What Do We Do When We Talk about “Evil”?

photo: Bad relationships, 2015

September 30th, 2022
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
A workshop on the 20th anniversary of Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought.

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"[C]rimes like Eichmann’s depend on thoughtlessness,
the refusal to use reason as we should."
Evil in Modern Thought, p. 303

"[K]illing is the secretion of this human world just doing 
what it is that it does.  
Day in day out. 
This killing is not an event but a condition."
Danielle Celermajer, “Who killed summertime?” The Guardian, Feb. 6th, 2021

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My dictionary tells me that “evil” is “profound immorality and wickedness” and that something or someone can be “evil,” i.e., profoundly immoral and wicked.[1] The dictionary also emphasizes that “evil” picks out these things especially when they are accompanied by a “supernatural force.” I will take it as settled that Susan’s book has explained how this addendum—let us call it the “supernatural add-on”—is a vestige of something ancient, possibly infantile, and that modern thought’s grappling with the concept of evil has left the supernatural add-on behind.[2] But I think that the dictionary definition without that add-on does capture what “evil” roughly means in my understanding of my culture. When we talk about “evil,” we aren’t just talking about something that’s wrong or someone that’s corrupt or even vicious, no, we’re talking about some “profound” register of these things. That’s what “wickedness” speaks to, also, for its origin in the misogynist and supernatural notion of a “witch” is one that, again, we can take as a discredited add-on.[3] But it’s actually quite puzzling to me what this “profundity” of “evil” should be getting at, or, more concerning to me, what it could be doing.

Of course, I can then recall twisted domestic stories I’ve heard where some partner does something deceptive and manipulative to the other to such an extent that the other’s life is threatened with being marred. Often these stories involve layers of hypocrisy and strategy that are jaw-dropping and outrageous for their transgression of basic norms of decency, honesty, compassion, and obligation. The children frequently get caught up in them. The wounds threaten to carry across generations. Even the community sometimes comes along. There’s the compound damage of authority relations perverted enough to throw into doubt everyday appearances, as when we find judges, policemen, doctors, therapists, or teachers using the veneer of their roles to cover for their wicked behavior. When I have seen and felt the damage in my community, especially to hapless spouses and children, I’ve found myself muttering that the behavior of the manipulator is “evil.” 

There are also prominent contemporary political examples—too many to relay, really—where I might be inclined to call the person’s behavior, or even the person, “evil.” The names “Vladimir Putin” and “Donald Trump” call too many things to mind. But I do not want to dwell on them right now. More interesting to me are the systems that are revealed in and through these figures.

For instance, I am inclined to see as “profoundly immoral and wicked” the system of American capitalism within which Donald Trump’s name is caught up. This is a system that incentivizes profit-seeking and the concentration of wealth and that has been corrupted to protect the wealth concentrations in countless ways, some of them historically racist or sexist and many of them profoundly colonial. America’s capitalism is a deeply impersonal system to the extent that even its moral contours in, say, the idea of a contract, are themselves fundamentally impersonal, i.e., not concerned with the dignity of people to agree to things as such but rather concerned with the protection of impersonal money-making agents against the perpetual tendency to defraud people in a pass at turning a profit. Capitalism operates like a virus, mutating to find ways in which to turn a profit, and in its corporate dimensions in the United States is legally structured so as to chafe against any values other than profit. Add armies of lawyers, public relations professionals, advertisers, financiers, and lobbyists, and American capitalism is a profoundly immoral force that, over generations, has eroded the conditions of democracy and of social welfare while plundering the planet. The knock-on effects of this are precisely unimaginable; for when they are joined with the history of global capitalism and the still colonial world system of nation-states, they have substantially contributed to unintended (but forewarned) geological effects that amount to the climate devastation we have seen just this summer in floods and fires and to the onset of the sixth mass extinction. OK, I will call that “evil.”

But what does that do? And is anything gained by grouping American capitalism together with twisted domestic abuse, bloody imperialists who speak Russian, and narcissist demagogues who dog-whistle polarization and fascist-like reactions to the point of undermining the United States’ constitutional democracy? What does it do to link the geological agency of historically and globally extended political, economic, and technological systems with marital strife? My intuition is to say that something is rather lost—namely, clarity in thinking and some ability to respond.

The worry is that calling something or someone “evil” interferes with moral clarity. Emphasizing that something that is morally wrong is profoundly so, or that someone who is corrupt is deeply so, doesn’t seem to help us see what is going on. It simply amounts to goading us to look more closely, yet without detail as to what we might want to consider.

