In summer 2025, I was approached by the director of the Central New Mexico (CNM) Honors Program to teach the seminar Understanding Evil in the 2025 fall semester, a seminar originally offered in the former Honors Program by a fellow colleague. I had taught my seminar, The Legacy of the Polis, in the Honors Program, focusing on political philosophy, urban design, and civic engagement at the local level. Given my experience in teaching honors seminars, I was already thinking about a course focusing on representations of evil and what they may say about the issues and anxieties of society, such as what we see in classic horror and contemporary true-crime genres. Thus, I was very excited for the opportunity to teach this course even if it was focused on “understanding” evil, since I already had a few ideas of what to bring in for readings given my background in German philosophy and critical theory.
In designing the course, I had two guiding questions I wanted to continuously pose to the students as we moved through the readings: Can we establish a clear concept of evil in secular society, and would it be useful and desirable to have such a concept? This helped us move away from medieval Christian debates about the concept and look at modern uses of the term that were more of interest for my students. It also helped raise the dangers of how the word “evil” can be misused in society and politics, especially to manipulate masses of people to fear already marginalized communities or to scapegoat misunderstood individuals. I also had us focus specifically on moral evil rather than natural evil, moving away from questions around theodicy and questions of general suffering. Instead, I wanted to focus on how “evil” is applied to actions, persons, and institutions, and whether it requires free choice. My own family history in Germany also helped frame the course, since I was raised to be very aware of how hate and fear were used in the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Shoah, and this historical event has always struck me as evil, if the term is ever actually to be applied correctly, given the utter self-destructive and cruel impulses that were unleashed during that time.
I began the course with three ancient sources on the question of “badness” in humanity, looking at Plato’s Republic, selections from the Confucian philosophers Mencius and Xunzi, and the Bhagavad Gita. These works allowed the students to explore non-Christian accounts of moral failure and vicious character, asking the question of whether any of these accounts can be accurately describing evil in our modern, secular context. Plato’s tyrant was important as we thought about the psychology of evil, raising the question of evil being a real force or a mere deficiency or ignorance of the good. We then moved forward into the modern context, looking at two essays from Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, four essays from Georges Bataille’s Literature and Evil, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. In this segment, we explored Kant’s concept of radical evil, Nietzsche’s genealogy of evil through differing perspectives of power, Freud’s death drive and the superego, Bataille’s concerns about transgression and social rules, and Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. The final third of the course engaged contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives, bringing in Terry Eagleton’s On Evil, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s “God’s Lovers as ‘Uncreators’: Morality in the Face of Systemic Evil,” and Lionel Corbett’s Understanding Evil. Incorporating literary criticism (Eagleton), ecological theology (Moe-Lobeda), and psychoanalytic approaches (Corbett), we then discussed how our understanding of evil continues to evolve in light of modern challenges such as systemic oppression, genocide, environmental destruction, terrorism, and psychological trauma.
Although the students said they were intimidated by the reading list at the start of the term, they were surprised at how much they enjoyed the texts and the discussions that unfolded. Given the seminar format, these were student-led discussions, in which students brought their own questions and interpretations, and occasionally a student would start the session with their own presentation on the reading for that day. They did an incredible job highlighting major points of the texts and relating them back to our bigger question of understanding evil, and generally there was a wonderful dynamic between the students in how they were conversing and asking each other questions about how they understood the authors. One particularly impactful text was Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Students shared that they actually didn’t know much about the development of Nazi Germany and the Shoah and they appreciated the detail and complexity Arendt provided in her account.
At the end of the course, the students turned in a seminar paper on a topic of their own choosing about evil, since I wanted them to explore the theme in relation to something of their own interests. Some topics that students wrote on were transphobia and the use of the monstrous in literature, the archetype of the witch in modern culture, the femme-fatale figure in contemporary film, the portrayal of dystopian governments, psychological case studies of criminal behavior, and the current problematic obsession with true crime podcasts as they express particular social anxieties. This was the first time any of them had to write a seminar paper, and they really enjoyed having the freedom to inquire about something specifically important to them. As such, the papers were a wonderful read during finals week, and I got to see how students were answering the questions about the concept of evil as they were wrapping up the semester. Students were rather divided about it; some thought was no longer useful for our society, while others highlighted its importance for recognizing the suffering of victims of incredibly heinous acts. Nonetheless, most of the students said they felt they had a better understanding of the discourses around evil, and they left with more nuance around the its use rather than arriving at a single concept of evil.
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Jaime Denison
Jaime Denison is a part-time faculty member in Philosophy, Humanities, and Digital Studies at Central New Mexico Community College. His areas of research are post-Kantian German philosophy, play theory, psychoanalysis, critical theory, ethical theory, and political philosophy. He regularly teaches courses in applied ethics, the history of philosophy, ancient humanities, and digital humanities.
