Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

HOMELESS

ZEUS: You are not in your own home, intruder; you are a foreign body in the world, like a splinter in the flesh, or a poacher in his lordship’s forest.

—Sartre, The Flies

Voltaire wrote poetry after Lisbon, but the catastrophes of the twentieth century seemed to resist expression. Most descriptions of contemporary evil emphasize its radical difference from everything that preceded it. Something about the crimes and misfortunes of the present shook our bearings so thoroughly that doing anything but describing them seems wrong. Adorno, most famously, wrote that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbarism; Arendt said the impossible became true. To seek understanding, explanation, catharsis, consolation—all goals of philosophical and literary reflection about earlier forms of evil—seems out of place. An almost obsessive, sometimes questionable interest in cataloging twentieth-century horrors continues to fill the world with testimony in all the forms modern media has at its disposal. But most agree that we lack the conceptual resources to do more than bear witness. Contemporary evil left us helpless.

For Levinas,

[p]erhaps the most revolutionary fact of the twentieth-century consciousness … is that of the destruction of all balance between explicit and implicit theodicy of Western thought. (Levinas 2, 161)

The claim that whatever was left of religious faith before Auschwitz could not survive it became famous in works of witnesses like Elie Wiesel’s Night, or of theologians like Richard Rubinstein’s After Auschwitz. The arguments that both Jewish and Christian paradigms of faith were destroyed there are not uncontroversial, but they have been well treated elsewhere, and I will not review them here.1 But unlike most contemporary thinkers, Levinas did not restrict the word theodicy to justifications of God’s goodness that were modeled by Leibniz. Rather, he drew as much on secular forms of theodicy, which persisted without religion as attempts to reconcile us to suffering. Theodicy, in the narrow sense, allows the believer to maintain faith in God in face of the world’s evils. Theodicy, in the broad sense, is any way of giving meaning to evil that helps us face despair. Theodicies place evils within structures that allow us to go on in the world. Ideally, they should reconcile us to past evils while providing direction in preventing future ones. Levinas claimed that the first task could not be maintained in good conscience after Auschwitz. He thus gave philosophical expression to an idea shared by many: the forms of evil that appeared in the twentieth century made demands modern consciousness could not meet.

In order to understand what is true in such claims and what is not, we should look more closely at Lisbon. For Lisbon too made something impossible. Understanding what ended there can help us to understand more clearly what is new about contemporary evil, and what resources remain for thinking about it. In the preceding chapters, I described an intellectual drama that spanned two centuries. Against this background, I now turn to discuss two cases, each of which was seen by its era as paradigmatic of evil. Each case shattered what had allowed those who lived through it to negotiate their ways through the world. Events are always located in distinct conceptual space. Both Lisbon and Auschwitz occurred in contexts of massive intellectual ferment. In both cases, catastrophe tipped the bucket of assumptions that were already precarious. But in both cases, the events themselves created boundaries between what could and what could not be thought.

Lisbon shocked the eighteenth century as larger and more destructive earthquakes did not move the twentieth. And though the Thirty Years’ War was barbaric and ravaging, it did not leave those who lived through it feeling conceptually devastated. Auschwitz did. The difference in response, I will argue, lies in the difference between the structures that each era had used to make sense of suffering. The very differences in the nature of the events caused differences in the kinds of shock they produced. Lisbon revealed how remote the world is from the human; Auschwitz revealed the remoteness of humans from themselves. If disentangling the natural from the human is part of the modern project, the distance between Lisbon and Auschwitz showed how difficult it was to keep them apart. After Lisbon, the scope of moral categories contracted. Before Lisbon, they could be applied to the world as a whole; it made sense to call earthquakes evils. Afterward moral categories were confined to one small piece of the world, those human beings who may be able to realize them. Auschwitz raised doubts about the sense in which we apply moral categories at all.

This chapter is structured as follows. The first section examines responses to the Lisbon earthquake, while section 2 discusses why the event named by the word Auschwitz stands for contemporary evil. The third supports Levinas’s claim by showing how Auschwitz destroyed two central responses to evil that can be viewed as secular theodicies. The fourth section goes further in showing that Auschwitz undermined the modern rejection of theodicy that locates evil in intention. The fifth argues that despite the dangers technology lends to terrorism, terrorism itself is not a new form of evil. The sixth considers some thinkers who took up traditional questions about evil after Auschwitz. In trying to elucidate why they did so after every form of theodicy had been rejected, the final section argues that the problem of evil is driven by ties not to religion but to the principle of sufficient reason.

EARTHQUAKES: WHY LISBON?

The Lisbon earthquake was said to shock Western civilization more than any event since the fall of Rome.2 Earthquakes clearly have metaphorical resonance. We are always trying to determine just what in the world we can trust. When the ground disappears from under our feet, anyone may incline to say: very little. But fifty years before Lisbon, an earthquake had destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, and nothing else at all. No conceptual damage occurred.

Viewed from the capitals of Europe, the West Indies had it coming. An anonymous pamphlet entitled Verses on the late Earthquakes: addressed to Great Britain announced that Jamaica, like Sodom, deserved whatever destruction it got. A place full of pirates and half-breeds was ripe for the hand of Providence and could be easily fit into any explanation invoking it. But Lisbon was neither so profligate as to merit the special attention of Providence nor so distant as to elude the attention of the arbiters of intellectual judgment. As example, it was both ordinary and representative enough to provoke general alarm.

Lisbon in 1755 was no backwater. Commerce had made it one of the world’s wealthier cities. Posed on the edge of Europe, it was the natural starting point for the exploration and colonization of the preceding centuries, which had made it powerful and cosmopolitan as well. A busy port with a large foreign population was an ideal place from which to broadcast any message to the rest of the world—which confirmed many observers’ view that the messenger must have been God. Qui n’a pas vu Lisbonne, n’a rien vu de bon. The fact that this claim was reported in French in a book published in England confirmed the feeling of globalization the earthquake inspired. Lisbon’s reputation as queen of the seas was underscored by the inventory of goods that were destroyed. The wealth lost was vast. In addition to gold and silver totaling millions, chroniclers recorded the destruction of hundreds of pictures, including works by Titian, Correggio and Rubens; thousands of books and manuscripts, including a history written by Emperor Charles V in his own hand; and furniture, tapestries, and ornaments from churches and palaces as well as simpler homes. Loss of life was less well documented than loss of property, but even conservative estimates counted fifteen thousand dead.

The sequence of disaster was unremitting. The earthquake itself struck the city on the morning of November 1 and lasted about ten minutes. This was long enough to destroy a vast number of buildings, bury thousands of people in the ruins, and turn the sky dark with dust. But a great deal could have been saved had the quake not been followed by terrible fires. These raged over the city, killing many inhabitants of poorer districts as well as destroying the treasures busy merchants had dragged from the ruins to salvage in the public squares. Descriptions of the day’s events suggest that the final disaster was the most terrifying. For even as the fires ravaged parts of the city, a series of tidal waves smashed the port, tearing ships from their anchors and drowning hundreds of people who sought shelter on the coast. Earth, fire, and water were together perfectly relentless. With all the elements combined to orchestrate destruction, even coolheaded observers might suspect a design.

Lisbon was a more natural candidate than Port Royal for intellectual disaster, for by the time it occurred, the Enlightenment was well underway. The earthquake shook up fertile ground. It didn’t create debate out of nothing but happened in the middle of it. Orthodox theologians welcomed the earthquake in terms they barely troubled to disguise. For years they had battled Deism, natural religion, and anything else that tried to explain the world in natural terms alone—or in terms of the vague general Providence that Enlightenment thinkers loved. God’s goodness was manifest in the system of order and harmony He occasionally revealed to prophets like Newton. Viewing Him as speaking directly to ordinary sinners was regarded less as false than as tacky. Who was so self-satisfied as to suppose his own crimes and misfortunes deserved cosmic attention? Leibniz thought the progress of science would allow the rest of us access to the general message; those inclined more to Pope believed that mysteries would endure. All were nevertheless far from holding the position we now take for granted: however it may be awful, it’s only an earthquake. For the eighteenth century, the whole of nature was invested with meaning. The meaning and glory of nature were so great as to make belief in particular Providence seem petty. Rousseau was the clearest but far from the only thinker to invest nature itself with moral authority. Traditional theologians’ faith in miracles and wonders was not what was threatened at Lisbon. What was shattered, rather, were liberal views about the miracle and wonder of nature itself.

In this context orthodox theologians saw the earthquake as a double gift from Heaven. Not only could it punish particular transgressions; it would show those who thought God’s works exhausted by the abstract and distant Creation that He still played a role in the world. Those within Portugal inclined to believe that the Portuguese had sinned quite enough to merit this punishment, and more. Those outside it inclined more to ask why Lisbon should have suffered a worse fate than Paris or London. But in Portugal and abroad, theologians took the opportunity to return to the sort of explanation that had just begun to go out of fashion.

If earthquakes are paradigms of natural evil, what kind of moral evil must have occurred to produce this one? Some poets thought it enough to point to the original relationship between human beings and the dust from which we came. “O Earth, why do you tremble?” was a question put rhetorically; if humans were made of clay, how could the earth fail to convulse with the weight of human crime? At least one observer pointed a finger at something we can regard as sin: “Think, O Spain, O Portugal, of the millions of poor Indians that your forefathers butchered for the sake of gold” (quoted in Kendrick). But this English pastor’s reminder was the exception. Most pointed to traditional sins that Lisbon shared with other locations. Ordinary greed and licentiousness seemed enough to explain the devastation. After years of watching the Portuguese prefer the goods of this world to God’s word, He determined to speak a little louder. Most divines viewed the event as proof of God’s mercy. The earthquake’s survivors were given a chance to repent before the general apocalypse visited everyone. So one Johann Gottlob Krüger, professor of philosophy at Helmstedt and member of the Prussian Academy, wrote a book called Virtue Awakened by the Earthquake. It argued that Lisbon was an unmistakable warning. Anyone seeking to explain it as a merely natural event should note that not only Christian but Stoic sources agree that the end of the world will be heralded by massive conflagarations.

It is true that Lisbon was not destroyed by underground fire. Fire was either already burning in hearths, which ignited fallen beams and boards; or it was in part set by godless and wicked villains. But the underground fire was indeed the cause of the earthquake itself…. Doesn’t our Savior himself mention the earthquake not just as prelude but as cause of the destruction of the world? (Quoted in Breidert, 41)

After quoting apocalyptic scenes from the Gospels, Krüger concluded:

What was missing on the night of November 1 to make visible the whole force of these words to Lisbon and the world? Nothing but roaring thunder in the clouds. This stood already mobilized like a wild horse before battle. But the Lord of Nature restrained it out of fatherly pity. (Ibid., 42)

Many devout souls turned to number mysticism to predict the timing of the next disaster. Dates were invested with meaning in violent doctrinal debates. Jansenists used the fact that Portugal was a Jesuit hotbed to show that God wished to crush the Inquisition. In choosing All Saints’ Day to strike His blow, God signaled that the saints themselves had begged Him to punish Lisbon for its religious perversions. One divine explained why so many churches were shattered while a street full of brothels remained standing: God more easily forgives the wretched creatures who frequent such places than those who profane His own house. Such explanations are invaluable, for they can be applied by opposing confessions ad nauseam. Jesuits had no trouble responding with the counterargument that the earthquake was God’s reaction to an Inquisition that had grown too lax—nor in following the quake with an auto-da-fé.

Even serious thinkers could think about Lisbon and continue to think about their world much as they’d done before. Consider Immanuel Kant. At the time of the earthquake he was a private scholar of little means in a provincial capital at the other end of Europe. His intellectual commitments were determined by the system of Christian Wolff, who had expanded on Leibniz’s views in fifty-nine volumes. Wolff’s influence was evident in the three essays Kant produced on earthquakes for the Königsberg weekly paper in 1756, which sought to assure readers that earthquakes don’t happen in Prussia. Kant’s reasons were taken from natural science, for his essays were written to show that earthquakes are not supernatural events. If they could be explained without reference to God’s judgment, Enlightenment views about general Providence could be maintained without raising troubling questions about particular Providence. So Kant elected to stay in the realm of science by expanding on the embryonic fault theory developing in the wake of Lisbon. For readers not convinced that earthquakes are perfectly natural, Kant offered instructions for experiment. All they need do to produce a little earthquake themselves was take twenty-five pounds of sulfur and twenty-five pounds of iron filings, mix them with ordinary water, and bury the whole mess a foot or so in the ground. This shows that earthquakes work according to general laws, the virtues of which are too well known to require repetition.

Leibnizian arguments about the goodness of systematic law in general were enough to support claims about the necessity of earthquakes in particular. But occasionally, Kant even tried to show that in this case as in others, apparent evils can have good effects. His example of goods that result from earthquakes—the creation of a mineral spring with healing properties—was, thankfully, brief. Kant spared his readers much of that sort of speculation by concluding that the main benefit of Lisbon was the knowledge that the world is not made for our advantage. Lisbon proved we cannot understand God’s purposes. The last of the earthquake essays ended with a reminder of our finitude that began at last to sound almost Kantian. After tirelessly insisting that earthquakes are the product of natural causes, Kant expressed skepticism about the possibility of preventing them through natural means. For

[f]rom the Prometheus of modern times, Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm thunder, to those who want to extinguish the fire in the vulcan’s workshop, all such attempts are proofs of the audacity of the human being, who is fitted with abilities that stand in small relation to it. These proofs bring him in the end to the humiliating recollection with which he ought to begin: that he will never be more than human. (Quoted in Breidert, 143)

These are hints of work he would write decades later. They reveal the young Kant as nothing worse than a complacently enlightened liberal. In the context of works like those of the professor in Helmstedt, or even more zealous colleagues to the south, Kant’s views were by no means embarrassing. Still he wrote, years later, that his writings in defense of optimism were the only works of which he was ashamed.

Kant’s shame marks the beginning of the modern. It signals awareness that understanding has limits. Lisbon didn’t create such awareness, but it crystallized it. Lisbon made sense—or failed to make sense—against the background of debate I’ve described. Later centuries would have encountered it differently, and earlier ones would have given it little notice. The premodern world experienced earthquakes with fear and trembling that not only didn’t threaten religion but often enhanced it. The random force of lightning is part of what made it a fitting symbol of divine power. Given the appropriate worldview, the sense that earthquakes are thoroughly inexplicable could increase the sense of mystery that furthers awe and wonder. Our lack of understanding of why the gods strike can be one more sign of the distance between human and divine that moves some souls to reverence. For contemporary observers, earthquakes are only a matter of plate tectonics. They threaten, at most, your faith in government building codes or geologists’ predictions. They may invoke anger at lazy inspectors, or pity for those stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time. But these are ordinary emotions.

At one particular moment in Europe, by contrast, an earthquake could shake the foundations of faith and call the goodness of Creation into question. What challenges one’s sense of intelligibility underscores particular worldviews. This challenge owed less to the weight of disaster than to the burden of increased expectations. Two related developments in the history of rationality turned the earthquake into a threat it would not have posed at another time. The first was the ways natural sciences had combined to confirm Enlightenment conviction that the universe is, as a whole, intelligible. The idea of general Providence was a response to triumphs of modern science. If the universal scientific order is such a marvel, why suffer a God who kept jumping in and out of it? A Creation that was good in the beginning should require no intervention thereafter. Particular Providence demanded too much meddling in the scientific order whose contemplation provided the Enlightenment with so much satisfaction. The wonder and gratitude earlier ages felt toward miracles was transferred to the generally miraculous system of nature. Not even Leibniz was so satisfied as to believe the system transparent. But he was confident that all the murkiness was our fault. Like Alfonso, we ascribe the confusion in our thought to Creation itself. With the passage of time, the clutter of the universe would be seen to have an order of its own.

It seems foolish to privilege one of these developments over the other. Rather, they worked together. The revelation of an increasingly transparent natural order through the discoveries of science fed expectations that a social order could be discovered which made equal sense. Conversely, demands for the replacement of structures based on tradition with those based on reason furthered demands for the discovery of rational structures in the universe as a whole. No crude expectation of reward and benefit, but the general demand that the world make sense stands behind both. As such demands were fulfilled in one realm, they were extended to another, for the inclination to the inexorable is natural to reason itself.

Rising expectations that the social and the natural worlds would be equally transparent thus made Lisbon the shock it wouldn’t have been without them. Both Leibniz and Pope discussed earthquake and sin: each was an instance of the unfortunate events in the world that do not lead us to general doubt.⁴ Babies had died in disasters before; this disaster led the hardened Voltaire to ask why. Lisbon could be used, of course, as a reason to protest against traditional religion. But reasons for protest existed before Lisbon. Traditional religion had answered them traditionally, by taking refuge in the claim that God’s ways are mysterious. The idea that they were not mysterious was a demand of reason embodied in natural religion as in other eighteenth-century discoveries. It was this idea that Lisbon sent stumbling.

For the government of Lisbon, none of these matters remained abstract. The question whether the earthquake was God’s signal or a natural event had direct political consequences. Those who believed it was God’s signal devoted their efforts to interpreting it. If God had sent the earthquake to warn of the short time remaining for repentance, the only interesting questions concerned duration and means. How much time did the Lisboners have left before the Apocalypse, and what sorts of measures would save their eternal souls?5

These questions undermined the work of those entrusted with restoring order. First among these was Pombal, the controversial prime minister of Portugal. When the unhappy young king asked him what could be done after the earthquake, Pombal is said to have replied: Bury the dead and feed the living. He quickly organized the disposal of corpses to prevent an outbreak of plague, commandeered stocks of grain to prevent famine, and ordered militia to prevent looting within the city and attacks by pirates from without. Pombal’s efforts were so successful that he could ensure the weekly paper was published without missing an edition. He knew that information was crucial. If the public was fed by false rumors and speculation, it would resist the measures needed to return the city to normal life. Pombal was explicit in supporting naturalist explanations of the earthquake. The more earthquakes were viewed as normal events, the easier it would be to incorporate them into a normal world—or to view the return to normalcy as a merely practical problem.

Initial shock and paralysis assisted Pombal’s first efforts. It was only some time after the earthquake that the tension between natural and supernatural explanation came to a very violent head. Aftershocks continued to feed fears that the earthquake had been only God’s gentle warning. Priests vied with each other in suggesting causes of the original catastrophe as well as the date of the worse one yet to come. The city was sent into panic by the rumor that a new and greater quake would occur a year after the disaster on November 1, 1756. The Jesuits were widely held responsible for the rumor. One of them, an eloquent, miracle-working Italian named Malagrida, challenged the minister directly in a series of sermons. His goal was to destroy the peace of mind Pombal worked to establish. Instead of going about the prosaic business of recovery, the Portuguese should repent of their sins. Scourging and fasting, not building and distribution, were the tasks this fateful hour demanded. Pombal wished to save citizens from sickness and famine; Malagrida wished to save souls from hell. Each worked under the shadow of a ticking clock. Malagrida was bent on persuading every sinner in Lisbon to drop every other occupation and spend six days in prayer and meditation at a Jesuit retreat. If their final hours were at hand, what occupation could be more important? So his sermons repeatedly returned to the earthquake’s true cause.

