Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy [Hardcover]

Neiman states that what constitutes evil has changed - evil today stands for "absolute wrongdoing that leaves no room for account or expiation." The author asks: "How can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms"?

Chapter 1, "Fire From Heaven" includes the thinkers who stole God's fire for man: Leibniz; Pope; Rousseau, Kant; Hegel and Marx. We start with the words of an 11-th century Castilian king embodying man's growing urge to independent thinking: "If I had been of God's counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better." At first, faith reigns supreme; we meet Leibniz, who thinks God has ordered all things for the best. His work, the "Theodicy" attempts the conformity of faith with reason. But the poet, Pope, nudges God aside with:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.

Rousseau was the first thinker to treat the problem of evil as a philosophical one. He states evil "is a catalog of mistaken acts that can be rectified in the future." Knowledge, not penance is needed. His account of evil was naturalistic because it required no reference to supernatural forces or sin.

Kant followed through on Pope by setting limits to mortal reasoning about God: questions about God and his purposes are out of bounds and speculating on
God is idolatry; he believed in the existence of a "Moral Law" that is supreme - and that we are duty-bound to obey. Purpose is not in nature but in Reason (we define our purposes).

For Hegel and Marx there are forces at work that drive humanity - not God but the force of History (Hegel) toward greater freedom and knowledge and the forces
of human creative work (Marx). Mankind must take responsibility for the world rather than explain it. God is man (Marx). Hegel wanted to eliminate the contingent; perhaps he epitomized, better than any other philosopher, man's quest for certainty.

Chapter 2, "Condemning the Architect" posits that God's creation is flawed. We are introduced to Bayle; Voltaire; Hume; de Sade and Schopenhauer. Voltaire railed against a benevolent world-view that tried to explain away the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in which several thousand people died. Bayle said faith requires a crucifixion of the intellect and that God is responsible for all evil - Reason thus leaves God condemned. We commiserate with Voltaire's plaint: "we miserable little animals have the right to wonder about our misery!"

When we reach David Hume we're told the emperor has no clothes: reason is not up to the task its been assigned (reasoning about God and evil is doomed to frustration).

And what to make of de Sade: an original thinker who wrote violently pornographic works - and who rather than merely state that man is capable of horrifying and despicable acts, bestowed upon us horrifying human specimans as though to show God himself what his "wonderful" creation was capable of. As Neiman states: "he tried very hard to stop at nothing." And by doing so, he condemned the Creator himself: for how could a benevolent God create creatures the likes of those de Sade depicted.

Chapter 3, "Ends of an Illusion" recounts the condemnation of man's religious-based rationalizations by branding them anti-life (Nietzsche) and infantile (Freud). The Promethean Nietzsche thought the problem of evil was not given, but created by those unequal to life. He sought to revise our concept of guilt away from the Christian to something nearer and more accepting of the contingencies of life. Freud's view can be summarized as, "Attempts to seek some kind of sense in human misery are fueled by childlike fantasies. The need for a metaphysics is an obsessional neuroses."

When we arrive at the end of our journey, in Chapter 4, "Homeless" we seem bereft of hope. We are called to account with the horrors of the 20th century -Communism, Fascism, Stalinism, Islamism which have given us two unprecedently destructive world wars, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Holocaust and September 11. Philosophy has shut the door on further idealisms and can only peer dumbfounded at what Hegel's heirs have wrought. We cannot innocently walk past the death camps and philosophize as before. We can never go back to where we started; but have we reached a dead-end?

So what might the answer be to Neiman's opening question: "How can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms"? As de Sade's writings reveal, we should analyze the mind's capacity for extreme levels of anger: in de Sade's case, he spewed vitriol against the idea of a benevolent God, Hitler viciously scapegoated the Jews, bin Laden despises America and wants to make Islamism the dominant force in the world. Hitler's and bin Laden's powers to instill fanatical hatred in followers was and is terrible to behold. This anger, coupled with human aggrandizement, and the fires of fanaticism feeds off itself like a feedback loop that continuously increments its energy levels until the person spins out of any rational orbit, tosses aside the "Moral Law" and willingly commits, justifies and revels in the most horrifying acts.

"Evil in Modern Thought" is a compelling inquiry into the problem of evil and will certainly stimulate your own thinking on the subject while increasing your understanding of what some of the greatest minds in Western philosophy said on the subject.

The question is, of course, how do you reconcile an omnipotent, benevolent Deity with the existence of evil. She starts the discussion with Leibnitz who felt that God considered all possible worlds, and decided that the one we have is the best one possible. Evil was divided into two types: natural evil that encompassed the cruelties of nature (floods, earthquakes, droughts, etc.) and moral evil i.e. those acts that we humans are responsible for. Pierre Bayle and Voltaire eagerly tore this idea to shreds. Rousseau came along and said that man, and not God was responsible for all evil, as man had become corrupted through the progress of civilization.

Neiman goes on to discuss the thoughts of Hume, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Feud, and even the Marquis de Sade. Then she delves into the topic of the Holocaust, and September 11. Of particular interest here is the thoughts of Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust, and her reflections during the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. Arendt feels that the vast majority of those involved in the Holocaust, Eichmann included, had no malicious intent in what they did. They merely performed assigned tasks, and did not really have the evil impulses that might be found in one of de Sade's novels. Evil truly had become banal, a merely boring activity of a bureaucracy. September 11th did provide evidence of evil intent, however. Those involved were determined to destroy innocent human lives.

At this point one has to wonder whether Evil as a philosophical issue has become obsolete. Arendt's reaction to evil (and Freud's too) pointed out psychological issues, and my feeling is that our study of the topic should move on to the examination of the individual and social psychology, and the cultural factors that examine our species' seeming propensity to engage in acts of "moral" evil. Author Neiman also asks the question of whether Philosophy can go any further with this topic.

One outstanding book that covers this topic is "Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century" by Jonathan Glover. He explores how humans become desensitized to evil; how we are able to dispassionately "kill from a distance." A government can decided to drop bombs on people; missiles are fired that do the task. Yet no one involved actually is engaged in any close up killing of another human.

Other books to consider are "Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty" by Roy Baumeister; "The Roots of Evil", by Ervin Straub; "Why They Kill", by Richard Rhodes; and "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People", by John Conroy. These books all explore the psychology of evil behavior.

A final comment. This book can be read and enjoyed by that ubiquitous "educated layman", but an interest in the topic of western philosophy would be helpful, as would some memory traces of what you learned in Philosophy 101.