To say, “that thing is truly and deeply wrong” or “that person is truly or deeply in the wrong” introduces one thought too many, for the questions are what is wrong, and why; what is it about the person who is in the wrong that makes them so, and why has it come to be? Anyone who is actually responsible needs to go straight to those questions, rather than lingering on a vague profundity tinged historically with supernatural horrors.

A comment from the end of Susan’s book when she reads Arendt is worth recalling here. Interpreting Arendt’s rejection of “diabolical” evil as a useful focus in analyzing totalitarian injustice, Susan comments, “Not evil but goodness should be portrayed with depth and dimension.”[4] Arendt’s claim is that evil should not be allowed to become some mysterious, incomprehensible thing in our minds. Susan continues,

To claim that evil is comprehensible in general is not to claim that any instance of it is transparent. It is, rather, to deny that supernatural forces, divine or demonic, are required to account for it. … Here Arendt’s project is heir to Rousseau’s. By providing a framework that shows how the greatest crimes may be carried out by men with none of the marks of the criminal, [Arendt] argued that evil is not a threat to reason itself. Rather, crimes like Eichmann’s depend on thoughtlessness, the refusal to use reason as we should.[5]

The point that these remarks raise is whether calling something or someone “evil” “use[s] reason as we should.” I am inclined to think that it does not. Talking about “evil” does not seem to help, either obscuring things or making them worse. For what does calling something or someone “evil” do? Let’s take it as given that “evil” puts us in the realm of the moral, namely, by pointing to the “profoundly immoral.” Once there, however, does “evil” clarify anything of the profound immorality, including why it is “profound”? It certainly puts something or someone off limits, as that which must be in some sense shunned or confronted, as the case may be, by all moral people. But we need to ask why the thing or the one shunned should be so, or we risk being arbitrarily divisive. Calling something or someone “evil,” however, does not reveal why it or they should be shunned. It simply implies that shunning is called for. That’s obscure, and dealing it out seems obscuring.

To call something or someone “evil,” though, is also to judge it or them negatively in the utmost moral terms. Talking about “evil” loads up judgment for condemnation. At the least, it takes something or someone and puts it or them on the outer edge of our moral universe: “Not that,” “not them.” But the behaviors so placed are human behaviors, often parts of social systems; the people so relocated are fellow human beings. How does banishing them to the edge of the moral universe help us to come to terms with the humanity in the behaviors, the society in the systems, or the human condition in the profoundly immoral people? It would seem to do the opposite, namely, to make it harder for us to understand the things that are human about “evil.” But that in and of itself makes things worse; for in situations when speaking of “evil” seems appropriate, what we need above all is to restore moral safety, sanity, or community. Pushing the humanity of behaviors, systems, and people to the outer limits isn’t disposed to do that. Once “evil” gets thrown down, a line has been crossed, a flag has been planted, and you have structured the world with strife. But does a world with strife in it need more strife?

There are many things that are wrong in the world and too many people who have thoroughly lost their humanity toward their fellows. To come to terms with the things that are wrong and to address those who have lost their humanity toward others, how should we talk with each other about them? It seems that we shouldn’t talk about them being “evil.” Rather, it seems that we should try to understand the specific kinds of failings that have left things or people as they are, including the particularities of their histories in those failings. We should narrate and understand more. We should moralize less.

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But these reflections so far don’t appear to speak to the underlying concern of Susan’s book, except being broadly sympathetic. Evil in Modern Thought heads toward the task of understanding the causes of profound immorality and particularly of injustice. The book’s outlook could be described as Spinozist even more than Rousseauian for its resolute commitment to the natural, not the supernatural, and to understanding, not to reactive states in which the mind’s capacity to grasp things gets overwhelmed. What I am saying regarding the ordinary expression “evil” speaks to these broad concerns, not against them. Using reason as we should points us beyond “evil” toward a more helpful way into moral responsibility and the virtue of thoughtfulness.