It is scandalous to pretend the earthquake was just a natural event, for if that be true, there is no need to repent and to try to avert the wrath of God, and not even the Devil himself could invent a false idea more likely to lead us all to irreparable ruin. (Quoted in Kendrick, 89)

This kind of rhetoric could not remain unanswered forever. By 1758 charges were trumped up to arrest Malagrida. The daylong auto-da-fé in which he died was also the end of a form of explanation. After Lisbon, even relatively conservative Western cultures were no longer willing to tolerate God’s hand in their daily affairs. Even relatively progressive cultures, of course, were unwilling to deny it entirely. Slogans like “In God We Trust” functioned as talismans long after the conceptual machinery behind them had ground to a halt. But the battle between priest and prime minister was decisive. Pombal’s victory was a victory for the view that God’s purposes have no public function. Even today, major earthquakes can evoke cries and speculations that will seem archaic, but they are generally confined to fundamentalist sects and hapless victims.6 Political action will focus on corrupt officials who take bribes in exchange for relaxing building codes rather than on increasing the performance of religious rituals.

This signals a shift in consciousness so profound that it often remains unnoticed. Since Lisbon, natural evils no longer have any seemly relation to moral evils; hence they no longer have meaning at all. Natural disaster is the object of attempts at prediction and control, not of interpretation. None of the questions that tormented Europeans reflecting on Lisbon was ever directly answered or even directly rejected. People affirmed the wisdom of God’s order in general without demanding to understand too many of its details. Theory proceeded much as Pombal did. It focused on eradicating those evils that could be reached by human hands. Progress, when we achieve it, involves doing just this. Enlightenment thinkers turned to praxis, for the apparent absence of justice in divine institutions was no excuse for tolerating it in human ones. If anything, it made the business of establishing justice even more pressing. But in proceeding as if questions were settled that were simply left hanging, theory left residues that cloud our attempts to eradicate evils today.

MASS MURDERS: WHY AUSCHWITZ?

Our very distance from Lisbon makes the disturbances it set in motion easier to evoke. Comparing the conceptual changes wrought by Auschwitz to those created by Lisbon, should help us recover a sense of shock. Can we summarize the changes by saying that humankind lost faith in the world at Lisbon, and faith in itself at Auschwitz? Only by making two important qualifications. The significance of the Polish death camps came to seem clear by the late twentieth century, but it was not self-evident before.

First, for many thinkers, the breakdown of the modern took place much earlier. Humankind’s faith in its ability to overcome its self-incurred immaturity was dispelled long before 1945. World War I in particular seemed devastating beyond measure. As Henry James wrote in 1916, to have to take the present “for what the treacherous years were all making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.” The sadness he expressed can seem as dated as some of his characters’ dilemmas. A world that could be shattered by Verdun and the trenches of the Somme looks almost as curiously fragile as the world of 1755. World War I now seems both intelligible and contingent, the lethal fruit of old-fashioned imperialism and early modern technology. From where we are standing, it remains within the outer limits of the normal.

Auschwitz does not. Lyotard compared it to an earthquake that destroys not only lives and buildings but also the instruments used to measure the earthquake itself, so that the devastation cannot even be adequately gauged. We can mourn the youth who died at Flanders while wondering how their officers could have thought a horse and a good education equipment enough with which to face artillery. By contrast, there is nothing a trainload of deportees arriving at a Polish ramp might have known. Auschwitz beggared expectation. The impossible became true.

The year 1945 thus marks a fundamental divide that can almost create nostalgia for the despair which followed World War I. But the divide was not immediately captured by the name Auschwitz, which gained its sense of uniqueness much later. The judgment at Nürnberg viewed the systematic murder of the Jews as one of many war crimes; Germany was held responsible for starting a war that caused untold devastation with unforeseeable consequences. The meaning of Lisbon was clear and immediate in 1755. For a good two decades after World War II, the conviction that limits had been crossed in ways from which we would never recover was captured more by the word Hiroshima than by Auschwitz. Atomic warfare disturbed the order of the universe, for it not only exceeded every prior limit to destruction but made complete and total destruction of life itself an ever-present possibility. So William Faulkner’s 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech declared: “There are no problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up?” Fourteen years later Leslie Fiedler would still write, “[F]or most of the younger writers today, the only war that counts is World War III, the war that does not happen.”7

In many contexts it is important to examine differences between the kinds of mass extermination that mark our world. The German Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, for example, argued that crimes like those committed at Auschwitz are greater threats to the human soul, whereas what happened at Hiroshima poses the greater threat to humanity itself. For, he wrote, it takes more hardness of heart to lead a child to a gas chamber than to drop a bomb on her. We are far from understanding what it takes to drive children into flames in which one knows one will oneself be consumed. Those who did the daily work of the death camps created an abyss between themselves and the rest of humanity. Some descriptions of them suggest an absence of soul that those who kill at greater distances from their victims need not share. But the problem is not that Nazi murderers were either particularly brutal or particularly heartless—but precisely that, by and large, they were not. Differences between them and others may be important differences for moral psychology, but they have little bearing on what Anders and others believed was the greater threat to life itself, namely, the possibility of total extinction through weapons of mass destruction without any of the features that once seemed essential to evil.

Comparing what happened at Auschwitz with Hiroshima or the Soviet gulags can be important for many reasons. To understand history or psychology and to draw conclusions for our futures, we will often need to examine ways in which forms of mass murder are different. Most attempts to assert that one form of mass murder is worse than another are motivated by political rather than philosophical concerns. In some contexts political concerns should be primary, and furthering them becomes a moral demand. During the German Historians’ Debate of the 1980s, for example, emphasizing the universal element within Auschwitz functioned as a way of denying German guilt. To assert that what happened at Auschwitz was worse than what happened in the gulags was thus to take a stand against rightist attempts to avoid German responsibility for its own war crimes by pointing to those of others. Different political contexts may demand different moral responses. It can be an act of courage and compassion to underline the universal elements that were present at Auschwitz—if one is, for example, confronting those American assertions of the uniqueness of Auschwitz which are used to argue that anything short of putting children in gas chambers is relatively benign. Political discussions that compare evils can be manipulative or moral, but they are all fundamentally practical. My purpose at present is not. Rather, I seek to understand how our consciousness has and has not been changed by contemporary evil.

While the moral shock that began in 1945 had several sources, I will continue to use Auschwitz as shorthand. To say that political systems as different as fascism, communism, and liberal democracy were all, by 1945, implicated in cases of mass murder is not for a moment to equate them. It is to say that contemporary evil takes distinctive common forms. Like sound echoing off the walls of a closed room, the reflection of evil from vastly different sources made it seem almost inescapable. The very multiplicity suggested something new and fundamental that was common to all those forms. To use the word Auschwitz as an emblem of a new form of evil need not be an entrance into political debate.

Before trying to elucidate the claim that Auschwitz represents new forms of evil, it is important to mention two common ways of rejecting it. One entails viewing the Nazis as no worse than other war criminals, while the other views them as uniquely diabolical. Each is a way of dismissing the significance of Auschwitz by attempting to fit that event into traditional conceptual resources for coping with evil.

The first evokes classical religious forms of explanation. Some orthodox Jews view Auschwitz as God’s judgment on European Jews, many of whom had turned away from traditional law. Here the covenant is evoked as simply as in the days of the prophets: God abandons those who abandons His ways. Why were those Galician Jews who kept the law murdered along with those Parisian Jews who did not? Since Judaism is a religion of collective responsibility, this kind of explanation can use notions of collective punishment to explain why God’s judgment fell on the pious and the secular alike. On such views, the Nazis were no different a scourge from any other group of antisemites. None of them are interesting in themselves. SS officers, Russian Cossacks, and the biblical tribe of Amalek are all interchangeable instruments in God’s hands. His message is always the same, and it’s the message, rather than the form in which He chooses to send it, that deserves our attention. This kind of reaction is no different from traditional priests’ reaction to Lisbon. Since beliefs in Providence are never built on evidence, they will always prove impervious to it. But we saw these beliefs waning in 1755. Though they resurface in moments of crisis, such beliefs do so in opposition to the modern world. For a modern atheist like Jean Améry, these reactions are forms of blasphemy.8

A more common way to deny the significance of Auschwitz combines a completely secular vocabulary with a curiously theological structure. While the first view regards Nazis as one more variation in the long history of antisemitism, the second views them as singularly demonic. On this view, Auschwitz reveals much about one nation in particular but nothing about humanity in general. The agitation that accompanies attempts to prove that only Germans could have produced Auschwitz betrays its own bad faith. Would that it were true. We are horrified, after all, not when beasts and devils behave like beasts and devils but when human beings do. Could it be proved that something about Auschwitz were essentially German, life would be easier for all of us.⁹ A dog born with three legs casts no doubt on our normal concepts of dogs. If Auschwitz were only a national problem, the crimes of one nation would reflect nothing about the human race as a whole.

Auschwitz was conceptually devastating because it revealed a possibility in human nature that we hoped not to see. For the conditions in Germany should have led not to highly developed forms of barbarity but to genuine civilization. All philosophical discussions of it insist on this point. Since many authors of those discussions were German Jews, some critics have tried to dismiss their work by suggesting that their efforts were moved by perverse and tragic need to vindicate the culture they could not abandon. Such dismissals are not only ad hominem but odd. Whatever culture those thinkers belonged to, they all belonged to the human race—and all accepted some version of universalist principles. Vindicating Germany by implicating humankind would not have offered any solace. The assumption that insisting on the utter uniqueness of Nazism was somehow equivalent to taking Nazism seriously is an assumption that was never adequately argued but nonetheless dominated much twentieth-century discourse outside philosophy. But those philosophers who addressed the subject argued that what was terrifying were the ways in which Auschwitz threatened and implicated a larger portion of humanity than had been threatened and implicated before. They would have agreed with French philosopher David Rousset, who wrote the following four months after his liberation from Buchenwald:

The existence of the camps is a warning … it would be duplicity, and criminal duplicity, to pretend that it is impossible for other nations to try a similar experiment because it would be contrary to their nature. Germany interpreted, with an originality in keeping with her history, the crisis which led to her creation of the concentration camp world. (Rousset, 112)

To say that Auschwitz stands not for particular national failures but for modern breakdown altogether is not yet to say why. It’s clear that technology shapes the bounds of contemporary evil. Before the invention of automatic weapons, you normally had to see anyone you hoped to kill. Since the development of the process that began with the American Civil War, you no longer need to do so. Technologically and, even more important, psychologically, this creates opportunities for destruction once available only to nature. Before contemporary warfare, nothing but an earthquake could kill fifteen thousand people in ten minutes. One eighteenth-century Portuguese commentator tried to console his readers for Lisbon by urging them to consider earthquakes as being like wars, where human beings cause destruction they are used to taking in stride. Like wars, he suggested, earthquakes are just one more unfortunate fact about the world; numbers of innocent deaths involved in either case cannot be the thing that matters.

Technology reversed those numbers, creating opportunities for killing at rates surpassing anything other centuries imagined.10 Today, only the more spectacular earthquakes cause as much damage as a modest bombing. But in neither case do we see evil as a matter of number. Most ethical and religious views deny that human life is quantifiable. Gratuitously killing one soul more or less cannot be what is morally decisive. The Talmud compared saving one life to saving a world. Dostoevsky argued that murdering one child might suffice to damn it. Thoughts like these belong to poetry as much as to argument. But arguments that try to rank evils according to relative numbers of deaths ignore what is crucial about the significance of each particular life.

If whatever is new about contemporary evil cannot be simply a matter of relative quantity, neither is it a matter of relative cruelty. The gas chambers were invented to spare victims more agonizing forms of dying—and the murderers sights that might trouble their consciences. For many, it is this perverted mixture of industrialization undergirded with a claim to humanity that made the death camps horrifying. Arguments about which kinds of death are worse lead to gruesome forms of competition. A moment’s reflection on the history of torture makes it clear that, before and after Auschwitz, human beings showed capacities for cruelty that words fail to capture. Only the fact that we are accustomed to Jesus’ death as an icon obscures the atrocity of the Crucifixion. Were it not so familiar, it could still easily serve as the paradigm for innocent suffering that early Christianity saw. To force a condemned prisoner to drag through a jeering crowd the instrument that will shortly be used to torture him to death is a refinement of cruelty that ought to take your breath away. It should be enough to stop the impulse to comparative suffering as it begins. What makes Auschwitz a problem for thinking about evil cannot be a matter of degree, for at this level, there are no scales.

The claim that Auschwitz represents a form of evil which is radically new persists despite all difficulties in giving reasons for it. I’ve suggested that uncritical faith in humankind’s ability to determine its own fate was shattered by World War I, not World War II, while its certainty in its continued survival was lost in Japan, not in Poland. If it is difficult to locate what is distinctive about Auschwitz in space or in time, it seems equally fruitless to view its significance by comparing numbers of corpses or degrees of agony. Singling out any one factor in the network of atrocity that made up the death camps is likely to be misleading. Rather than asking why this particular event produced the sense of unique devastation that heralds the violent end of an era, we should look more closely at what conceptual resources were destroyed. Like Lisbon, Auschwitz acquired significance in relation to the web of beliefs in which it occurred. What seemed devastated—nay, entirely thwarted—by Auschwitz was the possibility of intellectual response itself. Thought stood still, for the tools of civilization seemed as helpless in coping with the event as they were in preventing it. The most powerful testimony describes those tools as a hindrance to survival at Auschwitz. The humanistic intellectual skills required to build structures of sense were just the skills that proved treacherous. Seeking meaning and sense in reality could literally be fatal, for both were at odds with those skills required in a place that defied meaning and sense.11 These accounts suggest that what did not work in helping prisoners to survive Auschwitz will not work any better in helping us to understand it.

Although old models were occasionally refurbished, no first-rate thinker proposed new forms of theodicy, in the narrow sense, after Lisbon. Even the faithful stopped seeking systematic attempts to reveal God’s purposes in permitting individual suffering. But three distinct paths for theodicy, in the broad sense, remained open. None of them has the form of traditional theodicy, for all of them deny that God’s purposes—should there be any—are relevant to our attempts to understand the world. All these paths, however, are ways of confronting the same questions that earlier philosophers captured in theodicy. It is these attempts to replace theodicy that contemporary evils undermine.

The first kind of attempt, taken by Hegel, sought to redeem particular evils by placing them in history. The second was taken by Nietzsche, who argued that the problem of evil is our own creation; the moral categories that resentment established demand an opposition between life and morality which poisons our days. Both these ways of approaching the problem of evil are ways of attempting to abolish the distinction between ought and is. One holds out the promise that reality will become what it should be with the passage of time. The other offers hope that we will overcome the desire to condemn reality for not being something different.

The third avenue is quite different, for it rejects every attempt to reconcile nature and morality. Rather, it insists on their utter and essential difference. Natural and moral categories do not support or reflect each other. If this is true, neither nature nor natural events are ever good or evil. This path abolishes all that was understood as natural and metaphysical evil and insists that evil is a moral category alone. In exchange for abandoning the idea that natural suffering can be understood as evil, this path is all the more certain that we know what we mean in speaking of moral evil. Of all the losses humankind sustained at Auschwitz, I will argue that this is the most devastating. Our inability to rely on a clear notion of evil intention will be the subject of section 4. Before we examine the ways in which Auschwitz threatens to undermine the modern determination to live without theodicy, let us turn to the ways in which it devastated modern attempts to replace it.

LOSSES: ENDING MODERN THEODICIES

It is often claimed that Auschwitz overturned earlier beliefs that progress was inevitable, but such claims presuppose naïveté that few texts can support. We saw skepticism about humankind’s capacity to improve itself run through the work of Enlightenment thinkers as deeply opposed to each other as Voltaire and Rousseau. By 1794, at the very latest, any remaining faith in the inevitability of progress was under fire in practice, through the Terror, and in theory, through Kant’s powerful argument that progress was at best an ideal. Humankind’s capacity to hope was all that was left to bear witness to the existence of moral progress at the end of the eighteenth century. It is hard to view this as inevitable, or even particularly robust. And if a certain nineteenth-century cheerfulness came to replace the Enlightenment’s darker expressions, it didn’t last very long. Here is one description of what happened:

[Comte] failed as completely as Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose dream that the nineteenth century would see the beginning of an epoch of harmony and happiness was to be fulfilled by a deadly struggle between capitalism and labor, the civil war in America, the war of 1870, the Commune, Russian pogroms, Armenian massacres, and finally the universal catastrophe of 1914. (Bury)

Bury’s history of the idea of progress was meant as its elegy. It was written in the conviction that the idea of progress was decisively refuted by all the events he listed. Bury viewed that conviction as uncontroversial—though there were always dissenting voices. But even for more hopeful historians, these events, long before Auschwitz, were enough to dispel any unlimited faith humankind may have had in itself.

If few serious thinkers before Auschwitz believed that progress was inevitable, it isn’t a belief that Auschwitz could destroy. Yet though never as naive as is sometimes suggested, any form of Hegelianism held that humankind’s slow if unsteady movement toward freedom could be maintained as a whole. Backsliding into barbarism is always a possibility. But neither left- nor right-wing Hegelians questioned the identity of interest between advances in freedom and advances in knowledge that forms the core of secular faith in Enlightenment. This identity is precisely what Auschwitz threatened. For neither product of that faith—bourgeois culture or socialist revolution—had prevented the emergence of evil. On the contrary. Where civilization itself produces new forms of evil, who will dare urge another step forward? The central murders of the twentieth century were the fruit neither of passion nor of ignorance. Overcoming passion or ignorance, therefore, no longer held out the same sort of promise. When white southern Americans lynched their black neighbors, there was still hope for the idea of civilization. When Germans deported their Jewish neighbors, there was not even that.

But Auschwitz seems to negate Hegelianism less because of Hegelian beliefs in progress than because of two of its other elements. The first was its hostility to contingency. Recall Hegel’s claim that the sole aim of philosophical inquiry is to eliminate the contingent. Observers of twentieth-century history, however, agreed on nothing so much as the degree to which the contingent resisted elimination. Soviet terror functioned by functioning at random, making it impossible to predict what actions could lead to arrest or execution. This was one crucial difference between life in the Soviet Union and life in Nazi Germany, where ordinary Aryan citizens could control much of what happened to them by following the ruling laws and procedures.12 For non-Aryan victims of Nazi terror, nothing stood out more clearly than the contingency of survival. Life and death were so often dependent on matters of accident that every attempt to seek reason in them stopped short. The death camps revealed nightmares of contingency, thwarting the most basic assumptions instrumental rationality uses to promote survival in ordinary worlds. Your friend could be shot for doing her work properly; you could escape selection by doing the same.

Occasionally, those who were especially conscious of the role accident had played in their own survival found hope for humankind in the very power of contingency revealed during the Third Reich. Arendt, for instance, never ceased to be impressed that one could not have predicted who would capitulate to Nazi authority and who would resist it.

And when you have made it through such times as those of totalitarianism, the first thing you know is the following: you never know how someone will act. You always experience the surprise of your life! This is true at all levels of society and concerning the greatest differences between people. (Arendt 8, 85)

Neither age, nor class background, nor education, nor any other clearcut factors in one’s history could determine who sold their souls.13 This fact could be reason to hope for the prospects of human freedom itself. As Kant’s example of king and gallows showed, only the hardest choices reveal absolute freedom. If nothing in your past determined whether you collapsed in the face of fascism or whether you defied it, you are free in a way no tyrant can control. The utter randomness of responses within German society revealed realms of the human spirit that the most repressive dictatorship cannot reach.

