Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation 9780745629544

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radical evil

a philosophical interrogation

ltlOIAID J, l[AIISHIH

RADICAL EVIL A Philosophical Interrogation Richard J. Bernstein

polity

C:opyriRlll C'· Ri, harrl .J. lkm,trin 2002 Thr ri,?111 of Rirhard .J. Rrm,trin 10 Ix- id,·ntilird a., author nf this work has Ix-en ~srrtl'II in aumd.1111·r with tlu- C.:npy1igh1. Dnign, and l'a1,·nls Art 1988. FiN pnhli,hrcl in 2002 h~· Polity Pn·._, in a.,,oriation with Blatkwdl Publishers Ltd, a 81;11 kwrll Puhli,hin!( Company. F.d//11nnl 11{fi, r. Polit,· Pn~ ti:-o Bndl!t' Stn·rt C.:amhrid1tr CB:! 1l R. lJK Marl.ttrni: nnd p,,,du, /11nr. Bl.11 kwrll l'nhli,lu·r, [Jd 11111 Cow Ir,· l{oJrl

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Contents

ix

Pnji1a /11hod11dio11

PART I

EVIL, WILL, AND FREEDOM 1

Radical Evil: Kant at War with Himself

11

Ei:il maxims

l '11r01ulitional moral resj1onsibili!)'

14 19 36 42

Hegel: The Healing of the Spirit?

46

771r.fi11ite and the infinite f..i-il a11d jinitude

50 58 63 67 73

Radical ez:il Diabolical evil

2

Adam\- Fall

17ie neces.,i{J' and justificatio11 H,gel agai11st Hegel 3

9

of evil?

Schelling: The Metaphysics of Evil

76

Rm/ evil

80 83 88 93

Ground and existence Se!f will a11d the princij,/e of dark11ess The moral psyclwkJgy

of evil

Co11tmts

VI

Intermezzo PART II THE MORAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIL

98 101

4 Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil?

103

Good and had vmu.r good and evil 17ie dialectical ironirl Evil a11d re.r.rmlimer1/ B1yrmd good a11d evil What we leam ftom .Nietl;..rd1e about evil

105

5 Freud: Ineradicable Evil and Ambivalence Th, ambivalmu of lite ba11d of brothers 17,e thror)' of i11sti11cls .Nictzsd1e a11d Freud Respo11sibili9• far el'il PART ID AFTER AUSCHWITZ

109 119

123 127 132 135 143 154 156 161

Prologue

163

6 Levinas: Evil and the Temptation ofTheodicy

166

17,e rod qf tlieodi()' 17,e phmomerwlog)' of evil bifi11ite respo11sibili!J• 7 Jonas: A New Ethic of Responsibility

The respo11se lo 11iltilism Eril a11d our apoca9t1tic situatio11 "Den1)'tl10/ogizi11g" ]011as's TT!)•llt Jo11as a11d Lrvinas 8 Arendt: Radical Evil and the Banality of Evil

S11J1ajluow11ess, Jpo11ta11ei!J, a11d plurali!)• 1'.i.•il i11tmtim1.r and motivations? Eichma1111: human-all-too-huma11

168 174 180 184 187

194 199 201 205 209 214 220

Contents

VII

Conclusion

225

Nous

236

Bibliography

273

Subject Index

280

Index of Names

287

Preface

My understanding of philosophic inquiry, shaped when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, has always been Socratic. By this I mean that I have always believed that the deepest philosophic perplexities have their roots in our everyday experiences, and ought to help to illuminate these experiences. Looking back over the horrendous twentieth century, few of us would hesitate to speak of evil. Many people believe that the evils witnessed in the twentieth century exceed anything that has ever been recorded in past history. Most ofus do not hesitate to speak about these extreme events - genocides, massacres, torture, terrorist attacks, the infliction of gratuitous suffering - as evil. We have an intuitive sense that there is a difference between rndical evil and more common forms of immoral behavior. But when we stop to think and ask what we mean by evil and what we are really saying when we call a person, act, or event evil, our responses arc frequently weak and diffuse. There is a disparity between the intense moral passion that we feel in condemning something as evil and our ability to give a conceptual account of what we mean by evil. If we tum to morn! philosophy as it ha.'> been practiced in the twentieth century, we do not find much help. Moral philosophers are far more at case talking about what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, than in speaking about evil. "Evil" appears to have been dropped from the vocabulary of most moral philosophers, even though it is still very much in evidence in our everyday experience and discourse. This inquiry - this series of interrogations - began from the perplexity concerning the disparity between our readiness to classify and condemn phenomena as evil and the apparent lack of intellectual resources with

