Thwarting the terrorists.

Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, by Susan Neiman, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. 328 pp.

FRANCISCO GOYA'S HORRIFIC "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" adorns the dust jacket of Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought, a philosophy text remarkably accessible to the general reader. The shocking little etching, the aquatinted original only about 7x5 inches, is a perfect introduction to this equally powerful and provocative work. Confronting the enigma of evil, the author argues that all philosophy arises from pondering the simple question, "What are we to make of a world where bad things happen to good people?" Evil, she insists, threatens human reason, challenging our hope that the world makes sense.

Human history is without question a long, sad saga, an unrelenting record of death and disease, sin and suffering, crime and catastrophe, from one of the oldest stories in the Bible, Job's struggles against unjustified afflictions, to the atrocities in the Nazi death camps of the last century. More contemporary still are Neiman's timely and telling perspectives on today's terrorism. The book even brings to mind the recent havoc of the New Orleans hurricane and the attempts to deal with that tragedy. It is this skill in addressing evil not only in its historic setting but also in today's headlines that makes her book a rare achievement, described by one critic as "an intellectual adventure of a high order."

The author brings impressive credentials to her effort, having studied at Harvard and the Frei Universitat-Berlin and taught philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam. She has also authored two other well-received books.

It is not by chance that this present effort is so readable. From the start, Neiman says, she set out to address her work not solely to the professional philosophers, but to those who are not. It is written, she says, "in a manner that should be open to those without formal philosophical training, keeping notes and other scholarly apparatus to a minimum." It helps that her writing style is easy and elegant, full of keen and instructive insights.

Further, Neiman explains being drawn originally to philosophy by a determined interest in the fundamental issues of good and evil, life and death. She was disappointed to discover those matters were mostly being judged as subjects more appropriate for religious study while contemporary philosophical inquiry was concerned with such trendy theories as structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism or whatever was the current rage. Not one to be easily put off, Neiman persisted in her approach and has sub-titled her effort as "an alternative history of philosophy." At one point she approvingly quotes Schopenhauer: "The more specific character of the astonishment that urges us to philosophize obviously springs from the sight of evil and wickedness of the world. If our lives were without end and free of pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why this world exists."

In this study, Neiman takes as her time frame the three centuries since the Enlightenment when, as she sees it, people most like ourselves began to appear, thus defining the modern era. She also takes as the end points in her presentation the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Auschwitz death camp of the twentieth century. The destruction of the ancient and historic city of Lisbon, the deaths of thousands of its inhabitants, profoundly shocked the eighteenth century, raising the anguished question, how could such a terrible occurrence be explained, in much the same way as the exposure of the Nazi atrocities stunned the world, confronting it with evil beyond belief.

Attempting to deal with the question of what kind of world allowed such suffering of the innocent, Alphonso X, King of Castile, also known as Alphonso the Wise, declared "If I had been of God's counsel at the creation, many things would have been ordered better." A comment that only added to the uproar.

Unfortunately it was common then, as it had been for ages, failing any other explanation, to describe the worst calamities as "the acts of God." Greater sophistication was subsequently to differentiate between those woes that arose from natural causes and those that man inflicted on himself.

Of course explaining the prevalence of evil in the world has challenged the best minds of every age. To the true believer the answer was obvious: this world was created fair and full of goodness, only to fall afoul through the misdeeds of mankind. To the philosophers, however, making head and tails of this existence was not that simple and their attempts to grasp the workings of the cosmic order remained unproductive. Finally, after sorting out what was caused by man and what was still incomprehensible, Immanuel Kant, whose authority at the time was overwhelming, declared the way of this world was beyond mere human reckoning, leaving the matter once and for all, as Neiman says, not to reason but to faith, turning philosophic inquiry to lesser issues.

