CHAPTER ONE
FIRE FROM HEAVEN
1. All quotations, and my account of Alfonso’s life, are taken from Bayle’s version in the Historical and Critical Dictionary, “Castile (Alphonsus X of that Name, King of)” (Bayle 2). I am indebted to Claudio Lange for another picture of the king, whom much Spanish tradition still reveres as Alfonso the Wise for his collections of law and music as well as his mediation between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions.
2. See the headnote to the bibliography, below, for an explanation of the citation style used in this book.
3. Leibniz, 248. Discussion and quotations of Leibniz are based on this text.
4. For this reason, one of Bayle’s opponents retracted the doctrine that the tortures of hell are eternal. Bayle added an argument to show that if his original argument about infinite amounts of torture was valid, the same could be shown for torture of any duration.
5. Oddly enough, it’s Immanuel Kant, the philosopher whom Heine described as thoroughly unpoetic, who raised unresolved tension to something like the fundamental principle of human being. His occasional unforgettable passages not only approach Pope’s style but convey just Pope’s message. Think of “Human reason has this peculiar fate …” or “Two things fill the mind….”
6. There are excellent exceptions. The classic discussion is found in Cassirer. I follow his account on several points. See Velkley, Schulte.
7. Voltaire and Kant, to take two examples, were tireless in arguing that Europe, America, and the Orient, savage and civilized citizen, present the same barbarous picture. For Rousseau’s critique of what he takes to have become unscientific cliché, see Rousseau 1, 187, 220. Even Voltaire could be tempted by thoughts that are proto-Rousseauian; his Dictionary suggested that “Man is not born evil, he becomes evil, as he becomes sick” (Voltaire 6, 2:378). But such suggestions remained isolated.
8. Rousseau’s account of love is marred, of course, by the claim that Sophie, unlike Emile, should attend to appearances instead of the real things that matter. It is easy to imagine a version of the book in which Sophie, true to her name, received an education like Emile’s. Such an account would be less sappy as well as less sexist, but showing all this is a task for another occasion.
9. For discussion of the Pantheismusstreit, see Beiser, Neiman.
10. Of course this sketch is not intended to be a detailed survey of Kant’s theory of knowledge or doctrine of transcendental idealism. For those interested in a good one, see Allison.
11. The relevant text is sufficiently unnoticed to be worth repeating. It occurs in the casuistic discussion of cases of action Kant had elsewhere seemed to regard as clear. He asks his readers to consider: “An author asks one of his readers, ‘How do you like my work?’ One could merely seem to give an answer, by joking about the impropriety of such a question. But who has his wit always ready? The author will take the slightest hesitation in answering as an insult. May one, then, say what is expected of one?” (Kant 10, 431). Kant leaves the question open.
12. For a defense of this view, see Neiman.
13. Tucker rightly rejects what he calls the argument from propriety, which refuses to acknowledge that Hegel identifies anyone in particular with the Absolute simply because such a conclusion would be shocking. Forster gives a thorough discussion of Hegel’s rejection of the notion that philosophy and common sense must share the same world.
14. See Hegel 1. Fackenheim explains it thus: “The divine redemptive act, then, must unite the Jewish transcendent Lord with the immanence and humanity of the gods of Greece. To bring about this union He cannot, like the Greek gods, be merely represented as human…. In the Christian view the Greek gods were not too anthropomorphic, but rather not anthropomorphic enough” (140).
15. Roger Garaudy argues that the Incarnation serves Hegel as the paradigm for the overcoming of all dualism—between human and God, the historical and contingent, and the absolute and necessary—which is the goal of his work as a whole. See Garaudy, 109 ff.
16. This claim has been superbly shown by Odo Marquard in his “Idealismus und Theodizee,” in Marquard, 1.
17. “[The self-appointed guardians of humankind] … regard the step to maturity as not only difficult but also very dangerous. After they have first made their domestic creatures stupid and carefully prevented them from daring to take even one step out of the leading strings of the cart to which they are tethered, they show them the danger that threatens them if they attempt to proceed on their own. Now this danger is not so great, for by falling a few times they would indeed finally learn to walk; but an example of this sort makes them timid and usually frightens them away from all further attempts” (Kant 4, A482).