But those who saw here a reason to hope for the future of humanity saw no reason to hope for the future of Hegelianism. Much to the contrary. If the persistence of contingent factors in saving and destroying life thwarts a Hegelian dream of a world without accident, it also undercuts a Hegelian nightmare of a world without choice. Arendt, in particular, scorned every remnant of Hegelianism. The kindest thing she wrote about him was that he was the last of the old philosophers to evade the important questions. By contrast, she claimed,

Schelling marks the beginning of modern philosophy because he explicitly states that he is concerned with the individual who ‘wants a providential God’. (Arendt 7, 169)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem she accused both defense and prosecution of giving in to Hegelianism, since both were inclined to put history more than Eichmann on trial. If pushed far enough, she held both standpoints to exonerate Eichmann. For if history was merely one antisemitic event after another, wasn’t he even a smaller cog in a larger machine than he himself claimed? Arendt maintained the Kantian view that moral responsibility demands acknowledgment of the radical contingency of moral choice. Only by sharply insisting that such choices are fully undetermined could particular people be held accountable for Nazi crimes. For worse and for better, contingency played so central a role in the Holocaust that a philosophy aimed at eliminating contingency seemed doubly condemned by experience.

Thus neither the concept of progress nor that of contingency could carry the same weight after Auschwitz. Still more problematic, however, was the concept of reconciliation underlying Hegelian replacements of theodicy. For this was the point of the first two concepts. Removing the sting of contingency by showing individual misery to be necessary for human history as a whole was a way of reconciling us to a world where such misery occurs. Twentieth-century history made the very desire for reconciliation suspect. Part of the suspicion was that justifications invented to console us for past misfortunes could too easily be used to prepare the ground for future ones. The difference between invoking collective good as a way of consoling us for individual suffering and invoking it as a way of justifying individual suffering is so fine that it is routinely ignored in political practice. Hegel knew that any consolation his theodicy provided would be collective, not individual. Now the demand to ignore individual suffering for the sake of future collective goods is always problematic. Herder called such views unfair to people of earlier epochs, who suffered for the civilization they would never live to see. This kind of charge was never adequately answered. Nor were Hegel’s own remarks about individual suffering likely to assuage such concerns. He faced the consequences of his views and went so far as to state that “the finest and noblest individuals were likely to be immolated on the altar of history” (Hegel 5, 43). In nineteenth-century Berlin, such lectures could still be heard without a shudder; Hegel could not know what images those words would produce one century later. But even those who never dreamed of burning individuals themselves might have hoped to use Hegel to reconcile themselves to a world where other people did. After Auschwitz, that hope seemed decisively blocked. Thinkers like Adorno who had escaped through accidents of fortune thought the least one owed to those who hadn’t was the refusal to be reconciled with the world of their murderers. His claim that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric refers, among other things, to this. To reject poetry is to reject whatever consolation art delivered when God did not—the shadows of the argument from design that Kant saw in the presence of beauty. To seek such consolation seemed to drown the cries of the victims in the attempt to overcome one’s own dejection. Moral integrity demanded helpless silence. Reconciliation, were it possible, could occur only between the murderers and the murdered. The rest of us have no right to it.

Is this argument, or simply an expression of what is called survivor guilt? I believe it is neither but a form of disgust that is equally aesthetic and moral. Dialectics, on this view, are in execrably bad taste; every Hegelian avenue is blocked by the technological production of corpses.

Who would dare to reconcile himself with the reality of extermination camps, or play the game of synthesis-antithesis-synthesis until his dialectics have discovered ‘meaning’ in slave labor? (Arendt 7, 444)

Or as Hans Jonas put it:

The disgrace of Auschwitz is not to be charged to some all-powerful providence or to some dialectically wise necessity, as if it were an antithesis demanding a synthesis or a step on the road to salvation…. It remains on our account, and it is we who must again wash away the disgrace from our own disfigured faces, indeed from the very countenance of God. Don’t talk to me here about the cunning of reason. (Quoted in Bernstein 2, 4)

After Auschwitz, Hegel’s system came to seem like the efforts of Job’s friends: useful insurance against the possibility that God may be eavesdropping. If He were, there might be a point to claiming that this bloody process is the best device for moving history forward. For any more straightforward purposes, such attempts at consolation came to seem intolerable forms of denial.

In chapter 1, I described Hegel’s historical turn as an attempt to close the gap Kant’s work placed in the heart of being: between the given world as we find it and the ideals that demand it be different. The appeal to history was meant to preserve both. It seemed to negate the reality that should be negated without appealing to ideas that threaten to dissolve into pale and pious wishes. The real was the rational because the real would become rational in the passage of time. What was immanent as present hope would naturally become future reality. As Hegel himself knew, redeeming present evils through the unfolding of future historical development was the closest we could come to traditional theodicy.

As every such project seemed increasingly problematic, the urge to undermine the very impulse that leads to theodicy grew stronger. Nietzsche’s work proceeds from that urge. For Nietzsche, every Hegelian attempt to overcome the opposition between idea and reality was simply untenable. Not only faith in progress but even hope itself was an underground version of the love for the ideal that Nietzsche wished to subvert. Earlier generations had damned themselves and all the world by allowing reality to be judged by one ideal or another. Nietzsche proposed to end the conflict by dismissing all such ideals and willing reality as we find it.

Reality as we find it includes Dionysian carnage and autos-da-fé—two examples Nietzsche used to show he was aware of what reality includes. Willing the world without wanting it to be different must include the will to live with all of its evils. Like Hegel’s occasional dismissals of the importance of individual suffering, Nietzsche’s dismissals could make one uneasy in earlier eras. The exhortation to will the world eternally may just help in overcoming evils like Zarathustra’s loneliness. Could it really stand up to an auto-da-fé? While the proposal may be questionable in the face of the Inquisition, it cannot even be made after Auschwitz. So Giorgio Agamben wrote:

Let us imagine repeating the experiment that Nietzsche, under the heading ‘The Heaviest Weight,’ proposes in The Gay Science. “One day or one night, a demon glides beside a survivor and asks: ‘Do you want Auschwitz to return again and again, innumerable times, do you want every instant, every single detail of the camp to repeat itself for eternity, returning eternally in all the same precise sequence in which they took place? Do you want this to happen again, again and again for eternity?’ This simple reformulation of the experiment suffices to refute it beyond all doubt, excluding the possibility of its even being proposed. (Agamben, 99)

Agamben’s thought experiment is decisive. Once you have formulated it, you cannot imagine anyone grotesque enough to carry it out. A Nietzschean proposal that a survivor should be able to will the reality of the death camps seems even worse than the Hegelian proposal that he should be reconciled to them by contemplating some future good. Would the suggestion be equally repulsive if made to the survivor of an old-fashioned massacre? Perhaps it would be, but this isn’t a question Nietzsche raised. Once the question is raised directly, the flaws in his account cannot be overlooked. Willing the world eternally, and rejecting the ideals that propose to make it different, is not a demand you can make of anyone else.

Nietzsche might accept this conclusion. For willing the world is a task he thought so hard that it may only be self-imposed. You cannot demand that anyone will the reality, let alone the recurrence, of the evil that has been done to him. But could you, after Auschwitz, make such demands on yourself?

According to Jean Améry, it depends on what was done to you. If you were a victim of Gestapo torture, for example, he thinks Nietzsche’s challenge cannot be met. His essay “Resentments” was written to confront Nietzsche’s claims. Améry, who survived Auschwitz, held that no one who did so could will its recurrence. Even further, he is plagued by a wish to undo past time. The survivor’s engagement with the evil he witnessed is obsessive and fruitless. Nietzsche was right to view the wish as unnatural, producing the rancor and resentment he described so well. Those who cannot face the present without the wish to undo past evils are imprisoned without hope. But some evils produce states that cannot be overcome. Améry saw himself as a prisoner of events he could not undo and would not accept. Any diagnosis that tried to liberate him merely points out that his wish to undo the past conflicts with reality. But for Améry, this conflict is hardly news. Indeed, he argues that the whole worth of morality lies in that conflict.

What happened, happened. The sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morality and the spirit. Moral resistance contains the protest, the revolt against reality, that is only reasonable as long as it is moral. The moral being demands to set aside time. (Améry 1, 116)

Améry’s opposition to Nietzsche was deliberate and self-conscious. He knew all the reasons Nietzsche had to attack the very notion of transcendence. Auschwitz presented a reality, however, which demanded that transcendence be resurrected. Améry’s engagement with Nietzsche is particularly troubling in its acceptance of Nietzsche’s description of ressentiment. The wish to undo an evil that was done to you in the past is the very model of senseless obsession. If you cannot abandon it, you will be trapped in the sterile self-defeat of rage without revenge, pain without relief. Just this picture captures the survivor—said Améry after examining himself. He never disputed Nietzsche’s claim that it’s an ugly sight, though he denied Nietzsche’s view that the inability to will everything is a sign of weakness. The demand to will the world as a whole cannot include every world. Nietzsche’s demand relied on models of suffering that the twentieth century made obsolete.

Descriptions of Auschwitz leave little room for Nietzschean claims about the value of suffering. For nearly all observers share the view that this suffering created nothing of value, either for any individual who witnessed it or for humanity as a whole.14 This is not a moral but an empirical claim: Auschwitz produced nothing but possibilities that should never have been opened, wounds that can never heal. Again it was Améry whose statement of this thought was most devastating:

We did not become wiser in Auschwitz … nor did we become ‘deeper’ in the camps, insofar as that fatal depth is a definable spiritual dimension at all. That we didn’t become better, more human, more humane, and morally mature need not, I believe, be argued…. The word dies everywhere that reality makes its claim total. It died for us long ago. And we were not even left with the feeling that we had to regret its loss. (Améry 1, 45)

Améry claimed that the demand to will reality without ideals depends entirely on the character of your reality. For some forms of evil, the demand cannot be met. In chapter 3, I argued that Nietzschean remarks about the ability to suffer as criterion of nobility came dangerously close to the Christian and Stoic views he wished to oppose. But even should we be able to maintain distinctions between the view that suffering sanctifies souls and the view that suffering strengthens them, Auschwitz poses terrible problems. Postwar consensus was so adamant in denying that this sort of suffering ennobled its victims that those victims were often stigmatized.¹⁵ Brutal as it was, both survivors and observers often repeated the claim: the best were those who did not survive. The claim that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger was problematically applicable to survivors: if the experience led some of them to develop strengths useful in brutal environments, every other aspect of character was often atrophied. Even those who describe how decency was maintained inside the extermination camps agree that it was also exceptional.

For the camps were very successful in performing the task to which they were dedicated: not only the fabrication of corpses but the prior destruction of souls. Many have described the Musselmänner—prisoners whose wills were so thoroughly extinguished that even before they died, they were no longer among the living—as the essential product of Auschwitz. Even those who escaped this fate record nothing but losses. They conclude that whatever depth or wisdom or humanity was intact after Auschwitz remained not through but in spite of it.¹⁶ For everything was directed toward eradicating them. From the long ride in conditions barely appropriate for transporting animals, to the replacement of prisoners’ names with numbers, to the disposal of corpses without any of the dignity normally accorded them, victims were subject to a process designed to destroy the very concept of humanity within them. This is not an attack that can be faced directly, with heroic moments that may triumph over death itself. It is, rather, deep and grinding, dulling response by degrees and implicating the victim in his own slow destruction. Souls may be strengthened in the confrontation with evil that acknowledges them. Evil that seeks to deny its victims all the conditions of having a soul cannot possibly further them. We can be grateful to those few who found strength to resist this massive attack on humanity. We cannot suppose them to reveal anything but the mystery of human freedom.

INTENTIONS: MEANING AND MALICE

They would have loathed one another’s company, but I brought Hegel and Nietzsche together because both sought a unity between nature and morality that is at odds with modern consciousness. (Nietzsche’s description of his work as untimely correctly anticipated that its importance would grow, but it also revealed longing for some ancient impulses. He was out of place in the century that surrounded him.) Both Hegel and Nietzsche represent forms of monism that seek to overcome the gap between nature and morality by abolishing one of the terms. While the opposition between nature and morality is the source of complex metaphysics, it occurs in contexts that are perfectly ordinary. Whenever one voice protests, That should not have happened, and another insists, But it did, an opposition arises that can become intolerable. Any number of paths to overcome it may present themselves as different forms of monism.

But modern thought is more typically dualistic. We have little use for different sorts of substance, but Cartesian dualism is less urgent than Kantian. What’s at issue is not what reason and nature are made of, but whether it makes sense to expect them to have similar properties. If the Lisbon earthquake is a birthplace of modernity, it’s because it demanded recognition that nature and morality are split. Lisbon ought not to have happened, but it did. Accepting this came to seem a minimal sign of maturity, and Voltaire’s long lament about the earthquake appeared but an elegant version of the child’s curse at the chair over which he stumbled. Neither earthquakes nor chairs are properly viewed as objects of outrage because neither contains any moral properties at all. Nature has no meaning; its events are not signs. We no longer expect natural objects to be objects of moral judgment, or even to reflect or harmonize with them. For those who refuse to give up moral judgments, the demand that they stop seeking the unity of nature and morality means accepting a conflict in the heart of being that nothing will ever resolve.

This was the path most often taken in the need to abandon theodicy that arose after Lisbon. For all its difficulty, it’s a path which came to seem so self-evident that it forced a change of vocabulary. Before Lisbon, evils were divided into matters of nature, metaphysics, or morality. After Lisbon, the word evil was restricted to what was once called moral evil. Modern evil is the product of will. Restricting evil actions to those accompanied by evil intention rids the world of a number of evils in ways that made sense. Less clear were the concepts of willing and intention themselves. Falling rocks and tidal waves do not have them. What having them comes to remained murky.

Kant’s ethics began from the claim that only the good will is good in itself. His shopkeeper example was illustration: a shopkeeper who refrains from cheating because good reputations are good for business is different from a shopkeeper who knows he can get away with cheating, and doesn’t. Though we may never see the difference between them, we know that one is merely prudent, and the other is good. Suppose we accept this account of the difference between a good will and an indifferent one. The good will wants good for the sake of good alone; Kant called it acting from respect for the moral law. The indifferent will wants good when it suits its other interests. But how are we to understand an evil will?

If willing evil becomes too deliberate, we risk the return to original sin that Rousseau sought to avoid. In Rousseau’s version of the Fall, humankind became wicked without willing evil. Our descent from innocence into civilized barbarism wasn’t caused by the deliberate defiance that led Adam and Eve to ruin. The noble savages in Rousseau’s story made a series of natural, understandable, and contingent mistakes. Thus Rousseau could assert the fundamental goodness of God and His creatures without denying the reality of the evils of Creation.

The account had flaws, but it had the great merit of both acknowledging the appearances and asserting that there is order behind them. It was particularly brilliant in accounting for evils like inequality, and even slavery, and providing hope that they might be overcome. For Rousseau showed how such evils were not part of the order of nature but consequences of human actions that did not emerge from incorrigibly evil wills. Now even the eighteenth century raised the question: Is there radical evil that Rousseau’s account failed to capture? The origin of evil in a series of good-natured mistakes left what was evil elusive. It also threatened to undermine the very responsibility it set out to ground. If our mistakes arise from brutish self-interest, it is nature that made us self-interested brutes. How can there be crimes against nature, if evil is part of nature itself? You don’t have to be a moralist to find this outcome unacceptable. Sade was outraged by it, and spent most of his time in prison trying to imagine a crime so unnatural that nature itself would protest.

The dilemma is grave. To view acts of evil as deliberate acts of will was to risk a return to original sin. To view acts of evil as simply mistaken was to obscure the difference between what is merely expedient and what is much worse. Kant’s book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone tried to solve the problem by asserting the existence of radical evil that is a matter neither of oversight nor of brute natural inclination. Rather, he held that radical evil involves the calculated desire to break the moral law. His account has been so thoroughly and critically examined elsewhere that I will not discuss it here, except to express agreement with the view that Kant’s discussion of the matter is extremely disappointing. He argued that the grounds upon which anyone chooses to violate or respect the moral law will always remain inscrutable. This must be the case to preserve the absolute freedom that, for Kant, is the ground of moral responsibility. To say that heroism is as ultimately inscrutable as villainy, because both depend on the mystery of freedom, is to be honest about your limits. We’d expect no less of Immanuel Kant, but we would also expect more.

Traditional attempts to fix a distinction between nature and morality thus left many crucial questions open. But the distinction did fit and promote needs arising in a disenchanted world. As Freud showed, one goal of disenchanting the world was to solve the problem of natural evil. If there is no will behind things like earthquakes and lightning, those that turn out to strike you dead are merely bad luck. Even thinkers who, unlike Freud, still acknowledge God’s presence in nature no longer hold Him accountable for His absences. With natural evil reduced to regrettable accident, and metaphysical evil transformed to recognition of the limits we expect every adult to acknowledge, the problem of evil was as far on its way to dissolution as philosophical problems ever go. Though the solution left issues unresolved, it worked well enough for the same reasons Pombal’s answers worked for the people of Portugal. There’s always enough to do in the business of eliminating those evils we can approach without worrying about the ones we can’t. Resolving to take responsibility for some piece of the world in the absence of convincing metaphysical grounding is part of what it means to grow up in it.

In this context Auschwitz posed philosophical problems because it left the nature of assuming responsibility so very unclear. It’s easy to see that evil will is absent in things like earthquakes, but what did it mean for evil to be present in humankind? Auschwitz stood for moral evil as other war crimes did not because it seemed deliberate as others did not. Sending children to fight for Britain in the mud of Flanders without grasping the power of the weapons you have put in their hands can be called gross criminal negligence. Rounding up children from all ends of Europe and shipping them to gas chambers in Poland cannot. The number of Jews herded into cattle cars was even exactly calculated; the SS wished to pay the Reichsbahn no more than economy group rates for the cost of transporting people to be murdered. It is hard to imagine an act that is more intentional, at a structural level.

For the individual, things were infinitely murkier. Jurisprudence views heinous crimes as those done with malice and forethought. Both these components of intention were often missing in many agents who carried out the daily work of extermination. Sadists, and particularly venomous antisemites, were present among the murderers, but the SS sought to avoid using those who took obvious pleasure in murder, and most of it was carried out as routine. Vicious hatred was far less in evidence than might be expected among the lower echelons of those who took over the killing. The opportunity to avoid being sent to fight at the front enlisted far more concentration camp guards than did the opportunity to torment Jews. At the highest levels, not only malice, but clear view of the consequences of one’s actions was often missing as well. Eichmann is only the most famous Nazi official whose initial goals had nothing to do with mass murder and everything to do with petty desires for personal advancement. At every level, the Nazis produced more evil, with less malice, than civilization had previously known.

The apparent absence of malice or forethought has proved so disturbing that many observers prefer to argue they were present in subterranean form. Writers like Goldhagen argued that behind a mask of relative tolerance, German culture contained particularly virulent forms of antisemitism. The appeal of such claims derives less from historical accuracy than from philosophical naïveté. An old-fashioned picture of evil as inevitably connected to evil intention is more soothing than alternatives. Similarly, ordinary Germans who insist that they never knew what crimes were committed in the east in their names are dismissed as merely dishonest. Bureaucrats who claim to have joined the Nazi party without awareness of its final aims are dismissed as merely despicable. It is easier to appeal to unconscious hatred and unconscious knowledge than to admit the more disturbing view. They really didn’t mean it—and it really doesn’t matter. Auschwitz embodied evil that confuted two centuries of modern assumptions about intention.