X

Prefact

whirh to rlarifv the meaning, varieties, and vicissitudes of evil. The original stimulus ~as the thinking of Hannah Arendt, one of the very few twrnticth-century thinkers to grapple with what was distinctive ahout twentirth-century evils. Rt'lkcting on her contribution, I was !rd to ask, what can we !ram about evil from the modern philosophical tradition? This hook is thr result of the intellectual journey taken in seeking to answer this question. In the Introduction, I explain why I begin with Kant's understanding of radical evil, and why I have chosen the particular thinkers that I forus on in this inquiry. The manuscript for the book was finished a few wrc·k.~ before September 11, 2001. But the events of that infamous day conlinn some of till' main claims of this book. Few would hesitate to name what happened on that day as evil - indeed, the very epitome of evil in our time. Yet, despite the complex emotions and responses that the events have e\'oked, there is a great deal of uncertainty ahout what is meant by calling them evil. There is an all too familiar popular rhetoric of "evil" that bcromes fashionable at such critical moments, which actually obscures and blocks serious thinking about the meaning of evil. "Evil" is used to silence thinking and to demonize what we refuse to understand. I completed this book during a magnificent year (2000--2001) as a fellow at the ll1Jm1.1dwj/Jkolleg ;:11 Brrli11. This Institute of Advanced Study is an academic utopia. Everything is done to facilitate one's thinking and research. It is not only the detailed attention to taking care of one's material net·ds, but the extraordinary welcoming and generous spirit of the entire staff that make it such an unusual place to work. Not the least of the benefits of the Wissensduifiskolleg was the intellectual stimulation and collc·giality prodded by the follows working on the most diverse problems in an enonnous range of disciplines. l\lany new friendships were formed in the course of the year, but I want to acknowledge especially the helpful philosophic suggestions and conversations with my co-fellow, Dieter Henrich. Berlin, an exciting city that is in the process of becoming a m,~or cosmopolitan center once again, is probably the most self-consciously historical rity in the world. The past, especially the troubled past of the twentieth century, is always vi,idly present even in its silences and alJSl·nce. Berlin turned out to be an approp1iate site to explore the abyss of twentil·th-century radical evil. I want to make a brid' comment about the use of masculine pronouns in the hook. Originally I tried to adopt one of the new linguistic strategics for avoiding srxist language. But frankly, none of them seemed to work ·without stylistic awkwardnl'ss. All of the· major thinkers examined in the book use m,Lo;culi1w expressions when spt·aking about human beings in general. For stylistic re,M11S -- albeit with a few exceptions - I ha\'e followed this practice.

Preface

xi

The chapter, entitled "Radical Evil: Kant at War with Himself' is based on an earlier version of a paper published in Rethinking Evil, edited by Maria Pia Lara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 200 I). The chapter, entitled "Levinas: Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy" is based on an earlier version published in 771e Cambridge Companion to Emmanuel Levina.r, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I want to thank my research assistant, Laureen Park, for her care and diligence in preparing the manuscript for publication. I am also grateful to Jean van Altena who edited the manuscript with sensitivity and good judgment. For the past twelve years I have benefited from the stimulation of my colleagues and students in the Graduate Faculty of the New School of Social Research. We have a lively, intense, engaged philosophic community. Discussing, arguing, and working closely with my colleague Agnes Heller, for whom philosophy is a living passion, has been a primary source of the joy and intellectual excitement that I have experienced teaching at the New School. This book is dedicated to her.

Introduction

In 1945, when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and the full horrors of what had happened during the war years were just beginning to emerge, Hannah Arendt declared, "The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe." 1 Later, when Arendt was asked about her first reactions to the rumors about the extermination camps (which she first heard in 1942), she said that it was as if an abyss had opened. "Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us can." 2 Arendt, like many others - especially the survivors of the camps - felt that what happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical form of evil. "Auschwitz" became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and has come to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century. We might also mention Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia - names and sites so very different, yet manifesting horrendous events that we despcratdy try to understand, but to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Yet there is something extraordinarily paradoxical about the visibility of e,il in our time - a visibility that can be so ovenvhelming that it numbs us. Andrew Delbanco acutely observes, "a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. Never before have images of horror been so \\idely disseminated and so appalling - from organized death camps to children starving in famines that might have been averted .... The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak." 3 \\'e have been overwhelmed by the most excruciating and detailed descriptions and testimonies; nevertheless the conceptual discourse for dealing with evil has been ~parse and inadequate. What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person