Moreover, the real issue in Evil in Modern Thought is the possibility of moral progress. Given the senselessness that our social systems can produce or allow, how should we view the prospects for reasoning our way beyond them, out from the problems they create or enable?[6] Even this question can come off as being too desperate, asking us to stand at a crisis point where we might lose our faith in reason. But if we switch from despair to being “grown up”—one of Susan’s key figures that she got from Kant[7]—we have to switch from “whether” to “how.” How can we figure this “profoundly” immoral thing out? How can we understand and face people like this? Any other response, while human, if more than momentary, ends up being irresponsible in the end. We have others to consider, including the next generation. Out of moral obligation to them, what can we do? This means at first, what can we understand? Even deeper, what questions do we need to be asking, and how can we answer them? At times, I hear Susan’s rhetoric from the desperate notes of the 2002 book ridiculing these questions as those of a moral busybody. Yet in the end, they are responsible ones to ask if one is going to face one’s children.

There is a way, though, that my opening reflections on ordinary language and what we do when we talk about evil do speak to the core of Susan’s book. The apparently surface-level question of how we talk when we talk about majorly messed up things and people takes us to the actual scene of working on “evil,” where what’s pushing us forward is the drive for moral progress. How we talk about truly messed up things and people is a mark of our progress and of our capacity to grow in our relationships with each other. It is where deepening occurs in a way that “profundity” has a reference. 

Allow me to explain. Grappling with truly messed up things and people depends on working on good relationships. The way we talk to each other, the way we communicate, are ways into whether we can have good relationships. That’s why I began as I did.

I think that we should look at the problem of evil through the notion of good relationships. A whole way of approaching morality, politics, and even the practice of philosophy (certainly of professional academics), opens up when we take good relationships seriously, committed to following them out with the imagination and consistency of artists or with the exploration and structural attention of radical educators—or when we muddle through the details as people with stubborn integrity do. 

There may be implications for working around the problem of evil, too: would not only talk about “evil” but the problem of evil lose its intellectual grip, except when understanding how we got here? The problem of evil might then become historically important for having brought us closer to focusing on our relationships in the fabric of society. In turn, the senselessness produced by social systems would challenge us to understand how to be authentically autonomous and social when facing socially produced, moral contradictions in what makes sense. “Evil” and its problem would get absorbed into the reconstruction of our relationships. There, focusing on good relationships would open up the “depth and dimension” of goodness, which is what both Arendt and Susan wanted anyway.

Of course, this is all big picture and speculative. But there is something to it. So, in what follows, I am going to talk about good relationships.

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Before I continue down this path, though, I should pause to say a bit more about why evil might be useful as a concept. Susan’s book does not have a definition of evil in it, but based on the book’s orientation, we might say that evil is conscienceless moral wrong. This encompasses evil character (e.g., Trump; he is wholly arbitrary), an evil system (e.g., capitalism in so far as it is impersonal and profit-driven), an evil situation (e.g., global warming in so far as it is structured by wicked incapacities for accountability), and evil deeds (e.g., the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia, intentional killing of the innocent, where it appears that the chief agent utterly lacks a conscience to do what they did).

These are the kind of immoral things that show no conscience. But since conscience is the basis for moral accountability, the moral condition of making sense of the world is undermined. In turn, since morality is fundamental to making sense of things, this undermines the sense of the world. Hence, evil is that wrong that undermines the conditions of sense, as Susan likes to put it throughout her book.

But if evil is a wrong that, for those living with it, undermines the sense of the world, perhaps calling something “evil” is a way to stop the flow of senselessness by putting a dressing on conscienceless wrong, i.e., by keeping it in its place? Then marking something or someone as evil is not meant to put them outside of human behavior or even of the reach of our humanity, but rather is a way to mark that consciencelessness has appeared there. The question then becomes how to address what is missing, if not in the conscienceless person, then in the situation that surrounds them, and if not in the wicked problem (pun intended), then in the way we start to erode it and bring it slowly back into the fold of conscience—of accountability—bit by bit.

This sounds promising, but the point still stands: while calling something or someone “evil” may then be informative, it will not do more to help us face the problem. What is it going to take for us to bring conscience into our world?

Well, to start, we’ll have to approach things and structure our world through good relationships.