Those assumptions identify evil and evil intention so thoroughly that denying the latter is normally viewed as a way of denying the former. Where evil intention is absent, we may hold agents liable for the wrongs they inflict, but we view them as matters of criminal negligence. Alternatively, anyone who denies that criminal intention is present in a particular action is thought to exonerate the criminal. This is the source of the furor that still surrounds Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the twentieth century’s most important philosophical contribution to the problem of evil. The conviction that guilt requires malice and forethought led most readers to conclude that Arendt denied guilt because she denied malice and forethought—though she often repeated that Eichmann was guilty, and was convinced that he ought to hang. Her main point is that Eichmann’s harmless intentions did not mitigate his responsibility. Both the prosecution and the defense proceeded on the assumption that they would. So the prosecution tried to show that Eichmann was both more brutal and more knowledgeable than he claimed to be. Just as surely, the defense tried to show that Eichmann’s relatively high position in the hierarchy of the Final Solution resulted from good intentions: Eichmann was moved by nothing worse than the desire to please his superiors by doing his job well. So, it was argued, he never hated Jews, he never set out to murder them, and the one time he watched others do so seemed to have made him sick. Eichmann’s trial focused on the question of whether these claims were true. In doing so, Arendt argued, it ignored the most important questions.

Foremost among the larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. Where this intent is absent, where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed. We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions ‘that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wrong collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal’ (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty. (Arendt 2, 277)

Earlier legal conceptions tied crime to intention in different ways. Oedipus’s best efforts to elude his fate may have mitigated his guilt, but they did not erase it, for his crime damaged the order on which Greek life depended. Now Greek audiences too would have judged Oedipus, who did everything possible to avoid his crimes, differently from Eichmann, who did not. Eichmann caused tragedy; he wasn’t fit to be a subject of it. Thus Oedipus is anything but Eichmann’s equal, but his example reminds us that the moral consequences of intending an action are no more self-evident than the concept of intention itself. Both can change significantly, and with them the ways we cut up the world.

Arendt’s account was crucial in revealing what makes Auschwitz emblematic for contemporary evil. It showed that today, even crimes so immense that the earth itself cries out for retribution are committed by people with motives that are no worse than banal. Flamboyant villainy is easy to recognize, and not too hard to avoid. The lines between wickedness and decency, in yourself or in others, can be drawn with relative clarity. Criminals like Eichmann have none of the subjective traits we use to identify evildoers, yet his crimes were so objectively massive that they made subjective factors irrelevant. His attempts to prove he was perfectly normal were as arduous as the prosecution’s attempt to prove he was not. Both attempts were wasted, if what’s at issue is what’s appalling: the most unprecedented crimes can be committed by the most ordinary people.17 It is this factor that Auschwitz shares with other contemporary cases of mass murder—for all the other differences between them. In contemporary evil, individuals’ intentions rarely correspond to the magnitude of evil individuals are able to cause.

Again it’s important to distinguish between metaphysical and political kinds of discussion. Neither should be privileged over the other; each, rather, gains different significance in different contexts. Much of the anger that often attends comparative discussion of twentieth-century evils arises from the failure to distinguish between political and metaphysical comparisons. Arendt’s discussion of the role of the Jewish Councils in carrying out the Final Solution is an important case in point. These councils organized by the Nazis often used respected members of already extant Jewish governing bodies to administer the details of deportation. Eichmann in Jerusalem aroused particular outrage by claiming that the Jewish Councils were instrumental in ensuring the smooth organization of mass murder. Because she denied that Eichmann’s intentions were evil, then turned to discuss the behavior of the Jewish Councils, Arendt was widely accused of excusing the murderers and blaming the victims. At the very least, she was thought to propose the vague and unacceptable claim that in war, everybody is guilty of something or other.18

Arendt herself failed to distinguish between political and metaphysical discussion. When pressed, she retreated to the claim that she was only engaged in journalism. This underestimated the depth and force of her own work and allowed criticism to continue that missed her own point. Later historical work, largely sparked by Eichmann in Jerusalem itself, showed that the dichotomy it posed between armed resistance and cooperation through the Jewish Councils was too simplistic. But growing sympathy for the moral dilemmas faced by members of the Jewish Councils cannot obscure the fact that their strategies rarely worked. Though their goals were to save lives and reduce suffering through the very limited means at their disposal, their well-intended actions helped the Nazis to murder Jews with an efficiency and thoroughness that the Final Solution would otherwise have lacked. The Nazi capacity to implicate victims, or those who would elsewhere remain innocent bystanders, is the feature of the regime that most resembles traditional forms of evil. This suggests that not the Musselmann but the Sonderkommando is its most terrible product. Condemning the victim to participate in the mechanics of murder was one way of obliterating morality itself. But here too, the Nazis’ intentions were rarely actively diabolical, but merely a dull desire to let others do the dirtiest work.

Nazis forced everyone from passive bystanders to victims to participate in the vast network of destruction. Their success in doing so revealed the impotence of intention on its own. To shut your eyes to Nazism, and even to profit from it, is not the same thing as to will the sequence of events that ended at Auschwitz. Auschwitz was nevertheless the product of discrete actions decided upon by particular agents. Debate about moral responsibility during the Third Reich is often sidetracked by discussions of authenticity. If all the Germans who claimed to have privately loathed the regime were telling the truth, it could hardly have retained power for twelve days. But suppose that many bystanders’ claims to have been “inwardly opposed” to the Nazi regime were perfectly genuine. Most people desired nothing better or worse than to be left alone to pursue their own private and harmless ends. Much evidence suggests that Eichmann himself was perfectly sincere. He may have been more willing than many of us to ignore other people’s interests in the drive to advance his own, but he took no special pleasure in causing suffering, and seems to have actively disliked contemplating it. What better proof can there be that subjective states are not here decisive? What counts is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell.

Precisely the belief that evil actions require evil intentions allowed totalitarian regimes to convince people to override moral objections that might otherwise have functioned. Massive propaganda efforts undertook to convince people that the criminal actions in which they participated were guided by acceptable, even noble motives. Himmler’s exhortation to SS troops at Posen is only the most famous and extreme instance of propaganda that worked by inverting moral values. He proclaimed that it was the very difficulty of overcoming their normal reluctance to shoot women and children that revealed the sublime and significant nature of the historical enterprise in which the troops were involved. Less incredible instances worked in similar ways. Of course it’s always possible to betray someone for the prospect of petty personal gain. But if you believe your betrayal is required by loyalty to higher values, it’s that much easier to live with. The feeling of guilt is so unreliable that it can often serve as an index of innocence. The best of bystanders are those whose consciences are most tormented. Indifferent souls are rarely troubled by the thought of having done too little to prevent crimes.

Like most Nazi officials, Eichmann felt little guilt. This feeling (or its absence) was subjective. Inspecting his conscience, he discovered nothing worse than the ordinary wish to get ahead and even the admirable desire to fulfill obligations that sometimes countered his own private feelings. Suppose he was sincere: the contents of his soul were just as meager as he reported. This is no reason to deny his responsibility, but to look for responsibility elsewhere than in the contents of the soul.

Inspecting your soul is not like unpacking your suitcase. Philosophy long ago abandoned the picture of intentions as mental objects that are ghostly versions of physical ones. But once intentions are no longer viewed as inner objects, how are they to be understood? Frustrated with the vagueness of the concept of intention, some philosophers suggested that intentions be analyzed as dispositions or potentials. Your intention to do something comes to nothing else than your potential, under appropriate circumstances, to do something. But in the crimes we are considering, the distinction between potential and actual evil is exactly the difference that morality demands we preserve. Eichmann argued that in other circumstances he would have behaved no worse than others. Bad luck placed him at a desk where signing a form could become an act of murder. Potentially, he could have lived a life as harmless as his inner world, just as others more fortunately situated might have realized the evil for which he was responsible. This is what it means to engage in ordinary complicity—just as refusing to give in to this kind of bad luck is what it means to engage in ordinary heroism. But determining what complicity and heroism now mean is vital, for Nazi attempts to obliterate moral distinctions between actual and potential criminals make it all the more crucial to preserve them. Of all those who might have become criminals, only some actually participated in the Final Solution. Of all those who might potentially have been heroes, even fewer actually defied the powers that were. Guilt and innocence depend on these very simple truths. When the notion of intention is tied to a notion of potential, the distinction between actual and potential evil becomes even more obscure. So, Arendt argued, the court should have addressed Eichmann:

We are concerned only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. (Arendt 2, 278)

It’s not accidental that analysis of the concept of intention occupied much of late-twentieth-century philosophy and jurisprudence. Various authors have offered accounts of intention designed to avoid both Cartesian pictures of intentions as ghostly objects and the problems generated when we view intentions as potential. Some accounts are better than others, but none has yet led to consensus on how we are to understand historical responsibility. A moment’s reflection reveals how much is at stake here. Debates between the functionalist and intentionalist schools of Holocaust historiography betray a lack of clarity about the concept of intention itself. For they ask whether what is at issue is guilt (Schuld) or negligence (Fahrlässigkeit)—when what was present in most people was both. Recurring arguments about whether Nazi slave camps were worse than Soviet ones, whether the bombing of Hiroshima was comparable to the Axis slaughter of civilians, are questions about how to weight the role of intention itself. Much of the fury surrounding such debates results from the desire to retain a connection between evil and intention that is not theoretically defensible. Those reluctant to describe the bombing of Hiroshima as evil emphasize the fact that nearly everyone with any responsibility for it acted from acceptable, even good intentions. It is just this identification of evil with evil intention that led to the widespread misreading of Arendt. Because she argued that Eichmann’s intentions were only trivially bad ones, she was held to have argued that his actions were nothing worse. Her point was not to deny responsibility but to demand that we understand responsibility anew. The sheer number of questions that can be raised here reveals how very shaky our understanding has become. Post-Lisbon thinkers used intention as the concept that determined good and evil, turning what had once been natural evil into mere disaster, and evil into that which was somebody’s fault. But the concept cannot help without consensus about what it comes to, apart from agreement that it isn’t found in earth or water.

Eichmann’s case is interesting because it represents the worst case. Others who helped to carry out the Final Solution may have had better intentions—the genuine desire, for example, to hinder more, or more gruesome death. Once we turn away from Nazi crimes to look at others, we will find murders carried out for motives that many of us share. Perhaps the most frightening consequence of pondering these considerations is that the self itself retreats from view. The mass murderer turns individuals into numbered corpses, but he himself, as individual, is scarcely more present.

Sade’s works have grown steadily more popular since the war. One reason is surely a deep desire for models of villains who are both clear-cut and full-bodied. The claim that evil is easier to portray than goodness has become a cliché, but literature gives us surprisingly few examples of pure and radical evil. Iago is notoriously mysterious, too small and opaque for the degree of destruction he is able to cause. Sade’s criminals, by contrast, compete to outdo each other in transparent displays of evil will. Sade’s opponent was always God, even when he was skeptical about His existence. He thus sought to create criminals large enough to hit his target. Sade’s villains are neither subtle nor slimy. They are conscious about their motives, which they discuss at interminable length. Evil, for them, is a means to physical pleasure, the only drive that ever moves them. They are men and women with large and unusual appetites. You like lemon pie; Juliette likes torturing children. Saint-Fond, Sade’s most successful portrait of pure evil, adds intellectual refinements to torment as other people add spices. He particularly enjoys implicating victims in his crimes. Forcing a man to whip his beloved while being tortured to death extends Saint-Fond’s pleasure, through contemplation, a little longer. We have two minds about whether heat or coolness marks a more evil will. In creatures like Saint-Fond, Sade united perverse unbridled appetite with coldblooded forethought. Whatever is more essential to evil, he had the bases covered.

Sade’s portraits of pure evil fascinate because they are rare. Literature gives us fewer models than we’d imagine, for even the devil himself is usually disappointing. Consider modern literature’s greatest attempts to depict him. Both Goethe’s and Dostoevsky’s devils exude airs of shabbiness. Each is significantly smaller than the hero he means to seduce. Both offer themselves not as masters but as particularly obsequious servants. They represent not malicious impulses but mean ones. Faust is a thinker; Mephistopheles is a pedant. He is so constrained by rule that he cannot enter Faust’s study without finding a loophole. He limps, complains, makes vulgar jokes. Every word and every gesture signal impotence, not power. The spirit who always denies, Mephistopheles destroys what others create. He says himself that he’s not one of the great ones, and he claims—perhaps truly—that he cannot move anything at all. Faust sets ends; Mephistopheles provides means. When he describes himself as playing the devil, one wonders whether he’s ever capable of being it. Faust calls him a poor devil. It’s an ironic twist on a common expression, but it underlines all the difference between them. The figure of size and stature is Faust himself.

Goethe suggested that Faust’s search for meaning made him prey to temptations that leave others cold, and Dostoevsky said so clearly. The devil who visits Ivan Karamazov “loves the dreams of [his] passionate young friends, quivering with a quavering for life!” This devil is failure itself. Ivan describes him as a sponger, a flunky, a clown. The devil responds by taunting Ivan for his disappointment. Didn’t he know we live in a disenchanted world? Not even the devil appears in flames. Instead he comes in threadbare coat and dirty linen. He’s subject to colds and severe self-pity; the devil is the very sum of human weakness. He is so far from being a fallen angel that even his attempts to look like a gentleman dissolve on examination. He isn’t clearly driven by any motive worse than an indiscriminate desire to make himself agreeable. In the famous chapter “Rebellion” Ivan is prepared to reject God for the sake of Creation. When he finally meets the devil, he has no heroic choices. The devil is the expression of base urges, not defiant ones.

Both devils are remarkably concerned with their own existence. Dostoevsky’s devil recounts meeting with journalists who denied his existence outright. “Why, I said to them, ‘It’s reactionary to believe in God in our age. But I’m the devil. You can believe in me.” The devil’s need to demonstrate his reality is a comment on our unwillingness to see the presence of evil. Both devils defend their right to exist with traditional theodicy. Mephistopheles is the force that always wants evil and always does good nonetheless. What begins as evil is always revealed to end as its opposite. How can we complain about evil, in a world that functions so well? Dostoevsky cited Goethe’s text and tried to improve on it. His devil would prefer to do good, but he has another job: keeping the world in motion. Without evil there would be no events at all. The world would grind to a halt in a dull burst of loud praise. For, he intones, suffering is life. Here theodicy itself is the work of the devil. Mean and self-seeking apologetics replace active sedition. Romantic rhetoric is out of place.

The devil’s banality is designed to make us uncomfortable. Both Goethe and Dostoevsky said this clearly. Sade captured twentieth-century imagination because he described the devils we’d prefer. It’s often said that we long for lost heroes, but our need for the right kind of villain is no less urgent. We long for a picture of what went wrong in the world. Fortunately or not, villains like Sade’s are comparatively infrequent. The greatest destruction is caused by men who look more like Dostoevsky’s devil than they look like Saint-Fond. We are threatened more often by those with indifferent or misguided intentions than by those with malevolent ones; even deliberate forms of malice are often so petty as to bewilder. Brute sadists administered daily life in concentration camps everywhere, but they did not build them. Bad intentions and thoughtlessness were present enough in the architects. They do not add up to the magnitude of the evil they caused.

The banality of evil is a new phrase, but it isn’t a new discovery. At Auschwitz the devil showed the face that earlier literature merely suspected. What he did there resists the conceptual categories we have available. The Holocaust did not take place by accident, or by oversight. But the vast and careful design at some levels crumbles on examination at others. Who was the designer? Few Nazis showed the signs that traditionally made evil tempting. Out of uniform, they were rather pathetic, which mitigates their otherwise sickening tendency to feel sorry for themselves. Auschwitz revealed the gaps between the pieces of our concepts of intention. Neither malice nor foresight was sufficient to account for all of the evil they were meant to explain. Struck by the absence of sufficient signs of individual evil intention, some have tried to explain evil by a collective will, or structural intention. Appeals to structural processes that lead to evil remind us of our roles as parts of systems where divisions of labor, and simple distance, obscure individual responsibility. Auschwitz was hardly the only example of evil produced by human cogs—just the clearest one. But calls for awareness are not yet accounts, and substituting collective for individual intention is an attempt to preserve an old framework simply for the sake of having one. Recognizing this means recognizing that we have very clear paradigms of moral evil but nothing close to an adequate account of them. Sade and Auschwitz have little in common. It is unlikely that a general formula will be found to unite them, and any attempt to do so may obscure what is morally important in each.

The absence of a general account of intention and evil is profoundly disturbing because the hope for it was a minimalist demand. The problem of evil began by trying to penetrate God’s intentions. Now it appears we cannot make sense of our own. If Auschwitz leaves us more helpless than Lisbon, it is because our conceptual resources seem exhausted. After Lisbon, one could pick up shattered pieces of worldview and decide to live bravely, taking responsibility for a disenchanted world. After Auschwitz, even our attempts to do this much seem doomed to failure. The long philosophical silence on the subject will surprise no one who recognizes the consequences of the attack on intention. The notion cannot carry the weight that contemporary forms of evil bring to bear on it. Nor can we simply do without it—nor collapse the distinction between natural and moral evil.

We should admit the extent of our losses. If Lisbon marked the moment of recognition that traditional theodicy was hopeless, Auschwitz signaled the recognition that every replacement fared no better. In each case there was complex interplay between the shock of confrontation with evil and the intellectual resources present to cope with it. Lisbon exhausted classic attempts to connect natural and moral evil, and with them hopes of finding systematic justification of individual suffering. There remained three very different ways of closing the gap between the evil that happens and reason’s demand that it be otherwise. In the last section I argued that Auschwitz blocked both the path taken by Hegel and that proposed by Nietzsche. Finally and most troubling, as the present section argued, it undermined the most common modern response to the end of theodicy. For where the notion that evil requires evil intention is thrown into confusion, attempts to take responsibility for suffering will seem precarious.

TERROR: AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

One late autumn evening a student from Paris sat in my kitchen in Berlin and asked, apropos of nothing, where I had been when I heard the news. He might have come from Boston or Santiago or Zagreb. Wherever we were, whoever we are, it is a moment we will not forget, and need to recall over and over—as we needed to watch the World Trade Center fall, over and over on television, until we felt sick enough to be sure it was real. This is globalization. Is it Lisbon?

The parallels are undeniable. The suddenness and speed of the attack resembled natural catastrophe. There was no warning. There was also no message. The absence of both created the kind of fear that made most of us know we had not, until then, understood the meaning of the word terror. Like earthquakes, terrorists strike at random: who lives and who does not depends on contingencies that cannot be deserved or prevented. Thinkers like Voltaire raged at God for His failure to uphold the elementary moral rules human beings try to follow. Children should not be suddenly and brutally tormented; something as big as the difference between life and death should not depend on something as small as chance. Natural disaster is blind to moral distinctions that even crude justice draws. Terrorism deliberately defies them. In underscoring contingency, September 11 underscored our infinite fragility. Even in New York, many people knew no one who was in the World Trade Center at the time of the attack, but everyone seemed to know someone who was sleeping off a hangover or taking a child to kindergarten. Where failure to get to work becomes a way of saving one’s life, our sense of powerlessness becomes overwhelming. The terrorists chose targets sure to increase it. Wall Street and the Pentagon are at once symbol and reality of Western force, and it is unclear which was more frightening: the collapse of the glaringly conspicuous twin towers or the assault on the impenetrable recesses of military might. Neither visibility nor invisibility provided protection. Watching both shatter so quickly, no one could possibly feel safe. Ordinary people everywhere echoed Arendt: the impossible became true.