2

/ntmd11ctim1

as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt onre wrote to Karl Jaspers: "Tht·rc is a differcnrr between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all ... built factories to produce corpses."' But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? \\'hat arc we really saying when we speak of radical evil? Philosophrrs and political theorists arc much more comfortable speaking about i~justice, tlw violation of human rights, what is immoral and uncthiral, than about evil. When theologians and philosophers of religion speak about "the problem of c,~1," they typically mt·an something quite specific - the problem of how to reconcile the appearance of evil with a brlief in a God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and beneficent. Even this discourse has become specialized and professionalized, and remote from the lived experiences of ordinary people. In much of this literature, there is a litany of the usual examples of evil: Nazi horrors, ,villful sadistic acts, gratuitous murders, humiliating tortures, the extreme suffering of innocents, and the traditional Christian catalogue of sins. Frequently these exampks are treated a~ if they were unproblematic. The main issue of the so-called problem of e,~I is not really the characterization of evil and its varieties. It is rathrr the problem of how to reconcile evil (however it is described) with religious beliefs and convictions. It is almost as if the language of rvil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse. We might try to rxplain this in a variety of ways. There certainly has been a loss of the grip of traditional religious and theological discourse on people's everyday li\'es. Traditionally, evil has been closely assoriatl'd with rdigious, t'specially Christian, concerns. But today, there is a pre\'ailing sense of the irrelevance of throdicy. If we think of theodicy in a broad srnse as the attempt to find some 'justification" for the evil and useless sullering that we encounter, we might say, with Emmanuel Levinas, that we arc now !i,ing in a time after the "end of theodicy." "The philosophical problem ... which is posed by the useless pain [ma~ which appears in its fundamental malignancy across the events of the twentieth crntury concerns the meaning that religiosity and human morality of goodness ran still retain alicr the end of thcodiry. n:, In 1982 Lcvinas, who spent sewral years in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, and who lost most of his family at Ausclmitz, wrote: "This is the century that in thirty years has known two world wars, the totalitarianism of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia. This is the century which is drawing to a close in the haunting memory of e\'l'11·thing signified by these barbaric namcs."li Since 1982, the list of new "barbaric names" has grown at an alarming rate. There is anothrr reason why philosophers arc reluctant to speak about

Introduction

3

evil. In our popular culture there is a subterranean current of "vulgar Manichacism." By this I refer to the case with which the world gets divided into good and evil forces. Evil (as Nietzsche had already taught us) comes to represent everything that one hates and despises, what one takes to be vile and despicable, which is to be violently extirpated. This vulgar Manichacism can take deadly forms in fanatical ideologies. Today, it is the most ideological and fanatical groups that still employ the language of evil to identify what they despise and want to destroy. Yct the problems concerning evil come back to haunt us. There is an increasing anxiety that we can neither prevent nor anticipate the bursting forth of ever-new evils. \Ve need to gain some comprehension, some conceptual grasp of these evils - what we even mean when we label something evil. We lack a discourse that is deep, rich, and subtle enough to capture what has been experienced. This is the problematic - the felt difficulty - that forms the background for my present inquiry. Tlw immediate occasion for writing this book arose from my study Hanna/, Arendt and the Jewish QJ,mtion. Arendt is among the few post-World War II thinkers who sought to explore what is distinctive about twentiethcentury evil - as epitomized by totalitarian regimes ·- and to do so in a manner that does not rely on religious or theological descriptions of sin and evil. In my study of Arendt, I dedicated two chapters to her explorations of evil, radical evil and the banality of evil.7 I argued there - a~ I will also show later in this study - that she was extremely insightful in her questioning. But, despite her pcrceptiwncss, Arendt (as she realized) raised many questions concerning evil that she did not address. Spt·cilically, the comment she made about Kant in 17,e Origins '!/ Totnlitnria11irm led to my own interrogations. In introducing /1rr concept of radical evil, she said that Kant - the philosopher who coined the expression "radical C\il" ·· must have suspected the existence of a phenomenon that "confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know.'" (I have cited the entire passage at the bt·ginning of chapter I.) Later. I will explore what Arendt meant by radical evil. But it was this rdi.·rence to Kant that aroused my interest and curiosity. What did Kant, who many consider to he the most important modern moral philosoplwr, mean by radical evil? What might we still lcam from Kant, and from those post-Kantian thinkers who have probed the meaning of evil~ There is another reason why Kant is important for my inwstigation. In 1791, two years bc·forc the publication of Rd(t!,ion u:it/iin the limit.1 ,![ Rmwn Alone, Kant wrote a little known, but extremely important, c·ssay c·ntitlcd ··on the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies.'' 11 Tiu- very title of this essay is significant. Kant is declaring that theoclicy is not a task of science, but a matter of faith. If theodicy is conceived as a scimre or a