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And so I turn to good relationships. A couple things are worth noting at first, but they come from different directions. Recall that, after Rousseau’s critique of the so-called “evils” of natural disasters, the problem of evil is a social problem.[8] Things called “evil,” including the enabling conditions of people who are “evil,” are produced by societies, by “us.” This is a fundamental assumption of Susan’s history of modern thought, that starting with Rousseau, the problem of evil becomes a problem of social construction in the literal sense: we make worlds with evil in them; so, the problem is how to unmake or remake those worlds to become just. How can we change the world along with the demands of reason so that what is becomes what ought to be?[9]

But this problem of construction is social in a different sense, too, and this is my first point. In order for us to remake our world, we must figure out how to work well together. We need to be social with each other, i.e., able to cooperate and to work through things that are truly messed up in immoral systems or the enabling conditions for people who are corrupt. Working through these things often involves disagreement to the point of dissensus,[10] and it often involves difficult confrontation, including self-confrontation. Moreover, it involves being able to work as a team on complex problems that far exceed a given generation’s capability.[11] So, after Rousseau, the problem of evil becomes social in that it demands what Kyle Whyte thinks of as high degrees of relational capacity, including of qualities like diplomacy, consent, reciprocity, and trust.[12] This second sense in which the problem of evil becomes social could be inferred from stretches of Susan’s book, but it isn’t the one that is stressed.

My second point is that good relationships provide what Martha C. Nussbaum, following D.H. Winnicott, calls a “facilitating environment” for how we approach the world. Through them, the world appears as a field of sense and meaning shaped by the way we have grown to handle the negative anxieties that contribute to narcissistic control over people and things.[13] The line from the opening of Anna Karenina that Wittgenstein rewrote near the culmination of the Tractatus—that the world of the happy is different than the world of the unhappy[14]—speaks to what facilitating environments can do. People with good relationships often see the world differently than people with bad relationships do. 

While this is a psychological claim, the conceptual basis for it isn’t hard to grasp. In order to have good relationships, one thing that we must do is to relate well. We must orient our relationships through familiarity, knowing by acquaintance, not simply through know-how or knowledge-that. We cannot distort our relations by making them theoretical or practical objects, i.e., forms of intellectual objectification or of practical calculation. We have to be-with others in order to relate well. But the world appears in a categorically different manner when it appears through relational reasoning. This is what Levinas was claiming when he criticized the theoretical grasp of other people, and it is what Adorno and Horkheimer were criticizing when they railed against instrumental reasoning.[15] To orient oneself in the world by relating well is to orient oneself by the value of authentic connection, even harmony between people—one might even say of “beauty” in a non-aesthetic sense. It is to presume what R. Jay Wallace calls “the moral nexus” between people who have a presumptive right to their own autonomy so that differentiation is preserved between people, rather than absorbing them into some theoretical or practical form of objectification.[16] Orienting oneself by relating also seeks out events of connection rather than beliefs or deeds. The world’s not in the head or handled, but between us.

Here’s where Nussbaum’s use of Winnicott gets more than psychological traction. Facilitating environments are any kind of environment—from a parental one for children to a political one for residents and citizens—that supports people’s differentiation from each other in a non-narcissistic, non-reactive way. Central to these environments is how people are safe to show and to process anger, ambivalence, and attachment anxieties such that they grow into what Nussbaum calls the “subtle interplay” of good relating.[17] Relational reasoning makes sense of these environments conceptually, because in relational reasoning we have to keep things between us, not reducing one another to objects of one kind or another as human beings can reactively do when angry, ambivalent, or negatively anxious and wanting control over their situation. An environment that helps people grow in their capacity to relate well will necessarily support differentiation, authenticity, and autonomy. Facilitating environments are disposed to the psychological effects Winnicott recorded because facilitating environments depend on relational reasoning to structure them.

The point is: good relationships are facilitating environments just by themselves. As a result, they cultivate non-narcissistic and non-reactive relating as a matter of course, socially reproducing them as part of their ongoing life. The world of those who grow in and from good relationships is accordingly shaped by a non-narcissistic and non-reactive orientation. It is social in this sense. But we may want to ask what that sense is.

The answer is provided by understanding how we approach the world and each other when we are resolutely non-narcissistic and non-reactive. One thing we can say is that we must approach the world through wonder. Both narcissism and reactivity are defeated by wonder in which the independent being of something or someone is let to be how and what it is in the free play of the imagination. In wondering over the things and people we meet, we may have sudden jolts of surprise or delight—what Hume and his tradition called “wonder”[18]—but the normal run of things is to hold space in one’s mind around something or someone to let their sense and meaning play freely. I call this “the positive anxiety of consideration,” or more simply, the mind’s excitement. It is a form of ongoing understanding, not some sentimental, jejune, or unsustainable state. To relate well involves relating through a settled attitude of wonder as a background condition on the freedom and authenticity in the relationship. We can develop it as a state of our characters like meditation practitioners do, but also as thoughtful and attentive people characteristically display.[19]