So it was said and written, on streets and papers in more languages than are worth counting, that the world will not be the same. It is too soon to know what this means. This is partly because the consequences are not all clear. It is also because the only way to hold a world together is to deny it has been shattered. We cannot know whether an epoch has been ended by an event when not viewing the event as epochal is essential to going on. This is part of maintaining order in defiance of attempts to destroy it. Pombal had to underplay the earthquake’s significance in order to return Lisbon to normalcy. His exhortations to go back to business had the same source as Giuliani’s: where all the odds are against it, making life ordinary can be an act of heroism. For a day or so after the catastrophe, language itself seemed useless. At midday on September 12, CNN showed silent pictures above a running band of caption: NO COMMENT NO COMMENT NO COMMENT NO COMMENT NO COMMENT NO COMMENT. By nightfall there was ordinary newscasting discussing everything from economic losses to the appropriateness of discussing anything at all. Pombal simply kept the Portuguese newspaper in print. In our self-reflective era, the media rushed to defend their own return to business as usual. It wasn’t necessary. Terror is meant to strike us dumb. Finding words with which to face it is an act of reconstruction.

Still we cannot say how much the world will change. We face new forms of danger. But they are not, I submit, new forms of evil. The difficulties of coping with terrorism are not conceptual difficulties. Those who carried out the mass murder on September 11 embodied a form of evil so old-fashioned that its reappearance is part of our shock. It is old-fashioned not because it was carried out by those who held fundamentalist ideologies untouched by modern scruples. Seeing the power of belief in a god who rewards those who destroy his enemies with a rancid caricature of paradise can only make us grateful for skepticism, but the content of the terrorists’ beliefs is not central. Some Nazis’ decisions to die rather than surrender in the final days of the war drew on primitive chiliastic fantasies, yet I have argued that the Third Reich embodied contemporary evil. September 11 provided an instance of evil that was old-fashioned in structure. Banal evil emerges from the fabric of ordinary life that September 11 ripped through.

Most important: it was awesomely intentional. The foresight involved was massive. The murderers focused their end precisely in view, and they went to every imaginable length to achieve it—from the exact planning required for years of coordination to the preparation of their own certain deaths. The clearest use of instrumental rationality was matched by the clearest flaunting of moral reasoning. Nature disregards distinctions between every kind of guilt and every kind of innocence; the terrorists actively scorned them. Without even a demand that was put forth for negotiation, there wasn’t the flimsiest of excuses for the destruction of ordinary lives. The terrorists’ goals were, rather, to produce what morality tries to prevent: death and fear. (Rousseau thought the fear of death worse than death itself, since fear threatens our freedom and poisons our lives.) Malice and forethought, the classic components of evil intention, have rarely been so well combined. The terrorists bypassed complex models like Mephistopheles and took us back to Sade. Some will doubtless counter that they believed their cause was just. But the absence of so much as an ultimatum renders every attempt to make a case for just terrorism hopeless—even for those who like defending contradictions. Destroying random members of a culture you find unacceptable does not count as a permissible cause.

Later, it seemed foreboding. The slow and inexorable destruction of the giant double Buddhas in Afghanistan sent shivers down the spine of a world long inured to watching children starve before cameras. The Taliban explosion of what was, after all, only stone and statue, captured days of unexplained global attention. Did it foreshadow the imploding towers a few months later? Heine wrote that anyone willing to burn books will not hesitate to burn people. The sentence was written long before joyful Nazi students piled banned books onto public bonfires, and its prescience came to seem eerie. To take that pure an aim at human culture—what makes us free, according to Hegel, and able to assume the role of creators, according to Marx—is to aim at humanity itself.

But the parallels stop there. The Taliban and the terrorists they supported are not complex thugs. Their appearance on a sunny morning in the center of civilization was shocking because we were used to more sophistication as well as to more safety. Those whose intellectual nourishment isn’t confined to old Westerns were no longer accustomed to such straightforward moral judgments. When forced to choose between simplification and cynicism, educated people incline to the latter. There was plenty of evidence to make it look reasonable. Wall Street seemed determined to show that everything could be bought and sold, the Pentagon bent on renewing the pre-Socratic belief that justice means helping your friends and hurting your enemies. After 1989, only interests, not ideas, seemed objects of real conflict. Easy enough to conclude that any conflict between good and evil themselves was nothing but hype.

This paralyzed moral reaction. Those whose conceptions of evil were always simple and demonic were happy to see them confirmed. It gave them new missions, and new excuses to carry out old ones. Those whose conceptions of evil had been shaped less by Hollywood than by Chile and Vietnam and Auschwitz and Cambodia are at more of a loss. We have learned how easily crimes are committed through bureaucratic structures of ordinary people who do not let themselves acknowledge, exactly, what it is that they do. Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann was never completely elaborated. But the description of evil as thoughtless captured so many cases of contemporary evil that we were unprepared for a case of single-mindedly thoughtful evil. The sense of conceptual helplessness the terrorists thus produced was almost as great as every other sense of helplessness. We seemed left with no good choices. To call what happened on September 11 evil appeared to join forces with those whose simple, demonic conceptions of evil often deliberately obscure more insidious forms of it. Not to call the murders evil appeared to relativize them, to engage in forms of calculation that make them understandable—and risked a first step toward making them justifiable.

Some were willing to take those steps, and to offer crude forms of theodicy from several directions. Christian fundamentalists blamed the secular world for weakening God’s willingness to protect America. There were more numerous suggestions that New Yorkers were reaping what the Pentagon and Wall Street had sowed in all the forms of suffering they cause throughout the Third World. Only those closest to the terrorists went on to maintain that September 11 was therefore simple justice. But the lack of a coherent conclusion did not prevent many from pointing to the data, again and again, as if they should form one by themselves.

Simple theodicies are types of magic thinking. Hoping the powers that control your life are listening to what you think they want to hear is a desperate search for protection—as Kant chided the friends of Job. Jerry Falwell never had an abortion; French critics never hurt an Iraqi child. Surely they must be safe from terrorist assault?

They are not, of course, but we understand their impulse. This way of seeking explanations of evil is part of an attempt to ward off more of it, as well as to make sense of the world as a whole. If the first urge is comprehensible, the second urge can be positively commendable. Yet both are, in this context, obscene. For both are ways of denying that what happened on September 11 was evil—when the blatant unbearable anguish stared into our faces from every haunting homemade poster on the streets of New York.

Refusing to deny this kind of evil hardly entails a refusal to deny other kinds. All to the contrary. Dividing evils into greater and lesser, and trying to weigh them, is not just pointless but impermissible. To call something evil is to say that it defies justification, and balance. Evils should not be compared, but they should be distinguished. The appearance of old forms of evil need not blind us to the appearance of other forms, and it may even sharpen our eye for them. Systematic worldwide oppression does nothing to justify terrorism; it doesn’t even explain it. It surely prepares ground in which terrorism can grow. But even if it didn’t, it should be resisted as an evil on its own terms.

For those who wanted to hear it, Auschwitz offered a moral lesson about vigilance. Very few people are prepared to destroy their own lives for the sake of destroying others. Very many are prepared to play small parts in systems that lead to evils they do not want to foresee. Many whose lives were spent opposing contemporary forms of evil were reluctant to use the word to refer to the terrorists—or to use it at all except in scare quotes. They knew that it had been used crudely by those whose lives were spent making themselves deaf to the forms of evil they and their institutions cause. But abandoning moral discourse to those with fewer scruples is a peculiar way of maintaining one’s own. Those who care about resisting evils must be able to recognize them however they appear. Surrendering the word evil to those who perceive only its simplest forms leaves us fewer resources with which to approach the complex ones.

Evils can be acknowledged as evils without insisting that evil has an essence. Our inability to find something deep that is common to the mass murders committed by terrorists and the starvation furthered by corporate interests does not prevent us from condemning both. Thinking clearly is crucial; finding formulas is not. For contemporary possibilities threaten even early modern attempts to divide moral from natural evils. Terrorist strikes imitate nature’s arbitrary blows. If combined with the deliberate reproduction of nature’s worst elements, like plague, terrorism’s blend of moral and natural evil is so appalling that we seem doomed to despair. Using human intention to outdo nature at its most perfidious makes earlier ways of rearranging nature seem laughable. Knowing this cannot make us forget other possibilities that threaten to blur distinctions between natural and moral evils. Slow ecological disaster is not intended by the developed nations that fail to regulate the consumption that will surely lead to it—which lessens no one’s responsibility to prevent it. Debates about which blend of moral and natural evil is worse will lead us nowhere. I write in the fear and knowledge that either could destroy us all.

September 11 revealed one ground for hope they will not. The terrorists’ resolve to make us feel we have no power showed that in fact we do. For they revealed how far evil as well as resistance to it remain in individual human hands. A few men with determination and pocketknives killed thousands in an instant and set events in motion that threaten the earth as a whole. This would be reason for dismay, or at best for reflection, were it not for Flight 93.

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 Sonderkommandos who did the work that allowed the gas chambers to function were implicated in them, though every opportunity for resistance was gone by the time they knew what they were doing. 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 explosions that killed thousands of others. This, at least, was the judgment of a handful of passengers on board the fourth plane heading toward an uncertain Washington target. Unlike the passengers on other flights, they had knowledge on which they could act. Without it they would have been as helpless as those confronted by the unimaginable when the doors of the cattle cars opened. Before it ever happened, who could suppose that human beings would be extinguished like vermin, or transformed into living bombs?

Smashed planes leave little hope that we will ever know the whole story, but what we know already is enough. Informed via cell phone that other hijacked planes had been flown into the towers, some people determined to fight. They failed to overcome the terrorists but succeeded in assuring that the plane crashed into an empty field. They died as heroes die. Unlike the hypothetical fellow in Kant’s example who prefers to die than to bear false witness, their refusal to become instruments of evil became more than a gesture. We will never know how much destruction they prevented, but we know they prevented some. They proved not only that human beings have freedom; we can use it to affect a world we fear we don’t control.

This is not theodicy. It is not even consolation—though it is all the hope we have.

REMAINS: CAMUS, ARENDT, CRITICAL THEORY, RAWLS

In a tribute to King Alfonso, Hans Blumenberg wrote that the modern age began with an act of theodicy (Blumenberg 2, 307). Does it end with the realization that all such acts are forlorn? Political and historical reflection about particular causes of evil, and the hope of particular resistance that comes with them, would still be an option, but anything general seems proscribed. To be certain, theodicy’s continued existence was never assured. Leibniz’s stance was defensive even before Voltaire caricatured it in Candide. We saw theodicy come to an end, over and over, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only to reappear in other forms. Its persistence in the face of attack testifies to the fact that theodicy meets some deep human needs, but not to its truth, or even its stability. This demise might just turn out to be the final one; some messages take longer than others to grasp.

Changes within philosophy seem to confirm this suggestion. If any one feature distinguishes twentieth-century philosophy from its predecessors, it is the absence of explicit discussion of the problem of evil. Despite the differences between his work and everything preceding it, Nietzsche’s case makes this most clear: through the late nineteenth century you could take whatever position you wanted on the problem of evil as long as you were engaged with it. If you were not, you were not a philosopher. Engagement transcended differences between national and confessional traditions, between rationalist and empiricist, systematician and skeptic. Consider, as one surprising example, John Stuart Mill. While his lifelong concern with moral evil remains well-known, his concern with questions of natural and metaphysical evil has been largely forgotten. Here is one passage:

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of purposely inflict on their fellow living creatures. (Mill, 385)

Engagement with the problem of evil continued in British philosophy through McTaggart and Bradley, to disappear almost entirely with Bertrand Russell. Russell’s example is particularly instructive because it underlines that what is at issue cannot be explained in ethical terms. His commitments to ethical and political engagement, and even to writing works discussing philosophical questions of general interest, were demonstrated throughout a long lifetime. And since he began his philosophical career as a Hegelian, his disregard for the scope of the questions of theodicy cannot be a matter of simple ignorance. Yet Russell’s disinterest is so great that, like other analytic philosophers, he read it back into history: even the index to his 895-page History of Western Philosophy devotes more entries to Egypt than it does to evil.

Twentieth-century philosophy saw no future for theodicy and barely noticed its past. What had functioned as starting point for most philosophical speculations about appearance and reality, reason and right, became an embarrassing minor anachronism. We write the history we want to continue. Philosophers working on problems of foundationalism wished to be part of the same subject that engaged Kant and Hegel. Standing on giants’ shoulders is an old recipe for improving your vision—or at least for raising your stature. So contemporary historians described earlier philosophers’ projects in terms they wished to share. Being represented with certainty was not in fact the greatest problem the external world had traditionally posed for philosophy—but it was the one most twentieth-century philosophers wanted to solve.

Of course differences in philosophical traditions made themselves felt in the historiography of philosophy. Philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic now commonly deny differences between what was called analytic and what was called continental philosophy. Certainly simple attempts to distinguish them proved wrong. Polemical charges that continental philosophy was hostile to science, or analytic philosophy indifferent to ethics, were belied by good and overlapping work in both traditions. Even more problematic for those seeking clear philosophical lines was the growing awareness of differences within these traditions themselves. If no European philosopher ever answered to the name “continental,” the number of Anglo-Americans willing to regard themselves as analytic philosophers is currently in decline. Still one difference remains between philosophers trained in Europe and those trained in Britain or America. The former were likely to have learned something about the problem of evil and retained some connection to it in their own work. Contemporary analytic discussion of the problem of evil, by contrast, remains squarely confined to the marginalized field of philosophy of religion. Thus historical discussion, where it does occur, is focused largely on Leibniz and Hume, whose treatment of the problem of evil remained within traditional religious discourse. Postwar German history of philosophy, by contrast, offered rich and significant work related to many aspects of the problem.19 Yet the conception of the problem of evil those works faced was smaller in scope than the one I have sketched here. One consequence is a different estimate of its significance for the questions of metaphysics, so that the broad narrative of the history of modern philosophy as the transformation of ontology to epistemology is still the story most often told in Europe. Our views of our pasts and our futures are mutually supporting: underestimating the scope of the problem of evil in the history of philosophy makes it easy to overlook its remnants in the present. So it was possible for a German philosopher to complain in 1997 that German philosophy had ignored Auschwitz—though German culture as a whole was obsessed with it.20

These shifts in focus lend weight to Levinas’s claim. Shall we conclude with him that the most revolutionary change in twentieth-century consciousness was its ability to abandon theodicy? Not before considering, once again, exactly what is meant by it. Theodicy, as systematic justification of suffering, and of God’s goodness in the face of it, originated not with Leibniz but with the oldest book of the Bible—in the persons of Job’s friends. God’s reaction shows that something about this response to the world is deeply inadequate, and possibly immoral. God Himself condemns the impulse to theodicy, for He says that not the friends but Job spoke truth.

Which truth did He mean? The literature on the Book of Job is deeply divided. What’s clear is that Job’s speeches are no systematic justification but a response to the same impulse that gives rise to theodicy: the need to face evil in the world without giving in to despair. If we call this impulse the drive to theodicy in the widest sense, it is far from certain that it’s exhausted. Levinas’s own work is part of this project.²¹ Many other works are conscious attempts to take up the problems that no previous theodicy could resolve. Postwar philosophical discussion of these questions has been hesitant, in painful awareness that even the attempt to voice them may be problematic. Since reason itself has been thrown into question, the discussion takes a fragmentary, sometimes literary character. Not even theologians today attempt the sort of systematic accounts that were once central. Nevertheless, elements of traditional discussion of the problem of evil have reemerged in response to Auschwitz. This reemergence is so surprising that we must ask what moves thinkers well aware of the problems to undertake any discussion of them at all.

This section presents four examples of such reemergence. Discussing texts of Camus, Arendt, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Rawls is not a systematic overview of their work as a whole. It isn’t even an attempt to survey the practical engagement with particular evils that was important to all of them. Though Camus, as I argue, offered no interesting political theory, both Arendt and the Frankfurt School devoted years of hard work to empirical investigations of politics and history. The author of Eichmann in Jerusalem presupposed the work she’d completed in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The later reflections of Adorno and Horkheimer were preceded by lifelong attempts to rethink Marxism as well as the sort of studies undertaken in The Authoritarian Personality. Rawls’s work, of course, is as political as philosophy can be, and no serious thinker ignored the fact that contemporary evils must be treated in political terms. The thinkers I will sketch reveal something further: that political questions can emerge from, and remain entwined with, metaphysical ones. If the first moral obligation is to offer reflections that may help shape political solutions, the first philosophical obligation is to reflect on what precedes them.

The thinkers introduced here hardly exhaust twentieth-century thought on the subject, but they do represent it. A full account of these questions would include Bloch and Benjamin, Levinas and Sartre, Habermas, Lyotard, and doubtless others. Here I hope simply to present enough material to be exemplary. My interest is not to give a thorough review of the problem of evil but, rather, to shed light on the question: What makes it so central to modern philosophy?

A night watchman makes a brief appearance in Camus’s novel The Plague.

The man never failed to remind everyone he met that he’d foreseen what was happening. Tarrou agreed he’d predicted a disaster, but reminded him that the event predicted by him was an earthquake. To which the old fellow replied: “Ah, if only it had been an earthquake! A good bad shock, and there you are! You count the dead and the living, and that’s the end of it. (Camus 3, 114)

Instead of clean-cut disaster Camus gave us something else: men filling mass graves with increasing speed and indifference, internment camps whose guards shoot to kill, the slow unendurable death of a child. Worse than these: the increasing isolation of victims from each other as tragedy saps emotional along with physical strength, the bleak unending struggle when all human desire congeals into the wish for more food. It’s the insidiousness of evil—its grim persistent refusal to achieve heroic dimensions, its unremitting ugliness—that marks contemporary consciousness. Fighting it is a matter of quiet heroism, without hope of final victory. It may involve nothing more than “bearing witness … so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure” (Camus 3, 308).

We have heard this before, as Camus knew. The outrage he chose to witness was neither earthquake nor death camp but plague. Much controversy around his masterpiece was provoked by his choice. Prominent critics accused him of moral evasion. In focusing on a nameless natural enemy, The Plague, it was argued, taught readers to ignore history and human struggles. In response to Roland Barthes Camus wrote:

The Plague, which I wanted to be read on a number of levels, nevertheless has as its obvious content the struggle of the European resistance movements against Nazism. The proof is that although this enemy is nowhere named, everyone in every European country recognized him. I will add that a long extract from The Plague appeared under the Occupation, in a collection of resistance texts, and that this fact alone would justify the transposition I have made. The Plague is, in a sense, more than a chronicle of the resistance. But it is certainly not anything less. (Camus 5, 220)

For critics like Sartre this just begged the question. Why choose the brute blind plague to symbolize Nazism—unless you want to say that the Nazis’ crime was to act as accomplices to the blind forces of the universe? The plague can be used to symbolize Nazism only if Nazis themselves become symbols: for some vague and brutal destructive force that is part of the world and constantly threatens to overwhelm it. In that case what’s at issue are metaphysical conditions, not particular historical ones—which comes perilously close to absolving particular historical beings of responsibility. Sartre did not quite accuse Camus of this, or of making God responsible for human crimes. But he did say that Camus hated God more than he hated the Nazis, and complained that the latter never really counted in Camus’s world. Camus’s struggle in the resistance was a task he took on with reluctance, for it distracted him from the primary struggle against larger, more abstract evil (Sartre).

