Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy by Susan Neiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Lifespan of Moral Evil

This is a long and complex book, possibly longer and more complex than it needs to be in order to establish its main thesis, namely that “The problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.” More specifically, “The sharp distinction between natural and moral evil that now seems self-evident was born around the Lisbon earthquake [of 1755] and nourished by Rousseau. Tracing the history of that distinction, and the ways in which the problems refused to stay separate, is one aim of this book.” For Neiman, this is the birth of ‘modernity’, an attitude toward the world that will last until the other pole of her narrative, the death camp of Auschwitz as the representative symbol of the Holocaust.

Neiman establishes the centrality of evil through a creative but simple intellectual move:

“The problem of evil can be expressed in theological or secular terms, but it is fundamentally a problem about the intelligibility of the world as a whole. Thus it belongs neither to ethics nor to metaphysics but forms a link between the two.”

For her, therefore, the opposite of evil is not good but intelligibility. That which is unintelligible, that is to say chaotic, disorderly, brutally arbitrary, and without rational foundation is by definition what philosophers, and not just theologians, have historically considered as evil. Only during the Renaissance did evil become an accepted antonym of good, and only then did evil become a specifically theological problem involving the relationship between evil and God. This development promoted the distinction between moral evil and natural evil which has persisted into modern philosophical thought.

A sharp distinction between moral and natural evil was unknown to the ancient Greeks. More to the point, it was unknown to Judaism and Christianity. The biblical story of Job, for example, demonstrates decisively that moral and natural evil are indistinguishable. Neiman uses the Lisbon earthquake as the signal event from which the hard distinction arises. In a world considered to be created and maintained by divine order, such an event threatens the intelligibility of not just the universe but also its purported creator.

The distinction between moral and natural evil allowed everyone, Philosophes and Christian apologists, to have their cake and eat it - at least for a time. Moral evil is a human affliction; natural evil is a divine mystery. Ethics (or moral theology) diagnosed the human disease and its cure, while Christian faith prescribed a fatalistic confidence that, despite apparent disasters, the prevailing conditions and events of creation are best in the long term. The distinction also allowed a scripturally based explanation. There is a connection between moral and natural evil just as described in the natural disasters that had befallen ancient Israel. The new Calvinist theology fit right with this explanation.

God was thereby given a metaphysical free pass. But it was human beings who now became even more unintelligible, that is to say, more evil than they had ever been before. Religionists could point to a connection between moral and natural evil as just and appropriate compensation for sin. Suffering is a consequence of moral evil - entirely rational, and intelligible in concept, therefore. But how much is enough punishment? And why include the just and unjust? What about the infants? And by the way, are the infinite punishments of hell really justified by the finite sins of human beings no matter how heinous? The biblical sources themselves look less and less intelligible, and Calvinism more and more Manichaean.

But the Philosophes also shared the problem. What constituted a ‘normal,’ ‘rational,’ or ‘intelligible’ human being? The issue is crucial if human beings were to be considered as intelligible without God.* Leibniz had proposed a world in which God guided every human interaction. If God didn’t exist or was disengaged as the Deists suggested what standard could be applied to judge whether human behaviour was rational or insane? Without the concept of sin and its interference in ultimate purpose, this judgment looks to be arbitrary, certainly as arbitrary as the arbitrary acts of an all-powerful but unintelligible God. So evil remains an issue even after religion is established in its own intellectual niche by Kant.

So a purely human ethics doesn’t have a place to stand. Evil remains a problem. Human behaviour is at least as mysterious as divine behaviour. And mostly that behaviour looks pretty bad. So the cosmic problem of rationality continues in a sort of paired down or localised version. Irrationality was always the threat, but now it travels under the guise of moral evil, an undefinable flaw in humanity which, absent the idea of Original Sin, deteriorates into a label which connotes disgust without any further explanation. Evil is that which is incorrigible because it is unintelligible.

Which eventually brings Neiman to the other pole of her narrative - Auschwitz, the symbol of the fundamental unintelligibility of the event of the Holocaust. The trip from the Lisbon earthquake to the Auschwitz death camp is the central trajectory of her narrative. The Holocaust is incomprehensible in both its magnitude and its intention. It defies explanation, although many have tried to provide one. Its purpose is so unacceptable that even God could not have pursued it. Yet human beings conceived and executed it. Modernity, the idea that human beings are responsible for creating and enforcing their own ethical code, has ended in failure.

The Holocaust defies psychological, sociological and anthropological science just as the Lisbon quake defies theology. Rationality resides neither in God nor in Man. Nor, apparently, does it reside in Nature if we take things like Quantum and Relativity Physics seriously (hence Einstein’s quip about God and dice). The world may be describable but it is also as unintelligible as it has always been (I blame Plato). In fact, the more we know the less intelligible many things are. Neiman‘s analysis of philosophical history is interesting. But her idea of evil is, for me, indistinguishable from what other philosophers, writers and scientists call rational thought, or more simply, reason.

If this is so, then the 20th century certainly witnessed the death of reason as a fixed set of principles or methods, as the 18th century witnessed the death of the Will 0f God as the universal, uncontested explanation for the state of the world. Scientific research, linguistic analysis, psychoanalysis and existential philosophies also undermined the concept of intelligibility along with events like the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust. The result can be loosely called post-modernism. The criteria of intelligibility changed in post-modernism from what they had been previously, just as the criteria for good science or good literature had changed. If Neiman wants to assert, then, that the concept of evil as a threat to intelligibility also changed as a consequence, I have no objection. It might prove useful in other than historiography. It could catch on. Then again it might not

*One area in which this issue has taken on a dominant importance is Economics. The emerging field of Behavioural Economics is gradually encroaching on the dogmatically imposed rationality of classical micro-economics. More generally the issue in all the social sciences is whether human behaviour should be considered as de facto reasonable, that is in furtherance of some possibly undisclosed purpose, or judged by externally determined fixed standards.

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