18. See especially Pippin 1 and Pippin 2.
19. See Loewith.
20. Two excellent exceptions, which read Marx in light of traditional philosophical debates about the problem of evil, are Tucker and Gunneman.
21. Tucker, 125 ff., presents textual evidence to show that this, not The Philosophy of Right, was the fundamental text for Marx’s appropriation of Hegel.
CHAPTER TWO
CONDEMNING THE ARCHITECT
1. But those still inclined to insist on hard-and-fast distinctions between them should consider the degree to which Hume was required to slake his chief passion, the love of literary fame, through the response to his History and lighter essays. Not until after his death, and the dawn of a dryer age, did his metaphysics receive the central place in his work that they are now accorded.
2. Heine portrays Providence as a Jewish mother, the worried servant running after his charge with an umbrella (Heine, vol. 3). Nietzsche makes the hint explicit and thinks piety itself should abolish the notion of “a God who cures a headcold at the right moment or tells us to get into a coach just as a downpour is about to start … God as a domestic servant, as a postman, as an almanac maker—at bottom a word for the saddest kind of accidental occurrence” (Nietzsche 7, #52).
3. See Labrousse, vol. 2, as well as Richard Popkin’s introduction to his translation and abridgment of Bayle (Bayle 1).
4. In his The Philosophy of Leibniz, where he writes that Leibniz “seems to imply that existence means belonging to the best possible world; thus Leibniz’s optimism would reduce itself to saying that actual is an abbreviation which it is sometimes convenient to substitute for best possible. If these are the consolations of philosophy, it is no wonder that philosophers cannot endure the toothache patiently!” (Russell 1, 377).
5. “When he thought of the wealth that remained in his hands, and when he talked of Cunegonde, especially just after a good dinner, [Candide] still inclined to the system of Pangloss” (Voltaire 5, 64). See also the Dictionary’s “Well, All is Well” (Voltaire 6).
6. “Struck by seeing that poor man weighed down, so to speak, by fame and prosperity, bitterly complaining, nevertheless, against the wretchedness of this life and finding everything invariably bad, I formed the insane plan of trying to prove to him that all was well…. The absurdity of Voltaire’s doctrine is particularly revolting in a man loaded with every kind of blessing who, living in the lap of luxury, seeks to disillusion his fellow-men by a frightening and cruel picture of all the calamities from which he himself is exempt. I, who had a better right to count up and weigh the evils of human life, examined them impartially and proved that there is not one of those evils which could be blamed on Providence” (Rousseau 4, bk. 8, p. 99). Rousseau is referring to the letter he wrote Voltaire in response to the poem “On the Lisbon Earthquake.” He concludes by complaining that Voltaire never bothered to answer the letter directly. If he is right in suggesting that the answer, four years later, came in the form of Candide, it should have been some consolation.
7. I owe this term, and much discussion of the subject, to James Ponet.
8. See “Well, All is Well” (Voltaire 6). Or, as Candide asks after the Lisbon earthquake and its consequences, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?” (Voltaire 5, 28).
9. In private correspondence, he described the earthquake as a kick in the ass to Providence (“de cette affaire la Providence en a dans le cul”) (quoted in Gourevitch).
10. See Westfall, 21 ff., for this claim, in particular.
11. For further discussion, see Neiman, chap. 1.
12. See also the entries for “Atheism” and “Religion.”
13. See the open letter to the Journal Encylopédique, April 1, 1759, quoted in Gay, “Voltaire’s Faith,” in Voltaire 4; also the letter to Bertrand quoted in Mason, “ ‘Candide’ Assembling Itself,” ibid.
14. Schopenhauer was, at least in these matters, as good a reader of Kant and Hume as Kant was of Hume and Rousseau. See Schopenhauer, 2:338. Kant read Hamann’s translation of the Dialogues shortly after they appeared in 1780, when he was finishing the writing of the Critique of Pure Reason.