Sartre’s description was exact. As political analysis Camus’s metaphor borders on the willfully irresponsible. To fight particular evils effectively, you need to understand them. To view Nazism as comparable to microbes is to obscure understanding. Camus’s essays reveal even more of the truth in Sartre’s charges. Camus’s discussion of moral and natural evils was the result, however, not of conceptual confusion but of self-conscious assertion. Both moral and natural evils are special cases of something worse: the metaphysical evil built into the human condition. Camus rejected the description of metaphysical evil as abstract and harmless finitude. He thought that this was a coward’s attempt to reconcile us to our unacceptable fate. We are confronted with nothing so bland as a limit but with a death sentence imposed without mercy for a crime as universal as it is unspecified. So The Plague’s hero Tarrou, like Ivan Karamazov, hates the death penalty because it mirrors the human condition as a whole. All true rebellion is rebellion against the existence of death itself, for however it takes us, it is evil.

What drives us to rebel is not simple self-interest or the cowardly refusal to die; the rebel is less interested in life than in reasons for living. Like Platonism and Christianity, Camus would never be content with the temporal. His paeans to sensuality were always swan songs. At bottom he believed that what does not last cannot be significant. Thus he concluded that to fight against death is to insist that life has a meaning.

So The Myth of Sisyphus begins starkly:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. (Camus 1, 3)

Camus held the metaphysical problem of evil to be as unyielding as it was when first raised. He thought it arose in the attempt to combine Greek and Christian worldviews.

Christ came to solve two major problems, evil and death, which are precisely the problems that preoccupy the rebel. His solution consisted, first, in experiencing them. The man-god suffers, too—with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to Him since He suffers and dies. (Camus 4, 32)

The Rebel argued that the Greeks found neither gods nor humans entirely innocent or guilty. Disasters were closer to error than crime. The experience of cosmic injustice provokes a sense of outrage thus lacking in Greek experience of suffering: there it was easier to submit to one’s fate. Belief in a personal God and a sense of mutual responsibility go hand in hand; it’s sometimes been called a covenant. The attempt to combine Greek ideas with Christian ones produced gnosticism. Camus thought that the large number of gnostic sects reflected desperation: gnostics sought to remove motives for rebellion by removing the unjust element of suffering. But real metaphysical rebellion, he argued, first appeared in the late eighteenth century. This is not the result of declining religion. For the metaphysical rebel is less atheist than blasphemer: he denounces God in the name of an order that is better than the one we know.

Camus’s times demanded particular attention to distinctions among evils, and his views took shape accordingly. The Rebel begins by describing murder, not suicide, as the problem of the age. This was a deliberate contrast to The Myth of Sisyphus. The fifteen years separating the books were not random ones. The events that occurred between 1940 and 1955 focused Camus on solidarity, community struggle, and their conditions. In turning from the question of suicide to the question of political murder, he distanced himself from the earlier work. If both acts raise questions about the meaning of life, one does so in a way that the mature man could defend as a responsible citizen. Yet for all Camus’s intentions, much in the later book confirms the earlier book’s view that political problems are but special cases of metaphysical ones.

Nothing makes this clearer than his discussion of Ivan Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s chapter “Rebellion” is the prelude to his “Grand Inquisitor.” In it Ivan tells a story as unforgettable as any atrocity of more recent literature. An eight-year-old boy who threw a stone that wounded the paw of his landlord’s favorite dog was hunted and torn to pieces by a pack of hounds before his mother’s eyes. Ivan concludes the tale by resolving to reject truth, understanding, and salvation itself, if they come at the price of such murder. He explicitly refuses the comfort that might be won by seeing this story in political terms, as an instance of what feudalism had allowed. The abolition of serfdom should not provide comfort or reconcile us to reality. Even if political changes make a repetition of this crime impossible, the fact that it occurred once is intolerable to Ivan: he would refuse the salvation of humankind if it demands one sacrifice like this.

Ivan Karamazov became Camus’s emblem of a metaphysical rebel, and this chapter of The Brothers Karamazov was central to his thought. Camus’s echo of it in his own greatest novel thus reveals a great deal. The Plague’s starkest chapter is an agonizing description of one boy’s death. Here the source of torment is anything but malevolent. On the contrary, the boy’s death is particularly painful and prolonged because he was given experimental serum in a final effort to save his life. Knowledge of their own good intentions does no more to lessen the despair of the doctors observing the death than to lessen the suffering of the screaming child. Such despair and such suffering are indictments that no form of social reordering can answer.

We are left with what looks like paradox. Few people who ever made their living teaching philosophy were louder in their denunciations of metaphysics than Camus. But few modern writers were so deeply concerned with an evil that turns out to be metaphysical in its roots, merely moral in its manifestations. Metaphysical evil provides occasions for displaying moral evils, or for resisting them. But the former, not the latter, is the ultimate and unreachable target. Camus insisted on acknowledging the depth of metaphysical evil while leaving himself without options for redemption. Camus never viewed the transcendent as liberating. His greatest power as a writer lay in his ability to evoke the force and presence of the resolutely everyday. His early “Summer in Algiers” begins with descriptions of sky and sea so stunning they might leave you blinking; it ends by condemning hope as the worst of evils in Pandora’s box. Like Nietzsche, he thinks that to hope for something better is to live in opposition to life itself. Salvation, if we find it, will reside nowhere but in the hard matter of the human senses, whose unforgivably brief appearance demands all of our strength to protest.

Camus didn’t deny the transcendent; he blasted it—and gave us prose that can make one believe in an alternative. This was more the attack of an adversary struggling with a worthy enemy than that of one bent on disclaiming its existence. Camus was at war with the very idea of transcendence. Sartre’s criticism was thus fitting: political battles were, for Camus, unfortunate distraction from the real ones. To a political man like Sartre, this is the ultimate failing.

It’s important to note that whatever tendency Camus may have had to minimize the gravity of Nazis’ crimes appeared even before he used the plague as a metaphor for them. His “Letters to a German Friend,” written in 1943, reveal an astonishingly mild view of Nazism. Far from being a paradigm of absolute evil, Nazism appeared as an honorable enemy. It’s an enemy capable of war crimes—though in the one he mentioned, the real villain is a French priest. But the Nazis Camus addressed were men he treated as open to persuasion through moral principles he shared in common with them. The letters are ordinary war propaganda intended to convince the enemy of the righteousness of the French cause. Camus even felt compelled to argue that the Germans, not the French, started the war. All this may betray a political naïveté that cannot result simply from the poverty of information available in 1943. Camus’s readiness to use a natural evil like plague to symbolize a moral evil was probably supported by his underestimation of the moral evil represented by Nazism. It was a sign not of confusion between metaphysics and politics but of weaknesses in his political judgment.

In political terms, such work is useless. It will bring no understanding of the structure of the enemies who need to be fought. Its power lies in moral terms. Camus provided an unusually exact and evocative picture of the ethical weapons needed for the fight. His readers are left with an oddly hopeful picture of the human that is all the more stark against the bleakness of the cosmos. The depth and variety of quiet corporeal heroism contrasts too with the heroes of the novels written by some who criticized Camus for not engaging with history. If Sartre’s metaphysical claims seem to give more room for action, his characters give no reason for optimism about its results. Sartre tells us that other people are the source of hell. Camus lets us hope they might prevent it.

If there’s a key to Camus’s ethic, it’s found in the thought that hatred of the Creator dare not become hatred of Creation. His attempt to separate Creator and Creation determined his focus on the everyday substance of the world we are given. Camus called this attention to the banal (Camus 4, 87–88). If there were a Creator, He would be as awesome and terrible and endless as death itself. The Creation, therefore, is made out of moments. They are repetitive and finite. Without poets, they would also be nameless. The Plague’s finest character is the unassuming clerk whose life is exhausted in three tasks. He never forgets the woman he loved; he volunteers unhesitatingly for the dangerous work of the sanitary squads; and he devotes every evening to writing a work of literature that Camus finally reveals as endless attempts to write one perfect sentence. All, in the end, emerge as utterly ordinary, even dull. It is not accidental that he is the only one of the book’s heroes to get the plague and survive it—as it cannot be accidental that his name is Grand.

The Plague’s main hero is a doctor who is “on the right road—in fighting against Creation as he found it” (Camus 3, 127). Though Camus insisted on the importance of distinguishing between Creator and Creation, he seemed uncertain how to do it. Sometimes it looks as though you must hate God if you want to love His Creation. Sometimes rage against one spilled into the other. This is just the sort of muddle against which Camus himself had warned. Is that confusion we should expect from a man whose gifts were more literary than philosophical?

Arendt suggested otherwise. The slide between Creator and Creation can be made by thinkers as sharp as Leibniz.

Thus Leibniz, with admirable consistency, finds that the sin of Judas lies not in his betrayal of Jesus but in his suicide; in condemning himself, he implicitly condemned the whole of God’s creation; by hating himself, he hated the Creator. (Arendt 5, 38)

Condemn the Creation, and you’ve condemned the Creator. In this realm, constructive criticism is never possible. Alternatively, all criticism is constructive, for it implies a wish to replace the architect yourself. For this reason, tradition sought to stifle Alfonso’s fantasy before it could unfold. Once you begin finding faults in the world that is given, you are on the road to rebellion that cannot be blocked.

After Nietzsche, the distinction between Creator and Creation becomes even harder to maintain. How can one battle the Creator on behalf of Creation, if there’s no full-bodied Being to serve as a target? To love Creation while attacking the Creator for the faults it contains becomes worse than quixotic. Where the Creator is absent, it’s not even a task that can be defined.

In writing about the problem of evil, therefore, Arendt gave little weight to the distinction between Creator and Creation. Evil raises questions about the legitimacy of both. She defined theodicies as

those strange justifications of God or of Being which, ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers felt were needed to reconcile man’s mind to the world in which he was to spend his life. (Arendt 5, 20; my emphasis)

Or, as she wrote on another occasion, what drives the justifications of God in theodicy is the suspicion that life as we know it is in great need of being justified (Arendt 9, 24).

With this in mind we can return to Eichmann in Jerusalem and ask the question never adequately answered in all the debate the book provoked. What exactly was on trial here, and which side did the author take? Arendt’s claim that her best-known book was just a long piece of reporting was disingenuous, for her critics were right to sense that she was not merely describing but also defending something. The ferocity of debate obscured the object whose defense was in question. To reject her claim that she was merely a journalist is not to accept her critics’ claims that she was merely a traitor. I have argued that this accusation depends on a false picture of intention, but have not yet addressed the suspicion that the book is more apologetics than report. For Arendt, neither German war crimes alone nor possible Jewish complicity in them was on trial. What was under indictment was Creation itself. In a world that produced the death camps, the impossible became true. This was not a metaphor. The world itself, therefore, could no longer be accepted as it had been in the past. Eichmann in Jerusalem is a defense not of Adolf Eichmann, but of a world that contained him. It is the best attempt at theodicy postwar philosophy has produced.

Arendt was both determined to defend Creation and deeply troubled about the form any justification could take. For to justify life tout court would be to claim that things are, on the whole, as they ought to be. But her work expressed a constant, often simple hatred of Hegelianism in every form. She thought that human freedom depends on the contingency Hegel saw as a curse. Arendt’s willingness to embrace contingency fueled her lifelong distance from left Hegelian movements like Marxism, though she never belonged to the right. As we saw, she drew consequences from metaphysical commitments. But Hegelianism is the most natural way to justify Creation when you’ve given up on the Creator. What alternatives remain?

Throughout her work Arendt sought to formulate the task that might replace theodicy. How can life itself be justified without justifying the evils that call it into question? Knowing what we know about the magnitude of modern evil and the paucity of theoretical resources for approaching it, how can we even describe the relation toward the world we hope to maintain? Arendt considered calling a major work Amor Mundi, and the idea of loving the world was central to her thought. But since love itself requires grace, or good fortune, it is not a relation that can be demanded of us. So she suggested that the question is, rather, whether human beings fit into the world—a question she saw as central to both Camus and Kant (Arendt 7, 191; Arendt 9, 30). But she knew it was no accident that Kant never wrote a theodicy. To show that we are at home in the world would make us too comfortable for anyone so profoundly cosmopolitan, as she recognized when she refused to attribute such a project to Lessing. To provide a framework that would reconcile us to reality might support a passive stance which threatens to acquiesce in it. Her best formulation of the goal to which our efforts should be directed is probably this one:

to find my way around in reality without selling my soul to it the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil. (Arendt 7, 213)

Eichmann sold his soul. Arendt’s claim was not that such action was trivial but that souls generally go at bargain rates. Thirty shekels, another notch in a bureaucratic hierarchy—the things for which people are willing to betray everything that matters are appallingly insignificant. Her work seeks a framework to help us find our way in the world without making us too comfortable in it. To seek a frame in which to set evil is to seek something less than a full theoretical explanation of it. For an exhaustive theoretical explanation would restrict our room for freedom. To claim that evil is comprehensible is not to demand a full account but to make a commitment to naturalism. It is also to claim that our capacity for moral judgment is fundamentally sound.

Camus used plague to stand for evil in general. In a letter to Gershom Scholem, Arendt wrote that evil resembles a fungus.

Evil possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. (Arendt 3)

Arendt was far too sophisticated—and too determined to avoid causal explanation in the moral realm—to suggest that, like bacteria, evil could be given a genuinely scientific explanation. The metaphor is an attempt to defuse the conceptually threatening element in contemporary evil. Biological warfare could destroy humankind, but it is not the bacteria that call the value of life into question.

The fungus metaphor thus signals evil that can be comprehended. It also indicates an object that has no intention whatsoever. This, we saw, was Arendt’s greatest break with modern philosophical tradition—particularly Kant’s work, to which she was otherwise much indebted. Here the use of naturalist, nonintentional vocabulary is an attempt not to avoid responsibility but to develop new idioms for assuming it. Arendt was convinced that evil could be overcome only if we acknowledge that it overwhelms us in ways that are minute. Great temptations are easier to recognize and thus to resist, for resistance comes in heroic terms. Contemporary dangers begin with trivial and insidious steps. Once these are taken, they lead to consequences so vast they could hardly have been foreseen. The claim that evil is banal is a claim not about magnitude but about proportion: if crimes that great can result from causes that small, there may be hope for overcoming them.

Calling evil banal is a piece of moral rhetoric, a way of defusing the power that makes forbidden fruit attractive. Since Sade became presentable, the inclination to aestheticize evil has grown. Even Camus saw Sade’s embrace of evil as an understandable revolt against God. If the Creator commands us to do good while Himself producing evil, isn’t it better to reject the good itself? Camus never actually recommended such a solution, but he saw the aestheticization of evil as one way to respond to the absurd. Once evil becomes aesthetic, it’s not far from becoming glamorous. For this reason, Arendt thought that gnosticism would be the most dangerous, attractive, and widespread heresy of the future. She therefore sought descriptions of evil that resist the urge to give it “Satanic greatness,” for such urges are both puerile and dangerous. The ironic tone she took toward Eichmann was entirely calculated. It’s a tone that creates distance in place of desire. Like Brecht, Arendt argued that comedy undermines evil more effectively than does tragedy. The diabolic can be ambiguous; the ridiculous is not. To call evil banal is to call it boring. And if it is boring, its appeal will be limited. A fungus, after all, is rarely erotic.

Not evil but goodness should be portrayed with depth and dimension. When Arendt described heroes, her use of rhetoric displayed moral passion verging on the sublime. Consider her description of Anton Schmidt, a German soldier who sacrificed his life to help Jewish partisans. As his story was told during the Eichmann trial, a hush fell over the courtroom “like a sudden burst of light in the midst of impenetrable, unfathomable darkness.” For

[t]he lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries in which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation. (Arendt 2, 233)

Precisely this passage shows that what’s at issue is not only moral education, finding the right tools to move people to do better rather than worse. At issue are the questions that came from metaphysics as well. If the forces that produce evil have neither depth nor dimension, then gnosticism is false. But then, as she wrote to Kurt Blumenfeld,

[t]he world as God created it seems to me a good one.

To call evil banal is to offer not a definition of it but a theodicy. For it implies that the sources of evil are not mysterious or profound but fully within our grasp. If so, they do not infect the world at a depth that could make us despair of the world itself. Like a fungus, they may devastate reality by laying waste to its surface. Their roots, however, are shallow enough to pull up.

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. It is also to say that while natural processes are responsible for it, natural processes can be used to prevent 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, Eichmann in Jerusalem 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. Like Rousseau, Arendt sought to show that our souls are built to work: our natural faculties are corruptible, but not inherently corrupt. Nor are they in principle impotent, as Hume had argued so forcefully. We have means both to understand the world and to act in it. Arendt compared the feeling of understanding to the feeling of being at home (Arendt 8, 47). Our capacity to comprehend what seemed incomprehensible is evidence for the idea that human beings and the world were made for each other. As Kant suggested when discussing natural beauty, this is as close to the argument from design as we should ever come. If it offers something less than justification, it produces something more than hope. No wonder that Eichmann in Jerusalem could evoke exhilaration. Mary McCarthy compared it to hearing Figaro or the Messiah, “both of which are concerned with redemption” (Arendt 10, 166). Arendt’s reply is no less extraordinary:

[Y]ou were the only reader to understand what I otherwise never admitted—namely, that I wrote this book in a curious state of euphoria. And that ever since I did it, I feel—after 20 years—lighthearted about the whole matter. Don’t tell anybody; is it not proof positive that I have no ‘soul’? (Arendt 10, 168)

Many voices are in play here, and it would be foolish to rule out any one of them. But euphoria can be explained only by the sense of wonder and gratitude for all that is. Arendt saw this as the beginning of thought itself. We may be at home in the world after all.

The metaphor of being at home in the world is an old one. In his essay “Das Ende aller Dinge” Kant listed four models of homes that different traditions held the world to provide us: a cheap inn, a prison, a madhouse, and a latrine. Kant’s options are hardly appealing, but the metaphor persists even without acceptable images for it. Home is the normal—whatever place you happen to start from, and can return to without having to answer questions. It’s a metaphor that may seem to fit reduced expectations. We no longer seek towers that would reach to the heavens; we’ve abandoned attempts to prove that we live in a chain of being whose every link bears witness to the glory of God. We merely seek assurance that we find ourselves in a place where we know our way about.

The absence of such assurance is a touchstone of the modern. Since Lisbon, the world has been an object of study, but it’s no longer an object of trust. Despite its apparent modesty, home is too intentional a concept to be part of a disenchanted world. It’s a metaphor that shows how much we lost when we lost the argument from design. God was the architect whose plans ensured that you could do all the things you take for granted in your own domain, stretch your feet on the table without waiting for permission, or checking to see whether the floor will collapse. In losing the architect, we lost not only grander structures but all of that as well.

Still it’s a metaphor the twentieth century took up with particular seriousness. One famous section of Adorno’s Minima Moralia is called “Homeless Shelter.” There he wrote that whether it’s a slum or a bungalow,

[t]he house is gone. The destruction of European cities and the concentration camps merely continued the processes that the immanent development of technology decided for the houses long ago. ‘It is part of my happiness not to be a homeowner,’ wrote Nietzsche in The Gay Science. One must add today: it is part of morality not to be at home with oneself. (Adorno 1, 41)

Most important notes of the Critical Theory developed by the Frankfurt School were sounded here. Auschwitz was the completion of a process inherent in the modern, not a departure from it. Through that process we lost something too deep to be entirely fathomed. It’s a process in which we are always complicitous, if not entirely responsible. Nothing in Western culture is untouched by it; according to The Dialectic of Enlightenment it began with the Odyssey. That nothing can redeem or console or distract from it is expressed in Adorno’s famous aphorism condemning poetry after Auschwitz. Or, as this section concluded: there’s no right way to live when everything is wrong (“es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”). What remains is only the moral imperative not to deceive ourselves about the magnitude of the modern catastrophe. Decency demands that we refuse to feel at home in any particular structure the world provides to domesticate us. It also requires that we refuse to feel at home in our own skins.

