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Review
Scintillating and self-disciplined - a very rare thing in a philosopher. -- Jonathan Ree, Times Literary Supplement
Provocative and profound. -- Damon Linker, The Wall Street Journal
The American philosopher Susan Neiman has written the book for this world-political hour. -- "Neue Züricher Zeitung
A brilliant new book. . . . No summary can convey the intellectual firepower of Neiman's book. Within her field of interest, she seems not only to have read everything but to have understood it at the deepest level. -- William C. Placher, Christian Century
Eloquent... [Neiman argues that] evil is not just an ethical violation, it disrupts and challenges our interpretation of the world. -- Edward Rothstein, The New York Times
Neiman follows the argument like a sleuth, and, indeed, her book is a kind of thriller: What is it that menaces us? Will we find what evil is? And how may we escape it? The path leads from a God found absent past a Nature that's indifferent till it fetches up at the house of a man himself. . . . Neiman leads the reader through a careful analysis of the relation of intention, act, and consequence to kinds of useful knowledge and degrees of awareness. -- William H. Gass, Harper's Magazine
This great work....looks into these abysses with astonishing fearlessness. -- "Die Zeit
An erudite and compelling intellectual treatise that is profoundly interesting, often witty, and constructed without resorting to jargon or obfuscation. . . . In reorienting the history of philosophy, she has made it come alive. . . . This is a fine, even elegant book. -- "Choice
This is an accessible work of philosophy in the best sense, sharply focused on matters of vital human concern and free of the domain tics that mar even allegedly popular works by Anglo-American philosophers. -- Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books
Clear, elegant and inviting...suddenly, (philosophy) is again a matter of life and death. -- "Die Welt
We badly need alternative histories of philosophy. The story told (by me, among others) cries out for supplementation. . . . Neiman's snazzy prose makes this book a pleasure to read, as well as an immensely welcome change from the sort of history of philosophy to which we have become accustomed. -- Richard Rorty, Common Knowledge
A deeply moving and scholarly book that will interest many general readers. -- "Library Journal
Neiman's book is a welcome contribution to a philosophical conversation too long neglected. -- Barry Allen, Toronto Globe and Mail
Neiman argues that when we ask why the world is the way it is, rather than the way it ought to be, that's the same as thinking about evil. . . . If there is only a single standard of good behavior, then no matter how honestly we believe in our causes--in democracy, for instance, as opposed to tyranny or religious totalitarianism--we are never allowed to stop worrying about our own morality when we march forth to defend them. -- Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review
Neiman argues that, confronted with the enormity of the Holocaust, 20th-century thinkers found new grounds to conclude that what we call evil reflects nothing so much as the unintelligibility of the world. . . . [Her] conclusion is that we should neither abandon reason nor demand the impossible from it but rather rely on it as much as we can to identify the forms of suffering and acts of cruelty that we have the power to prevent, remedy or diminish. -- Peter Berkowitz, Washington Post Book World
Superb... Neiman's claim to have written an alternative history is not an empty boast. -- "First Things
Neiman's audacity and occasionally morbid wit are a welcome addition to contemporary philosophy. If there is any hope after Auschwitz, we may find it in the fact that human minds will not stop trying to make some kind of meaning out of it. -- Alan Wolfe, Books & Culture
Neiman's narrative . . . sheds light not just on the writings of particular thinkers, but also on their relation to one another. And it helps us begin to understand certain facts about the modern period that current philosophers find baffling. -- Thomas Hibbs, The Weekly Standard
Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability. . . . It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave. -- Mark Kingwell, Wilson Quarterly
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.
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Customer Reviews
So, I guess I was a little sceptical then when I first ventured this text. However, I am happy to say my concerns were soon dispelled. Auschwitz and the twin towers don't feature for another 250 pages and when they re-emerge they are handled with at least a degree of balance.