15. For the ease with which it has come to appear self-evident, see Norton, 19–27.
16. For a revealing instance of the latter, note the following 1764 letter from Paris: “It is putting too great a respect on the vulgar, and on their superstitions, to pique oneself on sincerity with regard to them. Did one ever make it a point of honour to speak truth with regard to children or madmen? … Am I a liar, because I order my servant to say, I am not at home, when I do not desire to see company?” (Hume 4, 1:439). Though Kant’s regard for truth telling is not as absolute as legend would have it, it is hard to avoid comparison with the tortuous vistas of his last essay.
17. One of Voltaire’s darkest passages suggests that those who invented torture did just this, modeling thumbscrews and racks on the illnesses that are “executors of the vengeances of Providence” (Voltaire 6, 490). Sade was not quite as unique as he tried to be.
18. If Descartes suggested this nightmare, Goethe put it in the mouth of Mephistopheles, who attacks God for having given humankind “that appearance of heavenly light he calls reason” (Goethe 3, line 283).
19. So Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator insists that “Genius itself is now called upon to hear whether it, as the highest fruit of life, can perhaps justify life; the magnificently creative man must answer the question: Do you affirm this existence deep in your heart? Is it sufficient for you? Will you be its advocate, its redeemer? But for a single true yes! From your mouth—and life, which is accused of such great crimes, shall be acquitted” (Nietzsche 2, 33).
CHAPTER THREE
ENDS OF AN ILLUSION
1. Nietzsche’s rendering of the passage is very different. See Nietzsche 1, sec. 3. Pippin rightly sees Nietzsche’s discussion of the question as central to his later work as well; see his “Truth and Lies in the Early Nietzsche,” in Pippin 2.
2. Nietzsche was right to warn us against confusing authors and their creations, and against the particular temptation to do so with Goethe and Faust. But no matter what it looked like from the outside, Goethe’s own description of his life was staggeringly bleak. In the Conversations with Eckermann he denied that he’d felt four weeks of contentment in seventy-five years. His description of his life as endless martyrdom without real pleasure in his Sketch of an Autobiography seems to confirm the insight of the old woman aboard ship in Candide.
3. I owe this formulation to Irad Kimhi.
4. Zarathustra finds it necessary to deny that his view is Leibnizian. On similarities between Nietzsche’s view of reconciliation and that of Hegel, see especially Pippin 3.
1. See in particular Rubinstein, Katz, and Münz.
2. This statement, like most of my information about the Lisbon earthquake, is taken from T. D. Kendrick’s excellent book. See also Breidert, Gunther, and Shklar for further discussion.
3. This is a subject in great need of discussion. Weber’s classic study attributed the rise of capitalism itself in large part to certain beliefs about Providence, but much remains to be done. It should be mentioned that while Hume’s work was often concerned with destroying beliefs in Providence, and his friend Adam Smith’s may be said to give Providence a naturalist shape, their correspondence records no mention of the Lisbon earthquake. On April 12, 1759, Hume did send Smith an appreciative remark about the attack on Providence in Candide.
4. Leibniz wrote: “One Caligula alone, one Nero, has caused more evil than an earthquake” (Leibniz, 26).
5. It was possible for traditional theology to blame humankind for its misery in this world as well as the world to come. So Virtue Awakened by the Earthquake argued that most of the damage the earthquake caused could have been avoided if houses had been differently built. This proto-Rousseauian claim puts the blame for the damage on us without quite sanctifying our responsibility for it. Its focus is vindicating the Creator rather than changing anything in His world.
6. The Turkish earthquake of 1999 produced some eighty thousand victims and a rash of fundamentalist Islamic claims about God’s punishment for a secular government. Similar reactions occurred in the wake of the even larger Indian earthquake two years later. Christian fundamentalist claims that the September 11 terrorist attacks were punishment for American secularism suggest that this kind of response is a universal possibility—and displays the fundamentalist rejection of the distinction between natural and moral evil.