This is the difference between the loss of trust in the world that occurred with Lisbon and the losses apparent today. Modern consciousness required us to stop viewing the world as a home that a stern but indulgent parent might have built us, and to grow up and build our own. If this project seemed increasingly precarious, it was maintained until the war. But the weak messianic hope that Benjamin still discerned in 1938 seemed prostrate soon afterward. For we, and all of our joys and sorrows, are implicated in the general decay. “Nothing is harmless anymore” (Adorno 1, 21).

The devastation was so extensive that Frankfurt School thinkers felt compelled to return to a notion of transcendence all had earlier rejected. For neither the sources of horror nor any object of hope that might replace them could be expressed directly. The losses are so great that any statement of them will be prey to twin dangers: the temptation to kitsch or to reconciliation. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the only solution was to be found in ideas that transcend given reality for something better beyond it. Both were well aware that such solutions resemble religious ones. Indeed, they praised traditional religion for “keeping longing alive.” Horkheimer was explicit:

What is religion in the good sense? The not-yet-strangled impulse that insists that reality should be otherwise, that the spell will be broken and turn toward the right direction. Where life points this way in every gesture, there is religion. (Horkheimer 2, 6:288)

Naturally Horkheimer argued for the need to distinguish between ideas that had their origins in religion and those that should come after them. So a fragment entitled “The Question of Philosophy” put the question thus:

“If there is no God, nothing about me needs to be serious,” argues the theologian. The horrible deed that I do, the suffering that I permit to exist, live on after the moment in which they occur only in conscious human memory and expire with it…. Can one admit this and live a serious but godless life? This is the question of philosophy. (Ibid., 198)

But protests that all this praise of transcendence is meant to be godless are less convincing when we look at the details. Adorno even went so far as to defend Kant’s discussion of immortality, for it condemns the unbearableness of the given and strengthens the spirit that recognizes it (Adorno 2, 376). Both Jewish and Kantian traditions believe that transcendent ideas are necessary. Both hold those ideas to be necessarily inexpressible. Horkheimer recorded his debt to each in a note entitled “On Critical Theory”:

The Jewish prohibition on representing God and the Kantian prohibition on going off into intelligible worlds both contain the recognition of the absolute whose determination is impossible. The same is true for critical theory, insofar as it declares that the bad—first in the social sphere, but also in the moral sphere, that of the individual human being—can be described, but not however the good. (Ibid., 419)

Representing ideals always betrays them. For the nature of the ideal is to be more, and better, than everything that merely is. That is why all that is dearest to reason must remain unknowable. Now most twentieth-century philosophy agreed about how little we know of the objects of traditional metaphysics. It differed in its standpoint toward all those things we cannot know—everything Kant consigned to the realm of the inexpressible. For analytic philosophy, what’s important is to restrict our discourse lest we stray into nonsense. For continental philosophy, what’s important is the hope of other modes of articulation. The difference between them is shown by their different answers to the question: Is the urge to move beyond experience part of experience itself? Is the desire for transcendence a matter of psychology—in which case it’s advisable to seek a good cure? Or is the existence of that desire fundamental to any experience we could recognize as human?22

By insisting on the latter, the Frankfurt School criticized not only analytic philosophy, which it never took seriously in the first place, but also Nietzsche, who was far more important to it. Recall that for Nietzsche any link to transcendence was a betrayal of life itself. Nietzsche viewed every appeal to the beyond as an expression of the theological instinct, with which he was at war. The war he waged was total. Traditional anti-Christians confined their attacks to heaven. Nietzsche’s target was bigger. Hope itself must be combated, since hope for something better condemns whatever there is. So Nietzsche reread Pandora’s box: hope is not redemption. Rather, it’s the evil that should remain enclosed in the box because the Greeks considered it the only evil that was truly malignant.

Nietzsche’s effort left few European thinkers unmoved. But it faltered on an event that even the very prescient Nietzsche never imagined. Auschwitz functioned as proof that some worlds are unacceptable. It demanded a return to all the machinery of transcendence that had seemed obsolete. So Adorno wrote that Auschwitz had, by itself, established a new categorical imperative: to act in such a way that Auschwitz will never be repeated. For as he noted, complaints about the bleak idleness of immanent reality are nothing new. Theologians and poets since King Solomon have expressed them. To move from complaints about the bleakness of reality to something that might take us beyond it, we need transcendent ideas. For

[o]nly when that which is can be changed is that which is not everything. [Nur wenn, was ist, sich ändern lässt, ist das, was ist, nicht alles.] (Adorno 2, 388)

But did Critical Theory think the world could be changed? This is probably the most debated question about Adorno and Horkheimer’s work. They insisted that ideas transcending reality are needed in order to protest it. Critics saw those protests as feeble celebrations of causes long lost. Earlier Critical Theory claimed that philosophy could function as a corrective of history by keeping ideals alive (Horkheimer 1, 186). But the pessimism implicit in later works, as well as their ambivalent responses to actual political protest, led many to conclude that critical theorists sought less to correct history than to elegize it. The Dialectic of Enlightenment can seem to describe the worst of all worlds: we have no one to blame for our misery, but the process is so swift and self-maintaining that we cannot stop what we started. After such a diagnosis, the appeal to transcendence can quickly become an excuse for inaction. The Frankfurt School’s response to such criticism was always unclear.

While the urge to reinstate transcendence arose in reaction to Auschwitz, it did not end there. The contrast between immanent and transcendent reality that increasingly found voice in the Frankfurt School embraced a form of protest that cannot be contained in political terms. If the problems inherent in modern humanity’s relation to the world begin with Odysseus, their solutions will not be exhausted by changes of particular social organization. Both Adorno and Horkheimer emphasized those features of disaster which were new to the twentieth century. Both stressed the need for forms of response that were not yet articulated. They very nearly reveled in the homeless metaphor and made exile an emblem of modern life in general. Yet each was emphatic in arguing that the twentieth century was only an extreme. The problems it posed were not confined to it. Thus one reason to return to elements of sacred language lies ready to hand. While Auschwitz presented a new set of problems, they are best understood through the vocabulary of the old. Though insisting that the death camps turned death into something it had never been, Adorno insisted that death itself is a problem for which there is neither meaning nor comfort—precisely because, contra Heidegger, it is foreign to human being. No human life is ever enough to realize the potential contained in it. Hence death and life are irreconcilably at war. From a different vantage point, Améry came to similar conclusions, whose expression took even starker form. After writing one of the most devastating descriptions of life at Auschwitz, he wrote a book arguing that nothing he witnessed there matched the horror of the universal process of aging and death. For the latter is not only inescapable; it involves betrayal from within. Death, for Améry, is reason’s ultimate foe.23

In works like these we glimpse a turn in the direction of metaphysical evil, and with it all the baggage of metaphysics that most forms of modern philosophy were proud to discard. It’s true that many came to agree with Wittgenstein that all the things which couldn’t be said directly were the ones that mattered most. As Adorno wrote, in a wonderful piece of polemic:

That metaphysical philosophy, which historically is essentially the same as the great systems, contains more Glanz than empiricism and positivism, is not merely aesthetic, nor merely psychological wish-fulfillment. The immanent quality of thought, which is manifested in power, resistance, fantasy, in unity of the critical with its opposite, is at least a clue, if not an index. That Carnap and Mies are more true than Kant and Hegel could not even be the truth if it were the case. (Adorno 2, 375)

Here the inexpressibility of metaphysics is the source of its force and radiance.

Just this passage could suggest why analytic philosophy inclined to abandon the problem of evil despite reclaiming most other topics in the history of philosophy. For the foregoing discussion seems to confirm its worst fears. Adorno’s Glanz can be translated as glitz or glamour as well as radiance. Analytic philosophy set out to replace the glamour of self-indulgent metaphysics with humbler virtues, and these quotations seem to offer more grounds for doing so. For, it could be argued, all the Glanz of the metaphysical questions surrounding the problem of evil derives from the afterglow of religion. Isn’t this just the sort of covert appeal to theology that analytic philosophy was invented to avoid? Adorno said that the problem vulgarly known as that of the meaning of life reflects the persistence of “secularized metaphysical categories” (Adorno 2, 367). Odo Marquard has offered a skeptical defense of metaphysics: metaphysics may not solve problems, but it’s needed to keep questions of meaning alive (Marquard 2, 48). But if meaning now appears in the role less cautious eras reserved for God, shouldn’t it be allowed, a hundred years after Nietzsche, to rest in peace?

John Rawls’s work developed within the best traditions of analytic philosophy. The disinclination to classical metaphysics usually produced there was reinforced, in Rawls’s case, by two factors. One was the kind of personal humility that makes grander sorts of speculation distasteful. The other was a resolute sense of moral priority. Figuring out which intentions are the right ones is more important than figuring out what intention is, and putting off the former until you’ve done the latter is likely to lead to wrong. Rawls’s insistence on doing moral and political theory independently of metaphysics thus had deep roots and was repeated often throughout his career. It is all the more surprising to find late suggestions that the problem of evil plays a major role in his work.

This is not because he wrote the first major book of substantive ethics in English since John Stuart Mill. Analytic ethics had been paralyzed by questions about whether and how moral judgments could be justified. Rawls’s Theory of Justice actually made some, and for anybody with lingering inclinations to believe that all moral judgments are merely expressions of feeling, it provided 587 pages of densely argued justification for them. Offering specific guidelines for solving moral and political problems can surely contribute to preventing specific evils. By itself, however, this would make Rawls’s work a contribution to ethics alone. His work stands in the tradition to which this book is devoted because his ethics is written in response to two metaphysical questions that orbit the problem of evil: the problem of contingency and the problem of reconciliation.

Although easy to miss in the idioms of analytic philosophy and rational choice theory in which the book was written, the problem of contingency is central to A Theory of Justice. There Rawls presented a method for making fair decisions about the structure of political institutions. In deciding whether a society is just, we are to pick the society we would choose to inhabit if we knew nothing about ourselves in particular. Rawls proposes a thought experiment in which we cover our characters with a veil of ignorance. You are to choose the world you want for yourself and your children without knowing whether you or they will be rich or poor, male or female, citizens of New York or Burundi. So far, this is a version of liberal social contract theory, one tradition on which Rawls drew. But he went considerably further: in deciding on social institutions, you are to imagine knowing nothing about your talents or inclinations. You may prefer to write poetry, or to establish an ascetic community devoted to otherworldly salvation. You may be more disappointed by missing a ball game than by the UN’s failure to make peace in the Balkans. You may be timid or daring, ardent or cool. You do not know any of this, so the choices you make must be right ones for whoever you turn out to be.

All this is a thought experiment for which many critics saw no point. Bad enough that it was a thought experiment that presupposed the sense of justice they hoped it would demonstrate. For like Kant, Rawls denied that there can be an answer to the question: Why should we be moral? No arguments can force you into other people’s shoes. Either you decide that it’s right to consider the world from somewhere other than the accidental point at which you stand in it—or you don’t. Particular interests cannot compel you to take up a universal perspective; instrumental reasons cannot serve as grounds for moral ones. Now these problems were present in the categorical imperative, the other thought experiment that influenced Rawls. But in expanding on that model, many critics thought Rawls only expanded on its flaws. His ideal subjects lacked all the particular qualities that make us distinctly human. Supposing we succeeded in imagining ourselves as the disembodied creatures in his original position. Why ever would we want to see the world from that point of view?

The answer is available in Rawls’s earliest work. The original position makes it possible to revolt against the arbitrariness of nature. Natural facts are contingent. When we allow those facts to retain social significance, we acquiesce in injustice.

But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these categories. The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human control but a pattern of human action. In justice as fairness men agree to share one another’s fate. In designing institutions they undertake to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit. The two principles are a fair way of meeting the arbitrariness of fortune. (Rawls 1, 102)

Many contingencies are unalterable accidents of nature, and we cannot even mitigate their effects. You may take the wrong train and run into an explosion—or miss it and run into an earthquake. Believing that fortune is arbitrary helps some people accept it. For others, like Rawls, this belief serves as goad to do all one can to lessen the force of natural accident. If many facts of nature cannot be changed, some of their consequences are in our hands. Your native intelligence or your willingness to take more risks than your neighbor is as much a matter of fortune as his trust fund. Neither of you deserves what you were born with. For desert and justice are not natural categories but ours to put in the world if we choose. Working to design a social world in which fortune plays no decisive role is a way of asserting your freedom. Nature may be contingent; you need not follow its lead.

Alfonso’s suggestions were confined to the cosmos. A monarch, however enlightened, is unlikely to propose a world where accidents of birth do not determine the social order. But Rawls’s late work revealed that Alfonso’s impulse could reappear in analytic philosophy. Redesigning a piece of the world is a project undertaken in the hope of affirming the world as a whole. Kant’s influence on Rawls was clear in A Theory of Justice. But Justice as Fairness, conceived as a restatement of the earlier work, opens by invoking Hegel.

A third role [of political philosophy], stressed by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right (1821), is that of reconciliation: political philosophy may try to calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history by showing us the way in which its institutions, when properly understood from a philosophical point of view, are rational, and developed over time as they did to attain their present, rational form. This fits one of Hegel’s well-known sayings: ‘When we look at the world rationally, the world looks rationally back’. He seeks for us reconciliation—Versöhnung—that is, we are to accept and affirm our social world positively, not merely to be resigned to it. (Rawls 3, 3)

Rawls avows his commitment to this role of political philosophy. If Rawls’s work more openly indicates hesitations imposed by the scruples of analytic philosophy, Auschwitz and Hiroshima are unspoken sources of his reluctance to write sotto voce.24

The more we know about the history of philosophy, and about history itself, the more the reasons to refuse to truck with reconciliation multiply. After the passage just quoted, Rawls warns against letting his own political philosophy serve as reconciliation in the sense Marx called ideological. We cannot allow the possibility of a decent social order to console us for the absence of an actual one. Awareness of theoretical and practical hazards has altered our expectations; even our hopes will be piecemeal. Hegel wanted to reveal the actuality of reason in the world as a whole. Rawls would be satisfied to show the possibility of reason in the social world. Yet this, he argues in The Law of Peoples, would be a good deal.

To be reconciled to the social world, one must be able to see it as both reasonable and rational. (Rawls 2, 127)

Rawls describes the goal of his work as showing that a realistic utopia is possible. A realistic utopia is a society in which the greatest evils of human history—unjust war and oppression, starvation and poverty, genocide and mass murder—would be eliminated through politically just institutions. Without the hope that this can happen, “one might reasonably ask, with Kant, whether it is worthwhile to live on this earth” (Rawls 2, 128). Rawls stressed, of course, that the most his work shows is something about possibility. Unlike Hegel, there is no sense in which he holds such a world to be actual in the present or necessary in the future. Developing a model for a social system that would create justice by reducing the role of luck in our lives is not, of course, the same thing as realizing it. But if the model is not merely utopian,

I believe that the very possibility of such a social order can itself reconcile us to the social world. The possibility is not a mere logical possibility, but one that connects with the deep tendencies and inclinations of the social world. For so long as we believe for good reasons that a self-sustaining and reasonably just political and social order both at home and abroad is possible, we can reasonably hope that we or others will someday, somewhere, achieve it; and we can then do something toward this achievement. This alone, quite apart from our success or failure, suffices to banish the dangers of resignation and cynicism. (Rawls 2, 128)

The reemergence of the problem of evil in Rawls’s work, despite his own best efforts (and those of his friends) to avoid metaphysical pitfalls, may account for some of the resonance of the work as a whole.25 The recent publication of his lectures on the history of philosophy is one testimony to Rawls’s engagement with the history of philosophy. His engagement with the problem of evil shows how thoroughly he is a part of it. The fact that this engagement was increasingly unavoidable almost in spite of personal inclinations suggests something about the problem of evil itself.

ORIGINS: SUFFICIENT REASON

In the previous section I sketched works of some postwar thinkers whose discourse was reflected in theology. Of them only Arendt acknowledged “a childish trust in God” (Arendt 6, 202), while the others were avowed atheists. All of them groped toward formulating a set of problems they knew could not be discussed in theological terms. And yet, it could be argued, this very groping betrays its origins in religious assumptions the authors could not overcome.

The question of whether the problem of evil derives from religious concerns has shadowed our discussion. It’s time to address it directly. Hegel was the first to emphasize the ways in which the idea of progress was continuous with the idea of Providence, but he never thought one was derived from the other. How are progress and Providence related? German discussion of this question centered in the secularization debate, which began with works like those of Karl Loewith and Jacob Taubes. Each independently noted similarities of structure and function between nineteenth-century ideas of progress and classical ideas of Providence.26 Thus it was natural to conclude that claims about progress which drive philosophies of history were derived from theology. The cunning of reason, the invisible hand, and the proletariat are different ways to replace the hand of Providence and cannot be understood without it. Hans Blumenberg responded to such claims by defending what he called the legitimacy of the modern—the idea that many modern concepts, including progress, were independent and irreducible. While those concepts occupied the same space formerly taken by theological ones, they were not simply derived from them. Rather, they represent something new, original, and constitutive of modern consciousness.

Much of this debate, though rich and interesting, depends on the unspoken assumptions captured in the opening metaphor of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History.

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called “historical materialism” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. (Benjamin 3, 253)

Blumenberg was right to see that what’s at stake in the argument about whether the idea of progress is derived from Providence is the question of legitimacy. For Benjamin’s automaton is a fake. What looked like a genuinely modern invention (the robot we dream of, with pleasure and fear) turned out to be nothing but an ordinary human, and an old Byzantine one at that. If philosophy of history is moved by history as the chess player is moved by the little hunchback, its results are just as deceptive.

For all its literary interest, the assumptions behind Benjamin’s metaphor are oddly positivist. Like Comte’s discussion, the metaphor suggests that thought could be in principle divided into theological and metaphysical phases. It implies that advancing from one to another would be a form of progress—without Comte’s assumption that progress actually takes place. When we return to our roots, we face decline; when we don’t, we face self-deception. Benjamin left us few choices. Of course, the argument that a secular idea is born from a sacred one need not end in a demand that it be rejected. For secular readers, pointing out that the idea of progress has stale and withered origins in theology may be enough to undermine it. But other readers may urge us to accept the religious foundations of modernity and return to faith with open eyes. Enlightenment rather than progress is at issue here. Are there ghosts (or soon to be ghosts) in the machinery? The Enlightenment will have no tools to remove them if its agents are driven by the same spirit as everyone else. What’s at issue is not just a scholarly question in the history of ideas. If concepts like progress, and evil itself, are reduced to religious origins, the use of them will be monopolized by religious spheres—and not likely the most scrupulous ones. The clear human need to recognize evil as evil, to seek progress as progress, cannot be met by those who doubt that the concepts can stand on their own.

Thinkers who support the secularization thesis imply that the transformation of concepts that took place was naive. In fact, it was completely self-conscious. Earlier philosophers were well aware of continuities between sacred and secular concepts even as they undertook to transform them. Kant, Hegel, and Marx all held certain questions to be essential to human reason. Those questions will be expressed and answered differently at different times. We may or may not make progress in resolving them, but whatever looks like progress in leaving them behind will simply be repression. Ideas of progress and of Providence are alternative ways of working out versions of the same problem. Neither can be reduced to or derived from the other. For they are the result not of historical accident (even a very big historical accident, like the Judeo-Christian notion of a personal God) but of something about human nature itself.

