It should be clear at this point that if ethical philosophy is going to continue to have any real relevance in the twenty-first century, the status and value of the absolute as the foundation for moral judgment and action alike must be critically reevaluated. We can no longer accept the vision of the absolute maintained within the history of philosophy of a pure moral force: the supreme good and ultimate telos of life—something to be affirmed and realized both within the personal and the political sphere alike. To the contrary, as we have seen, any appearance of the absolute within the ethical order is necessarily tinged with the possibility of evil. The recognition of this fact should not, however, motivate some attempt to craft an ethics without reference to any absolute. Such post-Kantian pretentions, as we have seen, are doomed to fail, either by falling into precisely the kind of nihilism they seek to avoid or by unintentionally establishing a new form of dogmatism capable of justifying a fanatical devotion. If we are to craft a contemporary ethics that has real personal and political purchase without falling into either of these extremes, we must ground it upon an absolute which is both actual and universally available; at the same time, we must equally recognize that such an absolute is not to be obeyed, but to be resisted. Precisely such an absolute is what we gain in Levinas’s phenomenological account of the Other cast through the lens of Schelling’s analysis of the reversibility of good and evil.
In Levinas’s Other we discover an absolute which appears in the form of an actual determinate entity (the face) and which is simultaneously universally manifest to all human subjects. In this regard Levinas’s conception of the Other allows us to overcome the limitations of the post-critical ethical disjunction detailed in Chapter 1. But, as we saw in Chapter 3, despite his best efforts to maintain the moral perfection of this power, Levinas’s conception of the Other all too easily converts into a potentially totalizing force, one which threatens to overwhelm us entirely, demanding from us absolute fealty and sacrifice—a demand which Levinas himself identified as evil. Following this discovery we concluded with Schelling that this Other, qua ethical absolute, should not be seen as unequivocally good, but should instead be viewed as the ground for the possibility of good and evil alike. Moreover, we discovered that evil emerges from this absolute ground precisely inasmuch as it is affirmed as entirely good and pursued practically in the personal and political areas. So it was, we concluded there, that the new absolute ground for ethical deliberation which we gain in Levinas’s account of the Other is not a force to which one should bend the knee idly nor acquiesce too complacently. Instead, we argued, we must learn to vigilantly resist the regime of the Other. Only in this way, we concluded, could we begin to pursue some semblance of the good.
What we must learn to do, to use Levinas’s own analogy against him, is to recognize that while the Other may shine with an ethically illuminative fire, one which is capable of kindling anew absolute ethical judgment, it is nevertheless a power which we must be cautious of, guarding against the dangers inherent to it, lest it spread beyond its appropriate limits and engulf us entirely. Such is the real task of ethics, it would seem: to learn how to manage the infinite power of the absolute. Like the heat of a flame, the power of the absolute must be properly contained and regulated. We should not see the needs of the Other as the singular path of goodness, but as a path to possible excess which can only lead to evil. By approaching the absolute in ethical thought in this way, as a limit case to be guarded against and regulated, we can begin to rethink the nature of ethical deliberation for the twenty-first century.
We began this volume with the claim that the history of ethics from Plato to Kant has been a history of collaboration: a history which has almost unilaterally defined ethical action as the acquiescence of the individual to some absolute ethical maxim, mode of evaluation, or mandate—that the principal aim of ethical philosophy has been to identify this absolute and define the best and most appropriate means of affirming it continually and actualizing it effectively. Evil, according to this tradition, as we saw, was the result of some failure in this process—the consequence of some inability, ignorance, or unwillingness to submit to the order of the absolute good. It is time that this history come to an end.