7. For these quotations and other fine discussion of these questions, see Lifton and Mitchell, 345, 304. On the development of the idea that Auschwitz was unique, see Maier; see also Margalit and Motzkin. For Anders’s view, see especially his Besuch im Hades.
8. See Améry 3, 101 ff.
9. Including many Germans, for—as Arendt remarked—collective guilt is a form of individual exoneration. Where everybody is guilty in general, nobody is guilty in particular. This reaction has been suggested as a reason for Goldhagen’s popularity in Germany.
10. On one estimate, if spread out over the course of the century, war killed one hundred people every hour (Glover).
11. For particularly stark expressions of these claims, see Primo Levi’s report of a guard’s statement, “Hier ist kein warum” (Here there is no “why”), or Ruth Klüger’s description of verlorener Verstand (lost understanding) as a condition of functioning well at Auschwitz. The classic statement of the idea that the intellect itself was defeated by Auschwitz is found in Améry 1.
12. For some of the discussion on which I have relied here, see Arendt 1, Diner 1, Diner 2, and Glover.
13. See also Klemperer. The Authoritarian Personality was the Frankfurt School’s attempt to come to terms with just this problem through empirical study of the structures that led people to be vulnerable to Nazism, but the study’s results were sufficiently general to confirm the sense of indeterminacy.
14. A surprising exception may be seen in the final pages of David Rousset’s L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Edition du Pavois, 1946) (translated as A World Apart). It is dated August 1945, four months after the author, a French professor of philosophy, was released from Buchenwald. “The balance is by no means negative. It is still far too soon to draw up the positive sheet of concentration camp experience, but even now, it promises to be a rich one. A dynamic awareness of the strength and beauty of being alive, self-contained, brutal, entirely stripped of all superstructures, of being able to live even in the midst of the most appalling catastrophes or the most serious setbacks. A fresh sensual feeling of joy, arising out of the most scientific knowledge of destruction and, as a result of this, an increased firmness in action and unshakable judgments; in short, a fuller and more intensely creative state of being” (103). Rousset’s voice is so unusual in the literature that its Nietzschean tones carry less force than would be the case if they were echoed elsewhere.
15. See, for example, Segev.
16. My discussion has relied primarily on the discussion of the camps found in Agamben, Améry, Hilsenrath, Klüger, and Levi.
17. “Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as ‘normal’—‘More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him’ one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude towards his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was ‘not only normal but most desirable’—and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be ‘a man with very positive ideas’ ” (Arendt 2, 25–26).
18. No commentator has yet suggested a satisfactory explanation of Arendt’s introduction of the discussion of the Jewish Councils into her analysis of the Eichmann trial at all. Benhabib says she has no answer to the question (Benhabib, 180). Bernstein suggests that Arendt wanted to show the general moral collapse of European society (Bernstein 1, 163). This is surely correct, but her further point is that this collapse was not a function of the wrong kind of intention.
19. I have learned, in particular, from the works of Blumenberg, Loewith, Marquard, and Taubes.
20. See Kuhlmann.
21. See Bernstein’s perceptive essay “Evil and the Temptation of Theodicy” (Bernstein 2), which argues that Levinas’s work as a whole is a response to the problem of evil. Bernstein views the nonreasonableness of Levinas’s demand that we take infinite responsibility for the other as a response to the nonreasonableness of evil itself.
22. Kant himself insisted that the urge to move beyond given experience is as central a mark of the human as the fact that we are limited to it. Critical Theory recognized this, and Benjamin is particularly explicit on this point; see Benjamin 2, 164. Wittgenstein is the twentieth-century philosopher most resistant to classification for just this reason. While nobody said more clearly that the unstatable questions were the only ones of importance, nobody fought more savagely his own urges to state them.
23. See Améry 2.
24. Although his article in Dissent on the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima is the only written work in which Rawls hints at those sources, they are evident from private conversation.