My concerns with talk about “evil” from the onset of this paper may now ring a bell. To the extent that talk about “evil” contributes to reactivity, talk about “evil” is in tension with the wonder that is necessary for relating well. To the extent that talk about “evil” doesn’t clarify or even obfuscates the immorality of what we are facing, it impedes what wonder leads us to consider: the things we face in their possibilities, stretching our minds to make sense of them and to consider them in many different ways. But to relate well in the presence of truly messed up, immoral things is to wonder over them. This is the problem of being social—remaining connected and authentic—rather than the problem of evil.[20]

The second point about facilitating environments comes home here. The problem of evil as a social problem demanding that people learn to develop strong relational capacities in order to solve wicked problems of social construction depends on being social in the third sense that I’ve articulated, namely, as being able to remain non-narcissistic and non-reactive in relationships. Strong relational capacities depend on an authentic social core in relational reasoning and its necessary place for wonder. The world of someone reeling from “evil” to the point of despairing over the demands of sense is different than the world of someone in and working on good relationships in wonder, no matter what comes one’s way.

This isn’t really faith we are discussing. It’s moral responsibility and clarity when things get truly messed up. Might that be better than faith – or the same thing expressed mundanely?

“This is the way the world really is right now. Okay, how can I relate well in it? What do good relationships show me of how I must be?”

You see, the despair comes from bad facilitating environments. The thing to do is to create good ones so as to look at profound social challenges anew.

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A mundane way to express what relational reason brings to light is that good facilitating environments deservedly make us at home. What makes a house a home is the relational reasoning in it, and the reason why we can have a home without having a house depends on whether we have good relationships to sustain us personally.

Susan’s work since the time of The Unity of Reason has focused on the importance of being homeless in the world, understanding that condition as a metaphysical one. Despite the uncharacteristic thoughtlessness of making something abstract out of something visceral and real for those of us without shelter, Susan’s use of the trope of homelessness misunderstands that home isn’t primarily about theory. It’s not a matter of theoretical reason in the first place, nor of practical reason. It’s about relational reason.

I can understand little but be at home with those I love and who love me. My practical life can be a mess, but I can be at home with those with whom I am in relationship. In so far as the problem of evil as Susan understands is bound up with home by way of the trope of homelessness, the problem of evil is truly and primarily a matter of relational reasoning in the first instance, not of theory and not even of practice. Susan’s Kantianism fails to grasp this, in large part because Kant did.

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Still, Susan’s book tells the story of one profound way in which a religious and philosophical tradition came of age. It outgrew supernatural evil. This let the entire universe make more sense. The tradition came to view evil as a matter of social justice. This gave anxious people something to do. I am inclined to think that the next part of that story of maturity is taking sociality so seriously that it becomes the guiding problem of moral progress.[21] Using reason as we should then demands that we reason relationally, something for which Kant did not even have a logic (he was stuck in theory and practice). Writing a history of philosophy for the future would then need to proceed from lacunae of good relationships.

How many philosophers had good relationships? How many philosophers understood them? For how many was philosophy a defense or a supplement because they were relationally immature? Much the same could be said of the history of religion, too, where bad relationships hide behind talk of “Lords” and “obedience” or appear narcissistically in purity and overcontrol of oneself, rather than in messy and incomplete authenticity. As I see it, the question of growing up is largely the question of learning how to relate well as the people that we are, not as we pretend to be.

But here we hit a formal obstacle in the academy and in philosophy in particular. Earlier, I wrote that attending to good relationships implied a kind of stubborn integrity shared with artists and radical educators.[22] What I was hinting at was a problem of form that really is quite challenging. Academics often relate poorly, and professional philosophers especially often. The reason why is not mysterious. The academy is guided by theoretical and practical reasoning above all. That is its form of power. 

We do not even need to focus on decolonizing the academy in settler colonial Amerikkka to see this. The academy isn’t here for good relationships; the academy is here for knowing things and being useful. This is a fundamental way that neoliberalism and imperialism get their hooks into education. It seems common sense among “serious” academics that “intellectual rigor” poo-poos being “warm and fuzzy,” and even—at least in STEM fields and economics—that “being practical” benches social justice. The “Ivory Tower” vs. the “real world” is a fantasized contradiction between theory and practice. Good relationships are voided from each, happy as capitalists and imperialists can be. To be a good academic is not to be relationally capable but to deserve a reputation for knowingness, expertise, or influence.