It is time that we reject the fallacious assertion that ethical action is defined in acquiescence to and in accord with the absolute. Indeed, it is time that we assert precisely the opposite. It is time to acknowledge that evil action does not arise from some moral deficit within the subject, some lack or refusal to submit to the absolute; to the contrary, evil results from the misguided attempt to affirm, achieve, and/or instantiate the absolute. The classical assumptions must be inverted. We must understand finally that it is not evil which should be defined privatively, but goodness—for goodness only appears where the absolute is not fully realized, where the absolute is resisted and its potentially infinite demands are held in check. To make the necessity for this inversion all the more clear, consider the case of Kierkegaard’s account of the Akedah (Abraham’s attempt to, in faith, obey God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac found in Genesis 22) in his 1843 Fear and Trembling.1
Kierkegaard’s apologetics for murder
The goal of his analysis of the Akedah there, Kierkegaard has his pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio write, is to liberate the reader’s understanding of Abraham’s dilemma from the everyday interpretation of it which has been used repetitively in moral sermons and casual banter.2 In these settings, he thinks, the meaning of the narrative has been reduced to the point of signifying nothing more than a model of sacrificial piety—something which all people of faith should aspire to emulate in their lives. However, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio argues, such interpretations level out and erase what is truly at stake in the narrative. Indeed, they result, he thinks, in a casual “indifference” to the narrative—one which allows the story to be read while “smoking [one’s] pipe,” or “stretching out [one’s] legs comfortably.”3 This indifference, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio thinks, leads to an interpretation of the story which gives rise to the banal call to “sacrifice one’s best,” a call which is all too casually bleated across pews on Sunday mornings between hollow smiling congregants as they encourage one another saccharinely to sacrifice their own best: their best effort at the charity bake sale, their dollar as the hat is passed round, or their time at Sunday school teaching catechism. “What is left out of Abraham’s story,” in this interpretation, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio thinks, “is the anxiety, for to money I have no ethical obligation, but to the son the father has the highest and most sacred duty.”4 In order to confront, confound, and upend these sorts of indifferent interpretation, de Silentio attempts to reintroduce the anxiety he sees at the heart of the story into the heart of his readers. This he does by forcing them to contemplate with Abraham what he thinks is the real meaning of the Akedah: the fact that what Abraham is really called to do by his faith is to commit murder.
According to Kierkegaard’s de Silentio, the key to reading the Abrahamic narrative correctly is to confront this terrible truth: that Abraham, the father of faith, is “either a murderer or a believer.”5 Make no mistake about it, he entreats his readers to understand, “the ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he intended to murder Isaac.”6 So it is, de Silentio concludes, that Abraham’s actions should not be praised from the pulpit by lazy pastors as a form of model citizenship. Nor should his actions and intentions be held up as some abstract ideal to which fatuous parishioners should strive. To the contrary, when understood properly, de Silentio argues, Abraham’s actions and intentions model precisely the opposite: exactly what a good citizen should never do. This, he thinks, is the horrible truth which the reader must confront if he or she is to understand the real message of the Akedah, and through it the logic of the absolute to which we are called in faith: namely, that obedience to God requires an absolute rupture with ethical deliberation and action.
To make this point all the more clear, de Silentio reminds his readers of the classical definition of ethical judgment in the West. Ethical judgment since Kant, he details rightly there, functions by referencing a set of universal ideals—ideals to which we can all, at least in principle, assent and which we should all, therefore, categorically obey. “The ethical as such,” he writes, “is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which may be expressed from another angle by saying that it is a force at every moment. It rests immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its telos.”7 The good is only achieved, it follows from this logic, when one submits one’s actions to the logic of the universal at all times. Indeed, what we may call evil occurs, de Silentio reasons, in further accord with Kant, when someone rejects, refuses, or inverts this universal order—when, in other words, an individual asserts himself or herself over and against the power of the universal. According to de Silentio, “As soon as the single individual wants to assert himself in his particularity over against the universal, he [breaks with the ethical] and only by acknowledging this can be reconciled again with the universal.”8
From the ethical standpoint then, de Silentio concludes, Abraham “ought to [be] remanded and exposed as a murderer,” for the binding of Isaac—indeed, he should be seen as an evildoer par excellence.9 And yet, and this is the exceptional moment in his thinking, according to Kierkegaard’s de Silentio, Abraham is precisely not a murderer. He is instead, as he styles it, a “knight of faith.”10 This is a fact, he goes on to argue, which not only exculpates Abraham from the possible charge of murder and evil, but which, in fact, elevates him to the status of saint.11 It is on this impossible reconciliation of the paradoxical conflation of these two figures, murderer and saint, that de Silentio thinks a proper understanding of the Akedah hangs; and, it is only by way of such a reconciliation, he concludes, that one can truly understand the duties one is called to by faith in the absolute.
