question, either more simple or complicated, that has a specific, concrete answer, that either you will eventually attain to, or at least someone else has or could.
But evil is not a problem. No matter how long one studies it, one will never be able to completely conceptualize or lucidly verbalize evil. That is why I think the best category under which to analyze evil is 'mystery.' Of course, those of the same enlightenment background as Dr. Neiman will balk at such a word, presuming that they have banished 'mystery' to its primitive corner. But it is possible to use the word mystery not about a 'whodunnit' novel, and not about a religious cultic experience. A mystery is a profound philosophical question, like love, death, personhood, etc., about which one can do much reflection, gather much light, rule out absurd propositions, but which ultimately cannnot, due to the nature of the subject, be encapsulated in concepts or contained in words. That was the enligtenment's dream, dashed upon the rocks of the Judaeo-Christian mystery of original sin, as best observed at Auschwitz and Hiroshima in the so-called modern 20th century.
Typical of this genre, on p. 335 Neiman equates the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages, an undergraduate mistake, yet one normal for those who think everything prior to Spinoza was bad, everything after him was good.
Methinks that enlightenment scholars, even at this very late date, doth protest the death of God too much. That may be true on the narrow strips of land of western Europe, and both coasts of the USA, but virtually nowhere else. Nieman, and other fans of the enlightenment (which brought our culture the lovely French Revolution, whose grandchild was the Bolshevik) seem wistful that we are now in the post-modern age, when we take the positive insights of the enlightenment (of which there are many), and blend them with the perennial insights of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.
Modern thought?: More like recently irrelevant. Discussing evil, without serious consideration, of the thinking of theologians, like Gregory A Boyd (Evil and the Problem of Satan), is just not keeping up with current thought. Other secular philosophers have acknowledged the new revitalization, of Christian thought. Oh well. bc
"Banal" Evil, Moral Responsiblity, and Interent Wrong Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
Not being a philosopher, I write only to offer a thought about the apparent view that "unintentional" or "banal" evil is not "evil." Although I have heard it stated in the abstract before, seen in the present context, that view is quite shocking.
Assuming a fully competent actor, evil should be defined not only according to the intentionality of acts (perhaps limited to acts whose nature or consequences are defined as evil either by spiritual or natural law on the one hand or positive law or moral authority as "evil"), but also, alternatively, in neutral terms of moral responsibility, without regard to the actor's subjective state of mind. To say that every person has moral responsibility is to say that each person has an obligation to know, or at least to investigate and decide upon, the moral quality of his or her acts, particularly whether the acts' nature of consequences are subject to being characterized as evil. An act done intentionally that would be evil because of its nature or consequences thus would be evil for the same reason when done without reference or regard to its moral quality.
By comparison, we award punitive damages in many jurisdictions not only where a party's acts are intentional, but also where they are done recklessly, which includes indifference to the rights and interests of others. It is true that many jurisdictions distinguish between malice murder and other types of killings based on the actor's state of mind, but pressing that distinction into service to justify a definition of evil assumes that only intentional murder can be called evil.
The Holocaust of course involved intentional killing. Factually, evil was inherent in the Holocaust as an event of history because of the intentionality of the leaders of the Third Reich; analytically, even assuming that some of the instruments of the Holocaust were "mere cogs,"the suggestion that their acts were not evil ignores moral agency and responsibility in at least two senses: the moral responsibility that is an inherent element of our "humanity"; and the moral agency that such persons almost certainly possessed and exercised in a manner that would be evil under both historical spiritual and modern utilitarian definitions. It is plausible to suppose that the "mere cogs" were indifferent to the nature or consequences of their actions, and in that case the evil inheres in that refusal to exercise moral responsibility. Neither being an historian, I would have to account for any evidence to the contrary, but the idea that the mere cogs were somehow ignorant of the nature of their actions (whether signing the orders or turning on the petcocks) lies on the laugh-line somewhere between implausible in context and ludicrous on its face. But even assuming that that might somehow have been the case, the evil lies in the mere cogs' failure to exerise moral agency.
The above may resolve to a definition of evil that turns on the nature or consequences of the act under scrutiny, in the same sense as the early tort of trespass was defined in the English common law, solely according to its consequences. It may well be that my starting-point of non-intentionality may be an artifact of my responding to a proposition that turns on intentionality, and that the "nature or consequences" of an act may suffice to justify labeling it as "evil." Such a test might be structured according to deontological values or, as Professor Neiman's proposal for the "modern rule" appears to be, utilitarian values. The former would seem to permit a priori judgments, whereas the latter might now. Beyond the taking of life (and leaving aside the death penalty and just war, which present other issues, it is useful to consider whether the following, for example, amount to evil: environmental damage of sufficient magnitude; and independent, state-sponsored, and state-perpetrated terrorism (the last according to the French usage of "terroriste" during the French Revolution, being a reference to government officials engaged in official acts. At the end of the day, to talk about 9/11 as an "evil" act apparently without concomitant consideration of whether some of the responses thereto have been "evil" is a best a serious defect in the development or application, or both, of a definition of evil, in the same sense that the penchant of United States officials to talk about the "evil" of terrorism without a searching inquiry directed at their own actions is a serious defect of politics and authority.
They Way Philosophy Could Be Done But All too Often Isn't Nieman argues that philosophy, historically speaking, is not about epistemology, as most of the textbooks claim, but that philosophers from Descartes (Leibniz) all the way into the 20th century had a different view in mind. No less than eminent New Testament scholar NT Wright has recommended this book as outstanding in surveying the issues and making the case for the thesis that theodicy is the centerpoint of philosophical questioning in the 17th through the 20th centuries. To quote him, from his own book on "Evil and the Justice of God," Wright calls Nieman's book "brilliant." (See page 20) Having read the book and been absolutely appreciative of her argument, and the clarity with which she makes her case, I have to say that Wright's judgment is correct (as I am convinced that most of his judgments are). Buy the book, its worth it.
Who'd a thunk it...an actual philosophy book This is a very good book. It actually is a philosophy book in that it makes one think about the fundamental: Is there a purpose? It does this by describing how philosophers over the last 300 years have defined and explained suffering and evil. I had not read many of the authors but Neiman is able to frame up their thoughts in the text without too much trouble. I made a couple of sidetrips to the dictionary and some other reference sources but not many. For the authors I had read, I found her observations new and interesting. Some key themes that bounced around are: -Is there an inherent conflict between the idea of an omnipotent God and a benevolent God? -Is a moral choice truly moral if the person knows that there is a specific reward or punishment tied to it? So, is the only universe where free will can truly be free one where nothing can be proved? -How much of our moral views might really be more related to psychology? -What is the role of intention in evil? Natural disaters were considered an evil at one time but were defined away. Is being a bureaucrat within a structure that causes suffering intentional evil or not?
What I feel is missing from the book is a treatment of how non-western religions and philosophies have dealt with the problem. Including a Buddhist perspective would have been a good addition. However, because Neiman framed her discussion up the way she did, it's not failure, it's just a choice. Maybe she will deal with it elsewhere.
This book has rekindled my own dormant interest in philosophy and I now have a short list of the other books I want to read as follow-ups.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
