EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT: An Alternative History of Philosophy

EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT: An Alternative History of Philosophy. By Susan Neiman. Princeton Univ. Press. 358 pp. $29.95

Susan Neiman’s "alternative history of philosophy" is no exercise in fashionable special pleading or canon reform but an attempt to show that Western philosophy has the wrong focus. Instead of the common but misleading alliance of metaphysics ("What is real?") and analytic epistemology ("What can we know?"), Neiman argues, philosophers ought to recognize that metaphysics is linked with ethics ("What is right?"). The traditional questions of appearance and reality, substance and change, reflect a sustained struggle, often frustrated or futile, with the problem of evil. This is not an unprecedented thesis—Aristotle, for one, had a version of it—but Neiman’s modern focus and the unhappy coincidence of recent events make the issue of evil at once more difficult and more pressing.

Usually conceived as a strict theological debate within Christian theodicy, the problem of evil is based on the widespread perception that bad things happen to good people. If this is so, then the Christian deity’s "triangle of perfection"—the linked divine qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence—is challenged; at least one corner must give. If innocents suffer and die, then God must be ignorant, weak, or malicious. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, a shocking devastation, prompted sharp criticism of the theodicy, especially Gottfried Leibniz’s "best of all possible worlds" version, which was lampooned savagely by Voltaire.

Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, asks: Are natural evils, such as the Lisbon earthquake, and human evils, such as the Holocaust, versions of the same problem, or are they distinct? If there is a distinction, what is it? We may abandon Christian belief, and so ease the sting of a natural disaster (it’s no longer, except metaphorically, an "act of God"). But this will not help us when human-made evils, genocide and torture and terrorism, have the very same effect of tearing asunder our idea of the world as a place where things make sense.

The book is ordered in four long chapters, working within self-imposed restrictions of neither defining evil nor extending further back than the "modern" era, set here as beginning in 1697 with the publication of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary. Neiman’s first two chapters survey rival responses to evil: "The one, from Rousseau to [Hannah] Arendt, insists that morality demands that we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Jean Améry, insists that morality demands that we don’t." There follows a separate chapter on the mixed, category-defying views of Nietzsche and Freud, and a final one of assessment and account taking, including some nuanced reflections on the rhetorical uses of the word evil in the days and weeks following September 11.

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. Both natural and moral evils exist, and both have the power to threaten the intelligibility of the world as a whole. The unforestallable attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were evil not because people died—far more people die every summer on American highways—but because they tore our fragile tissue of meaning.

Evil in Modern Thought is not merely a clever revision of traditional intellectual history; it is a demand that philosophers, indeed all of us, acknowledge the deep responsibilities of being here, in a world where neither God nor nature—nor, sometimes, other people—cares what happens to us. It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave.

—Mark Kingwell