4

Introduction

discipline that can yield tlicoretical knowltdgc, then it is impossible. Consequently, not only do all attt·mptcd philosophical thcodicics fail; they mu.st fail. Theodicy a~ a scienrc presuppoSrty himself makes this point. Till' metaphysil'ian n·sponds to this sort ol' talk hy railing it "n•lati\'istil''' and insi~ting that what malll'rs is not what languag1· is bring usrcl hut what is true. l\lt·taphyskians think that human beings hy nature desire to know. Tlwy think this ht·c·aust· the vornhulary thry ha\'t' inlwritt·d, thrir rnmmon st·nst·, provides tlwrn with a pictun· of knowlt·dgt· ,L~ a rdation ht·1w1·t·n human h1·ings and "reality," and 1111' idra that wt· ha\'t' a m·rcl and a duty to t·nter into this rc·lation. It al~o tdls us that "n•ality," il'propl'rl)· a~krcl, will help us drtt·rmilll' what our linal \'orahulary should ht·. So mt·taphysirians hdit'\'l' that tlll'n• an·, out therl' in thr world, n·al t·s~1·11t·t·s whirh it is our duty to disrovrr and which an· dispos1·d lo as,ist in thrir own dist·ovt·ry. 1;

Given the contcm and tone of what Rorty says about the ml·taphysidan/ philosopher, Nietzsche might wdl consider him to be a true disciple! But what recourse docs the ironist have if he is challrngcd about tlw status of his final vocabulary? \ \'hat recourse docs ~ic-tzsd1e have if we start asking what is the ba'iis for prnising lif'e-aflirming values and rnndemning life-degenerating values? Rorty labels the alternative "rccll·sl-ription.'' Rcdcscription covers a variety of rhetorical, poetic·, and metaphoric de\ic·c·s -- including story telling, vivid examples, inventive fictions, and myths all

116

17,e Moral Psyc/Jology of F,,vi/

of which arc used to make a specific vocabulary, a way of viewing the world as attractive and as persuasive a~ possible. The type of ironist that Rorty favors is, appropriating Harold Bloom's expression, "the strong poet" someone who has the imaginative creative ability to break through entrenched, deadening ways of "normal" description in order to invent startling new creative forms of perceiving, feeling, and evaluating. 111 Nietzsche docs not justify his critique of morality by an appealing to rational grounds or metaphysical foundations; he ')ustifies" it by imaginative redescription, by opening up new possibilities - possibilities that only strong poets arc capable of creating. I place 'justifies" in scare quotes deliberately, because by the standards of the metaphysician/philosophcr this is 110 justification at all. It is too relativistic. But the very plausibility of this standard objection prl'supposcs that it is possible to ground one's final vocabulary, by giving a noncircular argument that will justify it. This is what Nietzsche and Rorty arc challenging. This is the self-deceptive illusion of the metaphysician. He thinks that there really is something "better," "firmer," "more solid" than rcdcsrription. But there isn't - or so Nietzsche and Rorty claim. We can interpret Nietzsche as engaged in a two-stage strategy (although these stages arc frequently blended together). The first stage involves questioning traditional philosophical understandings of grounding, rational argumentation, and seeking solid foundations. He ridicules and "laughs" al the suggestion that this is even possible. He is certainly wily and sophisticated enough to recognize that this is just as true for his own striking claims about "knowledge," "reality," and "morality." He wants to expose the self-deceptive /Jrdudice about rational foundations that lies at the heart of philosophy. This aspect of his strategy is directed towards eliminating this fiction. But Nietzsche is even more radical. The second stage is to challenge the implicit either/or that plays such a significant role in the thinking of the mctaphysician/philosopher. For the metaphysician is convinced that there arc only two alternatives: either "serious" rational grounding or self-defeating relativism. This is the most disastrous prejudice of all - and it keeps philosophy in constant oscillation. 1!I This way of thinking needs to be abandoned, and replaced by the frank recognition that there is nothing more fundamental than imaginative and poetic redcsrription. Or, to use Nietzsche's own vocabulary, one needs to invent and experiment with multiple styles and perspectives, in order to show which fictions arc creative and life-enhancing, and which arc destructive and dangerously self-deceptive. The proper question to ask about Nietzsche's critique of morality is 1101 whether it rests on a secure "rational foundation," but rather, whether, in its graphic details, it enables us to expose what has been hidden and encrusted in moral platitudes - that is, whether it enables us to A1ww a11d see differmtfy.

Nietz,sd1e: Be;·ond Good and Ez:il?

117

Interpreting Nietzsche in this way helps to situate what have been called his "perspectivism" and his "stylistic pluralism." 20 Recently, there has been a great deal of discussion (pro and con} of Nietzsche's "perspectivism." There is something excessive and off-center about this debate, because it tends to suggest that Nietzsche was primarily interested in making a contribution to the epistemological issues that obsess so many contemporary philosophers. One of Nietzsche's clearest most forceful statements about perspective appears in the Genealogy. Because it is so relevant for understanding Nietzsche's critique of morality and his reflections on evil, I want to quote it at length. But pn·cis('ly because we sl·ek knowl Yon·I. Yirrniyahu. I:1. '.JO, I :l:l, '.B] II. 7, 2:JIJ II. 27 Zii.c·k. Sla\'oj. 117. 1111, CJO I, 112 '.J, '.ll'.J n. 51, 2·11111. II, 2.iO n. lh