What we get instead is a history of theodicy from the enlightenment to the post war period. What is theodicy you ask? Well, I didn't know myself until I read this book. Apparently it is a name for those theories put forward by thinkers to explain how a world created by a benevolent God can contain so much suffering and evil. The problem logically put is this:
1. God is good.
2. God is omnipotent.
3. Evil exists.
All three of these propositions cannot be true. If God is omnipotent and truly good he wouldn't allow evil. So, either God is omnipotent but chooses not to prevent evil, meaning that he can hardly be called good, or God is good but he cannot prevent evil, meaning he is not omnipotent. This kind of religious paradox is well encapsulated by the following puzzle: can God create a rock so big that even he cannot lift it? An answer either way is a blasphemy.
A number of Christian apologists have created theodicies refuting the third proposition: that evil exists. Leibniz claimed that our world was the best of all possible worlds, an idea so redolent with deliberate self-delusion that it's almost laughable.
The predominant claim has been to blame human beings themselves for evil, letting God off the hook even though we were made by him and in his image apparently. St. Augustine developed the idea of original sin in order to exonerate God - we're all guilty just by virtue of being born. Rousseau gave us the blame too, though through cumulative historical mistakes rather than from an ancient crime perpetrated by our forbears, Adam and Eve.
Of course all this is a gift for indignant atheists because there's only a problem if you insist on the existence of an all powerful, all loving God. Remove this element from the equation and we have simple brute fact; the world can be a very nasty place. But what is interesting about this book is its suggestion that, according to a number of thinkers, this is from where theodicy itself springs. The world can appear miserable and senseless, sure, but the essential human response is to ask the question `why?' Nature is not equipped to answer, for such enquiries are alien to her. For nature there is only `is'. The human thirst for meaning creates transcendental agencies to supply the missing `because' - Gods!
So we see that rather than theodicy being devised to justify God, God may have been devised to provide theodicy. It has proved to be an imperfect solution, clearly.
The most interesting sections of this book concern Bayle who laughs off theodicy and supposedly embraces the idea that all God's works are beyond human reasoning (possibly concealing a strong atheistic bent beneath pious platitudes); Kant who argues that if innocence and merit did always meet with earthly happiness and reward, any moral impulse in humanity would be completely nullified by instrumentalist gaming (and think of the loss of free will that this might entail); and De Sade who alternates between atheistic, nihilistic sensuality and a belief in an inverted God who delights in cruelty and exhorts his creations to revel in the same mire.
Freud takes the psychological approach of course; we are overgrown children who have been taught by our parents that good behaviour warrants treats. We seek in earnest for signs of this transaction in the Universe, generating all manner of metaphysical constructs to replicate it. Marx rails against the mythology created to retain the unjust power relations in society; the meek shall inherit the earth indeed.
The discussion is rich and broad-ranging, examining diverse ideas such as that 20th century formulation `the banality of evil' and the impulse, even in those antithetical to religion, to erect some kind of quasi-theodicy to help us accept the unacceptable elements in our world.
Even though Neiman purportedly writes this book outside the hallowed walls of the academy and refrains from many of the usual academic conventions, she does assume a basic grounding in the thought of the philosophers discussed and the reader will need this to get the most from the book. I found her prose engaging though there are occasional awkwardnesses.
I took two things from this book. Firstly, it made me reflect on the fact that if there is no God and no transcendent reality then there really is no record or ledger of human injustice and suffering other than human memory itself, which is fallible and disappears with a few generations. Even books and electronic data decay or are lost eventually. It is sobering when you consider that the perpetrators of some of the most unimaginable cruelties in history lived happy and fulfilled lives to ripe old ages. No account will be made at the end of time. How apt the adage, justice delayed is justice denied.
Secondly, I have had an awareness of one silly aspect of my own behaviour for many years that this book brought into focus. One misses the same bus three days in a row. `How bloody typical!' one might say. `It always happens to me'. As if the Universe itself were conspiring against you. Or the computer won't do what it's supposed to and one gets angry. `For God's sake!' one might say, or some similar harangue to the Universe (or anyone who will listen). It is quite astounding just how pervasive providential thinking really can be. The idea that we vaguely imagine that someone is listening to our complaints about those daily minor injustices and recording our grievances, or that someone or something is testing our limits. Like a child with a grazed knee who only cries when he is certain his mother is looking. Evidence of our own little personal theodicies.
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.
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