25. It must be emphasized that Rawls’s reluctance to engage in metaphysics was so great that the extent of his engagement with such questions was long unclear to most of his students, the present author included. In conversation and correspondence, Rawls occasionally said he was concerned with the problem of evil, and elaborated this with very fragmentary remarks in the directions sketched above. Thomas Pogge writes that “[a]ll his life, Rawls was interested in the question whether and to what extent human life is redeemable,” in his excellent “Brief Sketch of Rawls’ Life,” in Richardson and Weithman. Pogge reports Rawls’s frequent use of the word redeem in the interviews conducted for this sketch. But this was not the sort of language that left even an echo in earlier days, nor did the word evils figure significantly until The Law of Peoples.
26. See Loewith, Taubes. For some of the further discussion, see Blumenberg 1 and Marquard 1. Robert Pippin provided the best discussion in English; see his “Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem,” in Pippin 2.
27. The idea that showing the universe to be comprehensible is a moral project is one way to read the repeated attempts to combat voluntarism described in J. B. Schneewind’s magisterial book The Invention of Autonomy. Modern moral philosophy, it suggests, viewed autonomy and benevolence as arising in each other’s service.
28. Kant’s “Was heißt Aufklärung?” and Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts are but the two most famous instances of this metaphor.
29. So Bury argued that the Romantic reevaluation of the Middle Ages arose from the need to defend claims about progress in civilization. On this view, seeking light in the Dark Ages was a matter not of validating the Counter-Enlightenment but of confirming Enlightenment hopes for more or less steady progress in history.
30. On the first question, see Shklar; on the second, see Arendt 7, 242 ff.
31. I take this to be what Adorno meant in writing that after Auschwitz it is impossible to say that truth is unchanging and illusion is vergänglich (transitory) (Adorno 2, 352). I believe, however, that neither Adorno nor Horkheimer took their implicit critique of Nietzsche to its proper conclusion. To argue for transcendence, conceived radically, as a feature of liberation is to deny that transcendence is a theological concept, in any but the vaguest sense; talk of secularized metaphysical categories recalls Benjamin’s dwarf pulling strings behind apparently modern forces.
AFTERWORD TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION
1. Franklin Perkins, Heaven and Earth are not Humane: the Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy. Indiana University Press, 2014, p. 10. I have learned much from Perkins’ excellent book.
2. See Neiman, “Banality Reconsidered.” In Politics in Dark Times. Edited by Benhabib. Cambridge Universty Press, 2010.
3. Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann vor Jerusalem. Arche, 2011, p. 283.
4. Ibid.
5. Stangneth, p. 284.
6. See Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists. Princeton University Press, 2009.
7. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 28.
8. Records of the office of the White House Press Secretary
9. But see my Learning from the Germans, forthcoming.
10. Neiman, Moral Clarity, p. 349.
11. As it has often been noted, the bombing of Nagasaki was even more gratuitous than the bombing of Hiroshima, but the first use of atomic weapons has come to stand for the evils they entail.
12. John Rawls, Dissent, Summer 1995, p. 325. Reprinted in Bird and Lifschultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy. The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998, p. 474.
13. See for example J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atom Bombs Against Japan. The University of North Carolina Press, 1997; Gar Alperovitz, The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995; Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial. Avon Books, 1995; Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy. The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998; Michael Gordin, Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. Princeton University Press, 2007.
14. U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946, quoted in Lifton and Mitchell, op.cit., p. 83.
15. Lifton and Mitchell, ibid.
16. Walker, ibid, p. 102.
17. For details see Bird and Lifschulz, op.cit., and Hartun.
18. See Tom Segev, The Seventh Million. Hill and Wang, 1993
19. See Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. Phoenix 1994.
20. Elsewhere I have questioned the ways in which our historical consciousness has shifted from a focus on heroes to a focus on victims. See Neiman, Tanner Lectures, University of Utah 2012; and Neiman, Heroes ReViewed. Harvard University Press, 2016.
21. Op.cit, p. 336.
22. See Neiman, “Forgetting Hiroshima, Remembering Auschwitz.” In Thesis Eleven. Edited by Tester, August 2015; and Neiman, Learning from the Germans, forthcoming.