Evil in Modern Thought: an alternative history of philosophy

Susan Neiman
(Scribe) $35.00 PB

This is a SERIOUS WORK OF PHILOSOPHY though it's also a damn good read, if you can keep up your concentration. In other words, it strikes that curious balance which we might ask of any really philosophical text: that it should be both hard work, and rewarding task - a thing you enjoy reading even though it's sometimes an effort to keep up. Indeed, it would be strange if this were not a tough read, since its content is so ambitious: Neiman proposes a revisionist history of Western philosophy, from Leibniz through to Freud and Nietzche. Although Neiman traces the tradition by focusing on familiar, canonical thinkers, her perspective is original in that she recongifures the tradition as an ongoing attempt to deal with the problem of EVIL. She proclaims her aim to be nothing less than 'to reorient the discipline to the real roots of philosophical questioning' (i.e. EVIL).

What is 'the problem of EVIL'? It is a long-standing philosophical quandary, though it's not exactly flavour-of-the-month among contemporary thinkers, since it is usually regarded as a theological issue, now almost irrelevant in a predominately atheist philosophical establishment. This is the traditional, theological formulation of the problem:

1. EVIL exists.

2. God is benevolent.

3. God is omnipotent.

How can these be reconciled? How can a God who is both benevolent enough to want good for humankind, and powerful enough to make it happen, let us live with such vulnerability to pain and misery? How can She let EVIL exist? Neiman argues that the problem has persisted, in one form or another, right through the Enlightenment and the growth of atheistic thought. With or without God in the picture, this problem is what motivates people to philosophise, as attested to by Schopenhauer:

If our life were without end and free from pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why the world exists.

So modern philosophical thought is still motivated by the questions, how do we fit the flourishing of EVIL (think starvation, tyrrany, Holocaust) into our worldview, how can we make sense of such a world? Though I am not convinced that Neiman has thus determined the absolute key to Western philosophy, I totally agree with her when she more modestly points out that at least EVIL isn't as damn boring as the epistemological and ontological discussions to which most philosophy students are now subjected.

Certainly Neiman's reading of figures such as Kant, Voltaire, Hegel and Marx is insightful, and effectively draws these thinkers together to a common cause - i.e. trying to incorporate the shittiness of the world into some kind of promising worldview. And for those who haven't previously read any classic European philosophy, Evil in Modern Thought would be a good place to start, since it makes these philosophers seem relevant, and emotionally compelling, where many philosophical overviews make the whole thing seem like some insane history of word-games. On the other hand, Neiman's final chapter, on dealing with EVIL in the wake of Auschwitz, seems to ignore a lot of post-war trends which I would have thought were ripe for discussion. A different author with a less classically focused reading might have had much more to say about philosophers such as Foucault, not to mention the emergence of post-structuralism.

Review by John Mansfield