Abstract
This chapter explains why the approach through ‘negativities’ is important in ethical inquiry and how this follows and ‘sharpens’ the pragmatic method briefly discussed in the Introduction. Hence, this chapter deepens the very preliminary discussions of the introductory chapter. The concept of evil is also explored. An analysis of evil in terms of Charles Peirce’s doctrine of ‘real generals’ is offered. It is also argued that ‘theodicist’ views, according to which the reality of evil can somehow, either theologically or secularly, be justified, are ethically unacceptable.
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Notes
This via negativa argument has also been sketched regarding the specific case of guilt as a necessary condition for the possibility of morality in Sami Pihlström, Transcendental Guilt: Reflections on Ethical Finitude (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2011).
See, for example, Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)
Mark Johnston, Surviving Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Or, perhaps, ‘philosophy of the human condition,’ if the phrase ‘philosophical anthropology’ sounds problematic. Cf. here Sami Pihlström, ‘On the Possibility of Philosophical Anthropology,’ Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003b), 259–85.
If we were phrasing this in terms of the distinction between the good and the bad, there would be more room for quantitative differences along one and the same scale. However, speaking about evil (in contrast to the merely ‘bad’) indicates a move to a qualitatively different level. In brief, we may allow that ‘bad’ is a quantitative concept whereas the concept of evil refers to something that challenges, or even threatens to destroy, the moral universe altogether, with whatever scales of good vs. bad it includes. In a way, we might say that it moves in the same conceptual space as the notion of ‘moral perfectionism’ made famous by Stanley Cavell in his readings of Emerson and Thoreau: see Cavell, The Senses of Walden, rev. edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992
Kant’s Religion innerhalb der blossen Vernunft (1793–94) is available, for example, in Immanuel Kant, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983).
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London: Rider, 2007)
Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005
Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 113.
A strikingly similar picture of our fundamental starting point in philosophy is painted by Simon Critchley, who argues that philosophy begins from disappointment, from the realization of human finitude. See Critchley, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying (Cambridge: Polity, 2010)
Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007
Works by theorists of evil such as Bernstein (see above) and Tzvetan Todorov — see Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in Concentration Camps (New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1996)
See D.M. Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
This interpretation has more generally been one of my continuous endeavors since the late 1990s and early 2000s; cf., for example, Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003a)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. Brian McGuinness and David F. Pears (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974)
See, for example, William James, ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,’ in James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899); on the ‘cries of the wounded’ metaphor, see the famous essay, ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,’ in James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). Both volumes are available in The Works of William James, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983
Cf. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)
Hilary Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Cf., however, for example, W2:126-7. References to Peirce will be provided with the standard abridgments, with CP standing for Charles S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58)
Here, I think, we should agree with Philip Cole, The Myth of Evil (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
For a classical treatment, see Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971).
One important background idea here might be Donald Davidson’s theory of actions and events: some events can be described, hence understood, in a special way as intentional actions. The same events can be described and explained both in an intentional and in a causal vocabulary. See Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002
Evil and suffering intensify the problem of the meaningfulness of life but do not exhaust it, because mere mortality may be taken to deprive life of meaning. These problems are, of course, connected, as death itself can be, and has often been, regarded as evil, even though the contrary view, according to which immortality would be meaningless, has also been advanced. The present book does not directly address the issues of death and mortality; see, however, Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (eds.), Death and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1998)
Sami Pihlström, ‘Death — Mine or the Other’s? On the Possibility of Philosophical Thanatology,’ Mortality 6 (2001), 265–86.
Charles A. Hobbs, ‘Why Classical American Pragmatism is Helpful for Thinking about Death,’ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47 (2011), 182–95.
Ibid., p. 5. Thus, Neiman’s project, focusing on evil, is to lead philosophers back to the ‘real roots of philosophical questioning’ (Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, p. 13), redescribing the tradition of modern philosophy as a struggle with the problem of evil (rather than, say, with the problem of external world skepticism). Note that this is precisely the understanding of the problem of evil, emphasizing that evil threatens our ability to regard the world as comprehensible, that conservative philosophers of religion, for example, Peter van Inwagen, firmly reject (see van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006], pp. 15–16).
Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, pp. 7-8. This link could be strengthened by following Wittgenstein in regarding the world and life as, ultimately, ‘one.’ See Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 5.621; for a useful commentary regarding this matter, see Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Guilt, ‘transcendentally’ analyzed, is a similar concept in this regard, though of course not the same concept. Cf. Pihlström, Transcendental Guilt. For a reminder of the fact that, despite our tendency to easily conform to evil, there are also individuals who are in real-life cases able to resist such tendencies and refuse to kill and destroy even when exposed to major social pressure, see Eyal Press, Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (New York: Picador, 2012).
See, for example, William Rowe (ed.), God and the Problem of Evil (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)
Chad Meister, Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
Moreover, the attempts to develop theodicies seeking to justify the existence of evil might themselves be regarded as ‘anti-realistic’ in a quite different sense: such attempts would not take seriously the reality of evil as we know it but would rather swipe it under the carpet. Theodicies would not, then, maintain a truly ‘realistic spirit’ in their attempt to face evil. I am borrowing the notion of a ‘realistic spirit’ from Cora Diamond: see her The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1991).
Sami Pihlström, ‘Pragmatic Realism and Pluralism in Philosophy of Religion,’ in Henrik Rydenfelt and Sami Pihlström (eds), William James on Religion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
For an exchange between Swinburne (the theodicist) and Phillips (the anti-theodicist), see, for example, their contributions, both titled ‘The Problem of Evil,’ in Stuart C. Brown (ed.), Reason and Religion (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 81–102
See, again, Bernstein, Radical Evil; and Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought. There are also other recent theorists of evil who have insisted on the peculiar depth of the concept — retaining some of its traditional religious character in a secularized context. See, for example, Alan D. Schrift (ed.), Modernity and the Problem of Evil (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005)
Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).
For critical discussions of this idea, see Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998)
This is, I believe, especially easy to accept if you are a philosopher with pragmatist leanings. Pragmatists like James and Dewey famously insisted that philosophy must be relevant to human beings’ genuine problems, instead of just being theoretically and intellectually relevant. (On the other hand, there should, especially for pragmatists, be no fundamental dichotomy between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ philosophy, or relevance.) For Dewey’s views on the relevance of philosophy in investigating ‘the problems of men,’ see John Dewey, The Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).
James, Pragmatism, p. 20. See also, on James’s specific version of anti-theodicism, Sami Pihlström, ‘The Trail of the Human Serpent Is over Everything’: Jamesian Reflections on Mind, World, and Religion (Lanham, MD: University Press of America [Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group], 2008)
In addition to Phillips’s many works, see, for example, David Wisdo, The Life of Irony and the Ethics of Belief (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993)
Stephen Mulhall, Faith and Reason (London: Duckworth, 1994), pp. 18–19
Ben Tilghman, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994)
On the relation between the problem of evil and the distinction between genuine religiosity and pseudo-religiosity, see Sami Pihlström, ‘Religion vs. Pseudo-Religion: An Elusive Boundary,’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (2007), 3–31.
Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘Ignorance, Instrumentality, Compensation, and the Problem of Evil,’ Sophia 52 (2013), 7–26.
Eleonore Stump and Michael Murray (eds), The Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 250–7.
At this point, it should be noted that when I speak about ‘victims’ of evil and suffering, I fully recognize the problems troubling processes of victimization. The category of ‘victim’ can also be used for various purposes, good and evil. It can become an instrument in political power struggle. I am trying to use it as neutrally as possible here. It might be better to simply talk about ‘witnesses’ of evil, for instance — but then again, most potential witnesses do not survive to witness. See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
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Pihlström, S. (2014). Evil and Negativity: Sharpening the Pragmatic Method. In: Taking Evil Seriously. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412669_2
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