Problems of relational form abound in the academy. From the standpoint of relational maturity, the academy is structured immaturely, even if it is much more mature relationally than other parts of consumer society where even truth and usefulness barely live. Know-it-all philosophers, masters of the discipline, great influencers, and so on are then part of the problem, for in addition to any narcissism that they express, they deflect attention away from the formal immaturity of our society and its major institutions, the academy among them, even if politics and business are worse.

The problem of being social is so profound that the problem of evil is a part of it. How can there be moral progress when educational, political, and economic systems are so relationally deficient and twisted in both their formal structures and their values that they reproduce a wide range of kinds and degrees of narcissistic relations, that is, when they are poor facilitating environments? How can things make sense when schooling, politics, and business talk rationalizes relational poverty to the point of concealing it? The issue is that our world itself is structured in such a way that it recycles abuse, the control or erasure of others and of oneself as an authentic, relational being. Our philosophy and education are conveyors of that abuse, providing concepts and tools for recycling it. The issue here is beyond a concern with ideology. 

The formal inconsistency becomes the thing to follow. Systems that do not help us relate well and formats that are relationally impoverished become problematic. They maintain senselessness by reproducing poor facilitating environments in and out of which it becomes hard to work out our lives together and on our own. They may look quite smart, successful, or powerful, but they do not use reason as they should. Just as the problem of evil is a problem of education and of politics, the problem of good relationships discloses that education and politics are problematic in each and every poor relationship that they enable or create. 

How can we do “politics” through good relationships? How can we educate and be educated by making the mind and what is handy of secondary importance, as they should be? To try to achieve strategies and to advance interests or to try to become an expert and an influencer is just more narcissism. It doesn’t matter if this is how the world works. It’s not how good relationships are supposed to work.

From the perspective of prioritizing relating well, the core thing to consider is narcissism as it is socially produced and reproduced as well as abuse as it is set up and rationalized. If educational systems, if professional philosophy itself, enable or, even worse, teach either, then they are part of the major obstacle to growing up. To echo Vladimir Jankélevitch, we should look at what the systems commit, omit, or happen to cause, not at what they say.[23] The same goes for ourselves as participants reproducing these systems.

In this light, there are several things we could look at when we talk about “evil” in the academy or from its platform:

• What is “evil”-talk’s relationship to trauma? Does it feed trauma or recycle it? Does it manage to draw down reactivity and help people find the capacity to heal from trauma? Is “evil”-talk opportunistic in relation to trauma? Does it feed on it? Or is it part of a responsible process to come to terms with the causes of a given trauma and to redress them for real?

These questions can unsettle because trauma-feeding is real.[24] Trauma, like evil, is psychologically compelling, calling on us to react. Like shock headlines in newspapers, trauma’s an easy tool to get people’s attention and even to assert oneself as some kind of authority by putting oneself at the center of traumatic issues as if one were someone who knows something important about them. Academics are as slick as artists in a neo-liberal funding economy, and academics can succumb to the affective, reputational, and career economy of trauma. If we are going to focus on good relationships, we need to focus on the trauma cycling through our systems in ways that actually comes to terms with it. Susan’s Learning from the Germans seems a good example of this intention, but perhaps talk about despair-inducing “evil” is not so germane to it.[25]

• What is “evil”-talk’s relationship to polarization, judgment, or retribution? Is the “evil”-talk genuinely trying to understand how we can become authentically social or work out our social problems constructively, or it is overtly or subtly strife-ridden? When Susan rightly became concerned about the use of morally “clear” language in the American right of the G.W. Bush presidency years and lambasted the American left for morally muddled language resulting from too much post-modernism,[26] the question of how the morally “clear” language gets used was implicit. Moral Clarity cast the issue of whether our language helps us grow up. If talk about “evil” is used to drive a wedge down into social life, to do battle, or to put people in their place, then it seems to be part of the narcissistic cycles it ought instead to be confronting. 

The real issue for the American right and the left is whether they can stop trying to control things—whether they can abandon strategy as a way of life.[27] We need to create good facilitating environments for this need to go to the core of things, rather than seeming ridiculously utopian. The good community that some conservatives say they want and the democracy that some leftists idealize depend on good relations between us.