This is, of course, the whole point of Kierkegaard’s excursion: to work out through de Silentio a definition of faith as the embrace of precisely such a “paradox” whereby, he writes, “a single individual as the particular is [elevated] higher than the universal,” and is moreover “justified over against the latter not as subordinate but superior to it.”12 For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s act, by virtue of faith, not only falls outside the realm of the ethical order; it falls outside the realm of rational judgment in toto. It is, in the words of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “a foolishness to the world.”13 As such, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio argues, Abraham’s actions cannot properly be understood within the limited borders of finite human understanding, ethical or otherwise, and cannot be subject, therefore, either to rational judgment or to ethical condemnation. To the contrary, faith, he suggests, requires commitment to a logical order which breaks with the finite realm of such judgments and transcends into what he calls the order of “infinity.”14 As such, he concludes, faith “does not belong to the distinctions that lie within the proper compass of the understanding.”15 Instead, it can only be understood when one exceeds the limitations of human logic, understanding, and judgment—when one commits oneself wholly to the realm of what he calls “the absurd.”16 It is precisely this appeal to the absurd, according to de Silentio, which is the true excellence of faith—for it is through this transcendence of finite rational judgment, he argues, that the absolute, the infinite, is made manifest in the finite “here below” of existence. So it is, de Silentio further affirms with the Pauline epistle, that the foolishness of faith must be praised as “wiser than the wisest human wisdom,” for it is only through it, he argues, that we can know and see that which lies absolutely beyond human wisdom: the absolute itself—God.17 It is of course for this reason that Kierkegaard has de Silentio infamously conclude that the excellence of Abraham’s faith was precisely the way he transcended through it the universal logic of ethical judgment—the way he managed through faith to “teleologically suspend the ethical.”18
In his act, de Silentio writes, Abraham manages to “transcend the whole of the ethical [by virtue of a] higher telos outside” of and beyond human understanding.19 Indeed, it is on this basis that de Silentio distinguishes the actions of Abraham, which he praises, from those of a tragic hero, who at times must also sacrifice what is best to him or herself in order to achieve an ethical aim. But, “[where] the tragic hero is [only apparently] great by his ethical virtue,” de Silentio reasons, “Abraham is [actually] great by a purely personal virtue”—a virtue which operates in exceedance of ethical judgment and which elevates him, as an individual, over and above the realm of the finite values of every other mortal creature and brings him in relation with an infinite and eternal absolute.20 This is the critical difference between the two according to de Silentio: the “tragic hero still remains within the ethical,” his or her actions defined entirely within the limits of “the ethical relation between father and son or daughter and father to a sentiment that has its dialect in its relation to the idea of the ethical life.”21 By contrast, he argues, in faith “the single individual . . . determine[s] his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.”22 It is on this basis, Kierkegaard’s de Silentio concludes, that faithfulness to the demands of the absolute, however apparently absurd to the finite logic of human reason, is actually a superior mode of action than that which is merely ethical. Since the ethical person can only ever act on the basis of a rational judgment measured in relation to the universal value of all existent mortal and finite things, he argues, the actions of the ethical person have no ultimate, eternal, nor absolute value. As a result, he concludes, the meaning of those actions can only ever be fleeting and transitory, measured exclusively within the framework of the terrestrial and the human, bearing no eternal weight. By contrast, he argues, the person of faith, acting on the basis of a “duty to [an absolute] God” who transcends the value of all other things, manages to supersede his or her own finitude in infinite power and glory.23 As such, he reasons, the actions of the knight of faith register within the realm of the eternal and the infinite and bear a lasting significance. Indeed, for de Silentio what we witness in the absurdity of an act of faith is a sort of apotheosis of the divine—an appearance within the finite realm of human action of the power and glory of the absolute and infinite.
It was for this reason that de Silentio concluded that “there is an absolute duty to God” which could justify even the murder of a child, “for in this relationship of duty, the single individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute.”24 Abraham’s virtue, de Silentio thinks, rests in the fact that he “does not resist [his absolute duty to God],” but instead accepts it wholly, abandons the ethical, and works diligently to manifest the demands of the absolute fully within the finite realm of human action.25 By virtue of Abraham’s “teleological suspension of the ethical,” he argues, the power and might of the divine appears within the human. In this regard, de Silentio suggests, in Abraham’s act of faith one catches a glimmer of the incarnation of the divine which will ultimately come in the form of the messiah.
