Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation

by Richard J. Bernstein

At present, there is an enormous gulf between the visibility of evil and the paucity of our intellectual resources for coming to grips with it. We have been flooded with images of death camps, terrorist attacks and horrendous human suffering. Yet when we ask what we mean by radical evil and how we are to account for it, we seem to be at a loss for proper responses.
Bernstein seeks to discover what we can learn about the meaning of evil and human responsibility. He turns to philosophers such as Kant, who coined the expression 'radical evil', as well as to Hegel and Schelling. He also examines more recent explorations of evil, namely the thinking of Freud and Nietzsche on the moral psychology of evil. Finally, he looks at the way in which three post-Holocaust thinkers – Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt – have sought to come to grips with evil "after Auschwitz." Bernstein's primary concern throughout this challenging book is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it.
Radical Evil will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social and political theory, and religious studies.

Genres: Philosophy

304 pages, Paperback

First published August 9, 2002

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

.??? 2000s?: this is a fascinating exploration of what evil is, if not error, if not relativistic, if not natural science moment... but something we all need to understand better. if nothing else this book offers a good starting point to rehabilitate the concepts of good and evil too often elided in our ethics of postmodernity...

[Stella Haugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

BEST BOOK EVERRRR SUPER INTERESTING

[Sonny Piñar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough and complex read on human resposibility, this book brings you through philosophy to a different level of analysis.

[A.E. Reiff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who else but the life and writings of German philosophers Kant, Jaspers, Heidegger background Auschwitz and spread to the world?Or would you prefer the practices of European empire? Three contemporaries of Auschwitz and the evil it extends Arendt calls banal and offends the good persons of ethics so much. Stanley Milgram's experiments to test human propensity to obey orders, as participants gave increasingly large electric shocks to subjects, in The Perils of Obedience says, "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process". But it cannot be denied it is a word game, which is why philosophy has been displaced by linguistic analysis so much and why philosophy runs to Shakespeare when it comes to the inscrutable impasse of thought, the inscrutability of why some choose life and others death. No he is not Iago, or Lear or even Richard III, as if literature answered in words and deeds those images. But along the way much of interest occurs in these, even if Wittgenstein gets no mention in Radical Evil, who said, “What is your aim in Philosophy?” “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (Philosophical Investigations) – Wittgenstein

"Wittgenstein thought that the pursuit of philosophy in its traditional sense is pointless. Philosophers who scoured far and wide for a structured logical form applicable to everything were deluded and wasting their time, much like a fly who constantly tries to escape a transparent bottle by banging against the side. Wittgenstein saw it as his job to show these tenacious philosophers out of the top of the fly-bottle and to see philosophy for what it really is – a futile attempt to find an all-encompassing logical form of thought behind the mess that is ordinary language…" http://thewayintothefloweringheart.bl...

People have to cooperate for parallel compartmentalized societies to exist. The difference between gas chambers and labs, if inscrutable to bystanders is the same for those who resist, who resist for no purpose except they do. In the American instance people are made docile by the bread opiate and circus prosperity, cheap goods manufactured by Walmart at the expense of millions of subsistence laborers in the other world. That's what the bystanders get for keeping quiet. Maybe they even complain they don't get enough, that their lives are victimized, but not as much as the Others. Concern for others is the central receipt of Levinas, who insists upon "our asymmetrical and nonreciprocal response to the suffering of the other (l'autrue), my neighbor, and our infinite responsibility to and for the other" 166, 171. The death camps are a rhetorical framework on which to hand the singular transhuman future that corporations and governments seek. The point has always been that if people had not gone along, but protested, fewer had died, or maybe more would have considering they themselves might have entered the chambers. You would think in interrogations like Radical Evil Prometheus would be mentioned.

THE OTHER

Emmanuel Levinas, drafted in the French army, was taken prisoner in the Nazi invasion of France in 1940 and was a POW the whole war, but his citizenship spared him the death camps. A major influence on Derrida, Levinas says, "Justice is the way in which I respond to the fact that I am not alone in the world with the other" 167. Much is made of the bystander, always has been, but to no avail. He cites one Anton Schmidt who resisted, "how utterly different everything would be today...if" 173, but Schmidt is alone on the page. Spender gives a picture of a Wiemar bystander, Horst Keller, son of a general, http://animalwilderness.blogspot.com/... but all talk of transcendence of evil as a malignant sublime pales in what philosophers call ethical response. That it is so called only increases the number of bystanders: "the ethical response recognizes that the otherness of the other" 176...I AM INFINITELY RESPONSIBLE FOR AND TO THE OTHER PERSON, WHOSE SUFFERING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY OWN SUFFERING. 176 I took out the adverb, that this suffering is ethically more important.

I don't think ethics has anything to do with it. When Linda Brewster suggested I might like a date with her eager friend, I said I would, but my wife wasn't so eager. That she called ethical. It's not ethics, it's disgust. Ethics is the fancy of magical thinking. It breeds compromise. All bystanders hide in ethics and the ethical dilemmas cited, like the woman who had to choose which of her three children the Nazis would kill. There is no choice but death, death for all. Later, in Arendt, we see that advanced evil seeks to deny even martyrdom to the inmates, along with their humanity, but we take a lesson from the bear milked for its bile in China, that, seeing its cub about to be hooked up to also be milked, escaped, killed the cub and dashed its own brains out against a wall. Philosophers call this bestial, but it is the highest form of concern for the other. Believe me when I say the end of Eichmann or Goring has not ended yet. Levinas called Heidegger guilty of ontological imperialism-he trafficked in compromise with the Reich, "however, with the appearance of the human--and this is my entire philosophy--there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other...the person who in his being is more attached to the being of the other than to his own. I believe that it is in saintliness that the human begins" (PM, 172f) 179. "The presence of the Other [l'autrui] does not clash with freedom but invests it" (TI, 60). When they bring you before the tribunals do not think what you will say, but have a couple Psalms at the ready to shout as loud as you can.

In the presence of mass murder why not expect philosophers to go gnostic trying to explain it. Hans Jonas does this along the way. He is overcome by Heidegger too, but more by the diaries of Etty Hillesum who reported on her own, as if for duty, to a death camp in 1942 and in '43 graduated to Auschwitz and then to death: "I will go any place on this earth where God sends me, and I am ready in every situation and until I die to bear witness...and if God does not continue to help me, then I must help God...I will always help God as well as I can." 199

[Lauti Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente, me parece un excelente repaso por todos los autores sin desviarse del dichoso tema central, "el mal". Muy completo y además me sirvió mucho, por ejemplo, en la manera de abordar un autor en cualquier tema, sea ese o otro.

[Hannah Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philosophy presented with concern to the changing perceptions on evil and the question of forming a comprehensive theory of evil. Characterisations of Freud and Arendt are particularly interesting.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very readable survey and commentary on the Kantian and Continental philosophical traditions' views on evil and human nature