How can the academy contribute to good relations? How can it see knowing and doing as inseparably bound up with being with each other well? How can scholarship “exemplify a love for each other, not just a love for an idea”?[28]

• What is “evil”-talk’s relationship to anger? One misconception about the rhetoric of good relationships, including the figure of harmony between people, is that they are somehow conflict-free. This is a knee-jerk way that people invested in reactivity try to discredit the importance of relating well by making it cartoonish. Basic reflection shows that relating well cannot be conflict free, but rather that relating well depends on surfaced and worked-through conflict. Rather, the core of good relationships is in large part how well people can work through conflict and remain authentic and connected.[29] 

Moreover, when we talk about “evil” sincerely, we are in the space of injury and injustice. Outrage is a healthy and fitting response to what “evil” is about, and this outrage keeps us human.[30] But the major philosophers writing on anger now do not see rage as primarily a matter of good relationships. They see it either as a threat to them or as something practical to keep the struggle going and to preserve one’s own agency.[31] Some of them even see anger as a validation of being bad in relationships, something that we have to accept when we accept our human condition.[32] 

The thing about anger, though, is that expressing our anger can actually be a mark of trust. It depends on the world between us as a place where moral wrongs can be addressed. It holds out the social in its very form, and it is communicative. The expression of outrage can be a call for and a trace of good facilitating environments. Outrage seeks redress where trust could possibly grow again, and it is itself testimony to the inkling or memory of relationships where anger can be heard and held. But we have to learn to relate to anger non-narcissistically and non-reactively for its moral core to emerge, that is, for us to hear that trace of facilitating environments in outrage and to keep oriented on developing them in and through the dissensus.[33] Does “evil”-talk help us do that?

A comparison with Kant’s First Critique may help here. Narcissistic illusion is the tendency to turn people into objects, and it is as persistent as what Kant called “transcendental illusion,” the tendency for reasoning to overstep its bounds and to make unwarranted speculative claims in order to meet a need for metaphysical comfort.[34] Narcissistic illusion is a constitutive feature of living theoretically and practically, where we want to know lots of things about people and want to know how to handle people in all sorts of interactions, especially out of the often pervasive negative anxiety of sharing the world with each other.[35] The dynamic tension produced by our complex human being, though, is that being with people, relating well with each other, depends on suspending objectification in fits and starts and as an overarching orientation within which theory and practice can be at best momentary and circumscribed exceptions. With each other, the horizon should be a kind of openness.

Yet anger is primed to give rise to narcissistic illusion because in anger at people we are facing presumed moral wrongs. Perceived injury of some sort has occurred. Trauma is a possibility. Reactivity is understandable even if not ultimately moral. Being able to work through anger in a non-narcissistic way then becomes a virtue. How does “evil”-talk contribute to our character?

*

I was fortunate to be Susan’s undergraduate student when she was developing her course “The Problem of Evil” in the early 1990s. I first heard of it during the academic year 1991-1992, I believe, when Susan talked about the idea for the course and wanting to offer it. When the first seminar of that name was given in the Spring of 1993, I also was fortunate to participate, as Trip [McCrossin, the conference organizer – ed.] did as well. Trip and I then were course assistants for the first large lecture version of the course in Spring of 1994, a version for which Susan won a teaching award.

I remember the effect that the course had on me and then on my students the following year when I was a section leader. Some of them even went on to become professional philosophers and to open their first book with a memory of the class.[36] The course was orienting and life changing. But talking about “evil” was also at times and for some devastating. It threw some students into despair, or rather, it opened up despair under the surface of things. Did this help us relate well?

The thing is, in the deconstruction-intoxicated early 90s, to talk about good and evil was a relief, because moral reflection gave us ways to fight for justice and to try to live well with each other, rather than playing intellectual games. It was also a relief to focus on something that obviously mattered, whereas so much analytic philosophy was narcissistic in its manner and ridiculously trivial. I like to think of talk about “evil” during that time as a thread sticking out that we could pull until the fabric of our morally ambivalent systems began to unravel. 

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Modified 10.25.22 to add a link to a paper conceptualizing conscience.

[1]  “Evil,” Dictionary 2.3.0 (Apple Inc., 2005-2021)

[2]  Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[3]  “Wicked,” Dictionary

[4]  Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 302

[5]  Ibid., p. 303

[6]  Ibid., pp. 321-324

[7]  Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 5. V. “Coming of Age,” and her Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), and Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (New York: Harcourt, 2008)

[8]  Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, pp. 41-43

[9]  Ibid., p. 322

[10]  Cf. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)

[11]  Cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

[12]  Kyle Powys Whyte, “Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points,” WIREs Climate Change 11:1, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.603 and “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment and Society, 9:1, https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090109

[13]  See Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 4

[14]  Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Frank Ramsey and C.K. Ogden (Tonowanda, NY: Broadview Editions, 2014), 6:43

[15]  Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), and Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007)

[16]  R. Jay Wallace, The Moral Nexus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)

[17]  Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, pp. 213ff.