Note that the key factor in Abraham’s excellence, for de Silentio, is that he does not stop to measure God’s command to “make a burnt offering” of his son Isaac by virtue of ethical or rational thought. He does not stop to measure nor judge the commands of the divine. Instead, he gives himself over fully to the infinite logic of the absolute and works immediately to actualize the demands of his God “on earth as it is in heaven.” Abraham’s virtue, Kierkegaard concludes, lies in his willingness to submit to the transcendental logic of absolute goodness and not count the ethical costs. His virtue grows from his willingness to acquiesce and to say “yes, thy will be done” to the absurdity of the infinite’s demand.
Kierkegaard’s argument is so essential to the study at hand because it illustrates precisely what is wrong with the ethical systems of the West—namely, that they define virtuous action as obedience to an idea of the absolute which is identified as wholly good but which, precisely by virtue of being absolute, is actually capable of justifying terrifying actions within the here and now, like the murder of a child. In a sense Kierkegaard is right: the concept of the absolute introduces an absurd logic which not only justifies, but even demands that one break with his or her ethical duty to others. Where Kierkegaard is wrong is his insistence that such a break constitutes the excellence of faith. Let’s call it what it really is: madness and evil—something which must be resisted vehemently in order to pursue true excellence. The value of Kierkegaard’s analysis lies precisely in showing us how and where ethical judgment fails: namely, inasmuch as it gives way to the commands of the absolute. What Kierkegaard’s account of the logic of the absolute grants us is a better understanding of how obedience to the absolute functions to ground and justify evil.
What motivates and justifies the actions of the suicide bomber if not the absurd logic demanded by faith in the absolute—a faith by which he or she can teleologically suspend his or her duty to not kill? What is at work in those who would train children to martyr themselves in the name of their religion or nation if not the concept of an absolute value which transcends the value of all finite existence? Do we not also witness such an “elevation of the individual” over and above the rational principles which govern our ethical relation to others in the logic of the one-percent as they exonerate and even extoll their exploitation of the world? And wasn’t it by virtue of a similar call to infinite obeisance to the absolute will of the master that the inhabitants of Jonestown drank their infamous “Kool-Aid,” the members of the “Solar Temple” killed children and ultimately themselves, and the devotees of Aum Shinrikyo poisoned commuters on the Tokyo subway with sarin gas? Isn’t there even something of this logic at work in the rhetoric of the white supre macist or the plantation owner in the southern United States and Caribbean as they demanded the fealty of their chattel and sanctified the subjugation of black bodes in the name of an absolute racial order? Is this not the “great white burden” as they see it: to suppress the many in the name of some transcendent and absolute order and truth? Are these all examples of excellence, manifestations of the divine, and inheritors of Abraham’s saintliness? Or, are these not acts of evil, acts which we must ardently denounce?
Unfortunately, if we follow Kierkegaard and his logic of the absolute, we cannot denounce them. Instead, we must count such actions as transcendentally good. Indeed, we must sanctify them as manifestations of the divine and count them as premonitions of the messianic age. What we discover from an analysis of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is ironically precisely the opposite of what he intended: namely, a powerful argument in favor of the ethical necessity of resisting the absolute. Indeed, what we get from his work is an even better understanding of the sad reality that where the absolute is affirmed as a good, concrete ethical duties between humans necessarily collapse and evil flourishes. What we discover, in other words, is the repugnance of any ethics which seeks to affirm the absolute and the exigency of the cultivation of an ethics which would resist it. This conclusion is true whether the order of the absolute is assigned to a divine person or to a terrestrial reality. The actions and logic of Adolf Eichmann during the Second World War are especially instructive here.