Hegel expressed this idea in his Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.

Another of the main reasons why I have cited this earliest instance of the idea that reason rules the world [in Anaxagoras] and discussed its inadequacy is because it has also been applied more fully to another subject with which we are all familiar and of whose truth we are personally convinced—I refer, of course, to the religious truth that the world is not a prey to chance and external contingent causes but is governed by Providence…. The truth, then, that the world’s events are controlled by a Providence, indeed a divine Providence, is consistent with the principle in question. For divine Providence is wisdom, coupled with infinite power, which realizes its ends, i.e. the absolute and rational design of the world; and reason is freely self-determining thought, or what the Greeks called nous. (Hegel 5, 35)

For Hegel, Providence was one expression of an idea that goes back to the pre-Socratics, and may receive other interpretations in other times. None of these expressions is born from another; all derive from a fundamental truth of reason itself. Kant called it a need rather than a truth, but he held it to be just as universal. On such views the problem of evil is not derived from religion; religion is one kind of attempt to solve the problem of evil. The invention of Providence was the result of the need for an engine of progress in a world that presents little space for hope.

The suggestion that Hegel’s or Marx’s incorporation of sacred categories was less than conscious or critical should therefore be rejected. They were well aware that they were attempting to resolve problems traditionally resolved by theology, and to do so with concepts that were developed through interaction with religion. Nineteenth-century philosophers knew they were reworking ideas that had been rejected in the form of traditional religion, and twentieth-century philosophers were not more naive. If Adorno thought that the consolation offered by poetry might be unacceptable after Auschwitz, he would hardly have accepted the consolation of theodicy. Arendt so thoroughly opposed anything resembling Hegelianism that she struggled to find a form of reconciliation that would avoid Hegelian pitfalls. Despite all other differences, such thinkers shared awareness of the failures of past philosophy. If—after Auschwitz—they nevertheless reappropriated elements of the traditional problem of evil into central parts of their work, we must conclude that something besides God is at issue.

The impulse to theodicy is not a relic of monotheism but goes deeper than either. Indeed, it is part of the same impulse that leads to monotheism itself. When we recall that similar debates continue within theology, from earliest times, we must cease to view these questions as theological. Each of the three Western religious traditions maintains debates around the question: Was reason God’s greatest gift? If so, argues one side, He is bound to adhere to it; if not, argues the other, we are bound by nothing but obedience to His will.27 Here God’s presence is taken for granted by all parties; it’s His relation to reason that is open to doubt. For us this becomes the question of intelligibility: Are our capacities to find and create meaning in the world adequate to a world that seems determined to thwart them?

But once you seek a source of the impulse to theodicy more basic than religion, you are likely to be sent to read Freud. Freud thought religion itself begins in the longings of the frightened child. Recall that he traced all questions of Providence to the child’s need for protection against the pains that besiege her. For Freud as for the child, whether those sources can be divided into moral and natural evils is not an interesting question. Human beings and forces of nature can equally be objects of terror. The child seeks as comprehensive a source of shelter as possible. She invents the notion of Providence in the hope of protection, and where this fails, revenge. This explanation accounts for the emergence of some version of providential thinking across most cultures. Freud thought it universal, but a universal case of wishful thinking. He had particular contempt for modern thinkers who knew too much to give full voice to the child’s wishes yet tried to retain them anyway. So he found the attempt to replace the hand of Providence with an impersonal abstract principle to be an act of bad faith that was little short of blasphemy. Freud’s account makes sense of the fact that the problem of evil survives attacks on religion even as it condemns that survival as cowardly. For on that account, the hope of finding sense in the world is older than Athens and Jerusalem put together. Though it’s thereby more elementary, it’s all the less venerable. If the problem of evil begins in the child besieged by terror, our continued engagement with it is an expression of fear.

Where the child isn’t frightened, she seems to be whiny. So some view the problem of evil as a demand for rewards. Because we were raised to expect payment, we are distraught when happiness and virtue fail to link up. Here Providence takes more the shape of the indulgent mother than that of the avenging father, but we remain infantile all the same. The view that Joe Hill called pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die is cruder than anything we have yet considered. You needn’t be Kant to see that this much calculation is inimical to any idea of morality. Teaching children to be decent is a matter of teaching them that the world doesn’t function by rewarding them with treats for jobs well done, and insisting that they do them anyway. Yet some suspect that this is always where we start. The child seeking the cookie becomes the adult seeking the hand of Providence. She has learned to delay gratification, but her needs are at bottom the same.

Freud himself knew that pointing out the origins of a belief is never an argument against it. The belief in Providence might arise from the child’s hopes of reward for herself and punishment for others—and nevertheless be true. Yet even after we’ve learned to avoid the genetic fallacy, Freud’s account may succeed in undermining our beliefs as arguments do not. To present the problem of evil as expression of childhood needs is to present a paradigm that makes us ashamed of it. If the problem is a form of metaphysical whining, we can only hope to grow out of it. Then contemporary philosophy’s usual distance from the problem of evil will seem one of the rare proofs of progress in the field, and its willingness to ignore the problem’s centrality for earlier thinkers merely an application of the principle of charity. It’s hard enough to view Kant, for instance, as bound by the philosophical theology his own metaphysics undermined. To regard him as trapped in the realm of childhood fantasy seems positively disrespectful.

When what’s at issue is less a matter of argument than of origins, we need different paradigms of explanation. Suppose the problem of evil does express assumptions that emerge in childhood. Need we accept Freud’s picture of childhood itself? Freud’s child is a humiliated creature, driven by discomfort, dread, and shame. But the child may also be a figure of promise. She approaches the world in wonder as well as in fear. Here innocence can be a source of strength. The child’s questions about why things are as they are do not cease, pace Freud, when she learns where babies come from. The urge to greet every answer with another question is one we find in children not because it’s childish but because it’s natural. Once you begin the search for knowledge, there is no obvious place to stop. The fact that the desire for omniscience cannot be met does not make it either foolish or pathological. Indeed, it is embodied in the principle of sufficient reason itself.

The principle of sufficient reason expresses the belief that we can find a reason for everything the world presents. It is not an idea that we derive from the world, but one that we bring to it. Kant called it a regulative principle—not a childish wish, but a drive essential to reason itself. Children display it more openly than adults because they have been less often disappointed. They will continue to ask questions even after hearing the impatient answer—Because that’s the way the world is. Most children remain adamant. But why is the world like that, exactly? The only answer that will truly satisfy is this one: Because it’s the best one. We stop asking why when everything is as it should be. No wonder Hegel called Leibniz’s work a metaphysical fairy tale; children are natural Leibnizians. In the child’s refusal to accept a world that makes no sense lies all the hope that ever makes us start anew.

The child emerged as a figure in philosophy at the moment when the demand for theodicy was loudest. I argued that the optimism reflected in the eighteenth-century explosion of interest in theodicy was not about the goodness of the world but only about our ability to understand it. Progress in scientific discovery created expectations that grew harder to delay. As long as most things seemed mysterious, the question of useless suffering was less acute. The more the rest of the world appeared transparent, the more pressing was the need for an account of the mystery that mattered most. From this perspective, the search for reason in the world is not derived from religious notions of Providence. Rather, the invention of Providence arises with the search for reason in the world. Making bargains with the gods is a way of trying to control your fate. It is not yet demanding that your fate make sense. By contrast, belief in justice that is written into the universe is belief in a world that makes sense as a whole.

Rousseau has been credited with inventing the idea of childhood. Whether or not he was the source of it, the figure of the child’s growth to adulthood came to seem a natural metaphor for enlightenment, and indeed for civilization itself.28 The model was not entirely new; on some readings history itself was God’s form of pedagogy. The idea of human development as a process of growing up goes together with the replacement of antique conceptions of cyclical time by linear ones. Still, the metaphor was particularly appropriate for an age that experienced its understanding of the world as continually expanding. In some cases it served as a means for advancing understanding itself.²⁹

I believe we should use Enlightenment resources to develop a different picture of childhood needs from the one Freud offered. The child seeks sense as well as protection. One demand is no less fundamental than the other. To trace the problem of evil back to childhood needs is thus not, by itself, to show very much about its structure. The Enlightenment itself knew that children’s endless urge to find reason in the world can verge on the ridiculous. Everybody read Candide. But abandoning the urge altogether means abandoning the assumptions that drive humankind to grow up.

Kant distinguished between the reason that sets ends in the world and the instrumental reason that calculates means. While the latter can be mastered by any criminal, the former is a matter of seeking, and creating, what is good in itself. I follow this distinction, as well as Kant’s belief that the drive to seek reason in the world—even, or especially, at the points where it seems most absent—is as deep a drive as any we have. It’s this urge that keeps the problem of evil alive even after hopes of solving it are abandoned. It is not psychological, for it isn’t derived from particular facts about human development, like our parents’ desire to get our attention through a series of bribes and threats. Nor does it result from particular facts of historical development, like the move from polytheism to monotheism. For as Kant implied, but never actually stated, behind the principle of sufficient reason itself is the assumption that the is and the ought should coincide. The principle of sufficient reason starts its work where they fail to meet. When the world is not as it should be, we begin to ask why. Metaphysics is the drive to make very general sense of the world in face of the fact that things go intolerably wrong. If they did not, the world would make sense as it is. It would be transparent or, as the German has it, selbstverständlich—an untranslatable suggestion of something that is understood in and by itself. We proceed on the assumption that the true and the good, and just possibly the beautiful, coincide. Where they do not, we demand an account. The urge to unite is and ought stands behind every creative endeavor. Those who seek to unite them by force usually do more harm than they set out to prevent. Those who never seek to unite them do nothing at all.

The idea that the gap between is and ought generates metaphysics was often expressed by Schopenhauer.

If the world were not something that, practically expressed, ought not to be, it would also not be theoretically a problem. On the contrary, its existence would require no explanation at all, since it would be so entirely self evident. (Schopenhauer, 2:579)

Levinas maintained a similar view:

The first metaphysical question is no longer Leibniz’s question why is there something rather than nothing? but why is there evil rather than good? The ontological difference is preceded by the difference between good and evil. Difference itself is this latter; it is the origin of the meaningful. (Levinas 1, 160)

Arendt viewed such claims as extreme. With the possible exception of Schopenhauer, she thought that the sense of metaphysical outrage never produced great philosophy. She did believe that metaphysical outrage is related to its opposite, the sense of pure wonder from which philosophy was traditionally said to spring. Let us suppose that thinking demands both. One way to understand their relation is via the principle of sufficient reason itself. We experience wonder in the moments when we see the world is as it ought to be—an experience so deep that the ought melts away. The disappearance of the ought in such moments leads some thinkers to describe them as the experience of Being freed from human demands and categories. But it is equally the experience that all our demands have been fulfilled.

If we wish to retain traditional metaphysical language, we could call the claim the real should become the rational a transcendental one. It is transcendental because located neither in normative nor in descriptive space. Were it a claim about reality, it could be confirmed or disconfirmed by reality. Were it a claim within reason, it might be susceptible to other forms of proof. It is neither but, rather, the demand that reason be applied, and the basis of any application of reason at all. You may call it reason’s narcissism—the wish to see itself reflected wherever it goes. Yet reason’s attempt to be at home in the world is also a refusal to abandon the world to its own devices. The demand that reason and reality stand together is tenacious because it is no more than a demand. Its basis is not real but rational. We are so structured as to expect a world that comes to meet us halfway, for we cannot make meaning alone. Being dependent on the world is so fundamentally human that Stoicism will always threaten to slide into solipsism. Perhaps gods experience the world without caring whether is and ought coincide. If we began to do so, we would lose the basis of every attitude and emotion that is central to the human attempt to live in the world. The demand to unite is and ought is nothing but reason’s demand. Though it doesn’t come from experience, the attempt to imagine experience without it is no easier than imagining experience that wasn’t cut up into causes and effects. Belief that there may be reason in the world is a condition of the possibility of our being able to go on in it.

The urge to unite is and ought is so deeply anchored that it’s often maintained at too high a cost. Many victims of disaster would rather blame themselves for their suffering than view it as a matter of accident. And criminals found it easier to adjust to life in concentration camps than did those deported on racial grounds partly because criminals perceived their imprisonment as just.30 Belief in versions of original sin persists because experiencing one’s life as punishment is easier than experiencing it as senseless.

Even worse than blaming oneself for inexplicable suffering is the temptation to blame others. Kleist’s story “The Earthquake in Chile” describes human inability to tolerate contingency. With brilliant and poignant irony, Kleist rebuked all attempts to make the earthquake a source of meaning. In his tale, the mob that smashes a baby it holds to be born of an unholy union seeks both sense and sacrifice. Unable to accept the yawning unintelligibility of natural evil, it prefers doing evil itself. Kleist was not alone. The auto-da-fé that followed the Lisbon earthquake moved Voltaire as surely as the earthquake itself. Far better, he concluded, to live without reasons at all than to risk making that kind of mistake about them. These are pathologies that may arise from the drive to unite is and ought, and they function as warnings about its limits.

Fear of this sort of abuse has been one reason to avoid the problem of evil altogether, but an even deeper argument is sometimes made. This rests on the idea that to understand something is to justify it. Two versions of the claim occur in the literature—both in French, and both in the negative. But tout comprendre ce n’est pas tout justifier and s’expliquer n’est pas se justifier are always asserted defensively. Hegel recognized the insight behind Leibniz’s theodicy: full understanding of an event would show it to be part of a whole that could not possibly be better ordered than it is. If we stop scientific investigation at the point when we’ve achieved partial understanding, it is not only because we’ve learned to be content with less than our predecessors but because we suspect that understanding has moral limits.

In chapter 2, I argued that one motive driving those who insisted on remaining with the appearances was a moral one. Keeping faith with the world, and particularly with those who suffer miserably in it, seemed to require rejecting every attempt to find meaning that would make appearances seem milder. Voltaire preferred to reject philosophy rather than to accept a rosier account of appearances. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov made the point even stronger: after describing cases of tortured children, he chooses to reject comprehension itself.

“I understand nothing,” Ivan went on as though in delirium, “and I don’t want to understand anything now. I want to stick to facts. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. For if I should want to understand something, I’d instantly alter the facts, and I’ve made up my mind to stick to the facts. (Dostoevsky, 285)

Dostoevsky underlined the idea that the problem of evil is not just one more mystery. It is so central to our lives that if reason stumbles there, it must give way to faith. If you cannot understand why children are tortured, nothing else you understand really matters. But the very attempt to understand it requires at least accepting it as part of the world that must be investigated. Some hold even this much acceptance to be unacceptable. Thus the rejection of theodicy becomes the rejection of comprehension itself.

Just this realization drove contemporary thinkers to take up the question again, in full awareness of all the reasons the twentieth century provided to abandon it forever. The moral impulse expressed in Dostoevsky’s refusal to understand is overridden by the impulse that sees no alternative. To abandon the attempt to comprehend evil is to abandon every basis for confronting it, in thought as in practice. The thinkers who returned to the problem of evil while knowing the limits of any discussion of it were driven by moral demands. For creatures endowed with reason, love of the world cannot be blind. The intellectual struggle is more important than any particular results that emerge from it. Practical results are unlikely without some such struggle and the demand that begins it. Belief that the world should be rational is the basis of every attempt to make it so. Political progress has metaphysical conditions. We cannot even try to understand the causes of evil, and go to work on eliminating them, without the idea that happiness and virtue should be connected. Moral reactions like guilt and indignation that lead to political actions have their basis in the principle of sufficient reason. The connection between the rise of rationalism and the demand for autonomy is not a historical accident. The demand that reason and reality come to meet is the source of whatever progress occurs in actually bringing them together. Without such a demand, we would never feel outrage—nor assume the responsibility for change to which outrage sometimes leads.

The tentative and fragmentary discussions of the problems of evil that have arisen in the wake of Auschwitz reflect the fact that abandoning discussion comes too close to abandoning the principle of sufficient reason itself. Moral and epistemological scruples destroyed our hopes for complete explanations of reality. Twentieth-century events made systematic explanations of the whole seem not only impossible but finally and decidedly wrong. Were we offered an account that shows Auschwitz to be part of the order of things, most of us would reject it. Yet any account of the world that ignores it will be worth very little.

How much reason would be sufficient? It’s clear that we must make do with less than once was wanted. Some will consider themselves lucky to get any at all. It is crucial to resist the equation of rationalism and system. Kant’s greatest error was to mistake the demand for reason with the demand for system. Few took his vast architectonic entirely seriously, and pointing out its flaws became the Kant scholar’s minor sport. But the idea that rejecting the will to system meant rejecting the heart of rationalism was the miserable, unspoken legacy of German philosophy. Interest in the detail, analysis of the fragment, were thus left to all those who rejected reason. This proved especially fatal, for where so many structures of modern thought have been shattered, whatever sense we find must be incomplete. Attention to the pieces is now all the more important.31

In rejecting Kant’s account of reason as systematic, I do not reject his picture of reason as uncompromising. The adamant child who wants every question answered expresses something about the nature of reason. Kant held that reason is structured so as to seek premises for every condition. Logically, it will find no place to rest until it reaches the Unconditioned—the point at which everything appears so self-evident that there are no questions left to be asked. Reason’s tendency to keep going until all its demands are met is relentless. Some will dismiss it as childish; others will shrink from it as potentially totalitarian. Caution is always in order, for all the alternatives are worse. The smaller the expectations of the rational, the less it demands of the real. Where reason’s demands are too humble, it concedes all the terms to reality before the struggle begins.

The picture of reason as inherently systematic is fatal to any form of philosophy we will want to preserve. If the events that determined the twentieth century left contemporary experience fractured, any conception of reason that can be salvaged must reflect fracture itself. This is an old insight, reflected in the abandonment of the great metaphysical systems of the nineteenth century. Those who followed erred in dividing philosophy into areas. The analytic division of philosophy into areas of specialization and the German division of philosophy into Lehrstühle reflect a will to system grown embarrassed, not a rejection of it. Where experience was truly shattered, the pieces will never be neatly ordered again. They are pieces of a whole which reflects the fact that reason, if not a system, is still a unity. Ethics and metaphysics are not accidentally connected. Whatever attempts we make to live rightly are attempts to live in the world.

Classical rationalism viewed our lack of understanding as itself providential. Even Lessing and Mendelssohn’s attack on Pope named human ignorance as an argument for God’s benevolence: instead of knowledge of the future, God gave us hope. Kant turned this thought into one of his greater arguments: if we knew that God existed, freedom and virtue would disappear. It’s an act of Providence that the nature of Providence will forever remain uncertain. Einstein said the Creator was subtle; Kant’s thought showed Him brilliant. Our very skepticism is a providential gift. What binds the real and the rational together must be so fragile that it will seem miraculous—and on occasion the miracle occurs. As with any other miracle, it takes something like faith to perceive it.

Learning from the history of philosophy is not a matter of appropriating it wholesale. We use its insights to shed light on our own. We cannot make the same claims that even the most modern Enlightenment thinkers asserted before us. At times the most hopeful gesture we may be able to manage is not to answer whether life is justified but merely to reject the question. Meaning is a human category, and must be won against a background. A life that was inevitably meaningful would defeat itself from the start. Between the adult who knows she won’t find reason in the world, and the child who refuses to stop seeking it, lies the difference between resignation and humility.