[18]  See in particular Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and the stretch called “DELIGHT” in Sophia Vasalou’s Wonder: A Grammar (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016). Jesse Prinz’s recent work on wonder is the most prominent neo-Humean example in contemporary philosophy around wonder.

[19]  I have reread Nussbaum through what R.H. Hepburn calls the “neo-Kantian” tradition, and in particular the Critique of Judgment, to arrive at this understanding. See my Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder: How the Mind’s Original Joy Is Revolutionary, with images by Misty Morrison (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Setting and Motet 1.

[20]  In recent work around planetary injustice, I have focused on the problem of social alienation in the tradition of the 1844 Manuscripts and of Lukács. One way we might think about the problem of evil is how it sits in relation to social alienation. Does it clarify it—or contribute to it? See the forthcoming “The Planetary Sublime (Part II of The Problem of an Unloving World)” in Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, ed., A Planetary Imagination: Responses to Chakrabarty’s Social-Natural Historiography, a special issue of Environmental Philosophy 19:2, 2022, pages TBD; or the more popular “Vergangensheitbewältigung Now: 1492 and the Roots of Planetary Injustice,” Blog of the APA, April 22^nd, 2022, https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/04/22/1492-and-planetary-injustice/

[21]  Cf. Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) and his Moral Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), where Susan’s response to the lecture is also included. Philip’s evolutionary pragmatism focuses especially on the development of cooperation, as did Richard Bernstein’s, albeit through judgment, political pluralism, and solidarity—the differentiation side of the social.

[22]  Cf. also my “Philosophy in the Contemporary World: How to Disagree, or Experiments in Social Construction,” Blog of the APA, July 12^th, 2018, https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/07/12/philosophy-in-the-contemporary-world-how-to-disagree-or-experiments-in-social-construction/ and “Democracy as Relationship,” e-Flux Conversations, April 17^th, 2018, https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/democracy-as-relationship-by-jeremy-bendik-keymer/6519

[23]  Vladimir Jankélevith, “Do Not Listen to What They Say, Look at What They Do!” Critical Inquiry 22:3, 1996, pp. 549-551

[24]  Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Misty Morrison, “Trauma-Feeding: Why It’s Not Okay to Exploit Trauma in Art,” Aesthetics for Birds, September 17^th, 2019, https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2019/09/17/trauma-feeding-why-its-not-okay-to-exploit-trauma-in-art/

[25]  Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019)

[26]  Neiman, Moral Clarity, Introduction

[27]  See my “The Neoliberal Radicals,” e-Flux Conversations, Febraury 17^th, 2017, https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/jeremy-david-bendik-keymer-the-neoliberal-radicals/5986 and Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder, motet 3.

[28]  “Scholarship has to exemplify a love for each other, not just a love for an idea.” Linda Tuhiwai Smith, June 30^th, 2020, Massey University

[29]  On authenticity, see Charles Larmore, The Practices of the Self, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), where authenticity is a matter of committing oneself over and again in all one’s relations—theoretical, practical, and interpersonal. It takes work and is neither a given nor without gaps.

[30]  Myesha Cherry, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)

[31]  Martha C. Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) sees anger largely as a threat to moral relationships, and Cherry, The Case for Rage, sees anger as important for agency and self-recognition.

[32]  Agnes Callard, On Anger (Boston: Boston Review Forum, 2020). I criticize Callard’s view at length in Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder, motet 4.

[33]  In Upheavals of Thought, chapter 4, Nussbaum focuses attention on the “ambivalence crisis” of infancy when infants first hate their parents while depending on them. The moment of outrage is much more than merely “ambivalent,” but the formal tension remains in it: it both seeks a clearing for outrage, contempt, and even hatred, while wanting sociality to hold it in a communicative process.

[34]  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), A297/B354

[35]  In the Setting to Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder, I claim that this anxiety is the fundamental source of the problem of politics. See also motet 3.

[36]  Megan Craig, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Pres, 2010), Preface. Craig suggests that she took Susan’s class as a junior once she was already seeking answers to her philosophical questions. But she took the class in 1994 as a freshperson in the section for which I was responsible.

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).