But not all philosophers agreed, as witness Neiman and others she cites. Their efforts have resulted in two basic approaches to understanding evil in the modern world. One point of view, evolving from Rousseau to Hannah Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other school, from Voltaire to Theodor Adorno, insists morality demands that we do not. Neiman explores these differences in more detail, discussing the philosophers of the modern era in their relation to various aspects of evil. While a fruitful effort, it is not easy, as the author explains:

  Dividing philosophers according to their stance on one large question
  is rough division, and produces odd alliances. Among philosophers who
  insisted on finding order in addition to the miserable one presented
  by experience, I include Leibniz, Pope, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and
  Marx. Among those who denied the reality of anything beyond brute
  appearances, I discuss Boyle, Voltaire, Hume, Sade, and Schopenhauer.
  Nietzsche and Freud cannot be fit into either division, however
  broadly construed, but raise sufficiently similar questions to deserve
  their own chapter.

As she concludes:

  As I argue in the final chapter, the twentieth century presents
  particular philosophical problems. The fragmentation of tradition will
  be reflected in fragmentary responses illustrated by Camus, Arendt,
  Horkheimer and Rawls.

The twentieth century, described by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn as one of history's darkest, provides the most deplorable outbreaks of evil for the thoughtful to contemplate. Even the most superficial historical review is appalling. As a prelude, from the end of the nineteenth century, an outbreak of anarchy found a bomb-thrower igniting a riot in Chicago, an assassin slaying an American president, and the murder of a European crown prince leading to what was then called The Great War. It was a conflict in which modern weapons, from machine guns to poison gas, produced the slaughter of unprecedented millions.

The aftermath of World War I was a devastating world economic depression. Following the Russian Revolution, totalitarianism spread from the Nazis in Germany to the Fascists in Italy and the militarists in Japan. The harsh regimes of Lenin and Stalin spawned the Soviet gulag, a dead end for those who dared to oppose state policy. Hitler's pursuit of a master race doomed all non-Aryans and unfortunate misfits. The Japanese not only attacked America but ruthlessly overran their neighbors in Asia.

While the anarchists faded in the face of much fiercer movements, it took World War II to end German aggression. The Italians and Japanese also had to be defeated by force of arms. The Soviet empire was to collapse from internal contradictions and the harsh reality that the free world was prospering as it faltered.

While history is not without other dark chapters, the past hundred years can be seen as offering a full curriculum of wrong thinking, human failing, and unprecedented evil doing. In a startling footnote, Neiman cites a statistical estimate that, if the casualties were spread over the course of the past century, wars killed one hundred persons on the average every hour. Other sources claim state actions were responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of some 125 million people during this bloodbath era.

Such unprecedented slaughter led to one consideration of evil as becoming commonplace. Perpetrators took refuge in the fact that since they were involved in a world conflict, they had no choice other than to act as they did. The usual explanations that they were simply following orders, doing their duty, covered a multitude of evils in their view.

In one of her thoughtful insights, Neiman points out that as the German people were moved to accept a collective guilt for atrocities, individual consciences were thereby relieved of a deeper, more profound sense of personal guilt. Distinctions of this character are what make Neiman's book provocative and instructive. This is never more evident than in her comments on present-day terrorism:

  Evil is not merely the opposite of good but inimical to it. True evil
  aims at destroying moral distinctions themselves. One way to do so is
  to make victims into accomplices.... The worst horror of September 11
  was the fact that those riding in the planes that slammed into the
  World Trade Center were not only torn out of ordinary lives into their
  own deaths, but became part of the explosions that killed thousands of
  others.

This terrorist action was surely shatteringly successful, but in one way it was not completely so. Its purpose was to make Americans feel they were completely helpless in the face of such an unexpected and deadly attack. As it happened, they were not. There was the fourth plane, Flight 93, diverted from some unknown target, presumably Washington, D.C. that ended up crashing into a Pennsylvania field, the result of some passengers, made aware of what was happening through their cell phones, acting somehow to abort the flight even at the cost of their own lives.

Neiman concludes, "Terror is meant to strike us dumb. Finding words with which to face it is an act of reconstruction." In that sense, her comments are a defiance of terrorism. Even the reading of her work, discussing it, can be considered an act of confrontation, thwarting the terrorists.

CARL GULDAGER is a regular contributor to Modern Age: A Quarterly Review.