A report on the banality of evil revisited
In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Hannah Arendt notes that she went to Jerusalem in 1961 to attend the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects and executioners of the Shoah, expecting to see the very face of evil—a grimacing macabre visage twisted in rancor and hate. What she found instead, she details, was an individual she described as mild mannered, even meek—a pencil pusher of a man who maintained his innocence before the law on the basis that he was just obeying “superior orders.”26 It was in fact on this basis, as she reports, that Eichmann maintained not only his innocence, but in fact his excellence. Indeed, as she details, Eichmann felt that he should be praised for his dutiful obedience to his masters. As Arendt writes, Eichmann maintained throughout his trial that “he had always been a law-abiding citizen, because Hitler’s orders, which he had certainly executed to the best of his ability, had possessed ‘the force of law’ in the Third Reich.”27 As a result, she details, Eichmann appeared incapable of understanding why what he had done was wrong. To the contrary, Eichmann seems to have thought of himself as the ideal Kantian citizen, one who submitted his individual interests to the rule of law and the universal logic of the state in pursuit of a perpetual stability and peace, which he argued was the ultimate aim of the Third Reich: to establish a new world order. In any case, he famously contended, in further defense of his innocence, that he had not given the order to kill. Nor, he maintained, had he ever “killed any human being.”28 As he testifies, “I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it.”29 Nevertheless, as Arendt notes:
Nobody believed him. The prosecutor did not believe him, because that was not his job. Counsel for the defense paid no attention because he, unlike Eichmann, was, to all appearances, not interested in questions of conscience. And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar—and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.” However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.”30
According to Arendt, the great cloud of disbelief surrounding Eichmann’s protestations of innocence did not spring from some misapprehension of his character. To the contrary, she famously argued, it grew from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and origin of evil, a misunderstanding which she sought to correct in the conclusion to her report on the Eichmann trial.
The root of the problem lay, she argued there, in the false assumption that evil action always results from some malicious or wicked will, neither of which, she surmised from the testimony, prompted Eichmann’s actions. To the contrary, she argued, Eichmann’s actions were borne of what she termed “a sheer thoughtlessness.”31 On this basis of this conclusion, she argued, the evil of the Shoah should not be attributed to some malevolence within Eichmann or the German nation, but to what she famously termed a certain “banality.”32 For Arendt, this banality is the ultimate ground of the rise of totalitarianism, the horrors of the death camp, and every other manifestation of real evil in the world. It was thus in attempt to devise a means of protecting individuals against such “thoughtlessness” and the horrors which result from it that Arendt dedicated the bulk of her subsequent works: arguing, for example, that in the cultivation of an active “life of the mind,” one finds a solution to the banality of Eichmann’s evil.33 Since, she reasoned, evil is conditioned by the kind of mindless obedience Eichmann exhibited toward his “superior orders,” the aim of ethical action must be to cultivate the strength to resist the lure of such orders, whether they originate with the state, the employer, the neighbor, or even God. Only thusly, Arendt thinks, can evil be prevented and the good preserved. Indeed, it was for this reason that she argued in her later works so passionately for the value of the cultivation of an active interior life. Only through the cultivation of such an active “life of the mind,” she suggests, can one develop the strength to authentically engage with others in the public sphere without giving way to “thoughtlessness” and the “banality of evil.”34
In this regard we find in Arendt’s account of the banality of evil an analog to our claim that evil arises, in contrast to the established history of ethical philosophy, from an all too complacent acquiescence to the “superiority” of some presumed absolute order—in Eichmann’s case, the ideal state. With Arendt, we must assert that the evils of the Shoah, like the evil of Abraham’s attempted murder and the evil of suicide bombings, mass suicide, and unchecked capitalism, are the result of the affirmation of and attempt to actualize completely some absolute demand, whether it be of the state (i.e., Deutschland, in Eichmann’s case), the divine (in Abraham’s), or the dollar (in capitalism’s). But, where we must differ with Arendt is in her assertion that such an assent is always the result of “sheer thoughtlessness.” To the contrary, as we will see in more detail shortly, such actions may result from precisely the opposite: a well-intended and even thoughtful attempt to affirm and actualize some good. As will become clear, the real problem with Eichmann was not his “thoughtlessness,” but his presumption that the good he sought carried the weight of an absolute order—one which demanded that he cast off the idea of a universalizable ethical duty to all in order to realize it completely. Thus, while Arendt asserts that evil action results from an assent of the will, by simply going along with the flow, we must differ with her in thinking that such assent arises from some rational deficiency, some idiotic “thoughtlessness.” In contrast, as we will see, Eichmann’s assent to the will of his masters was borne from his conviction that their commands carried the weight of the absolute. His actions, far from growing from some “sheer thoughtlessness,” in fact emerged from a profound consideration of his duties—only a consideration worked out in the order of the absolute.
The realization that the Shoah did not result from sheer thoughtless passion, but instead originated in a cool, disinterested, and quite abstract rationalization and thorough planning, is part of its horror. The mechanism that drove the efficiency of the Nazi extermination of the Jews was nothing if not thoughtful, calculative, and, to some extent, even rational. As will become clearer, the logic which justified the Shoah grew from an attempt to actualize rationally a perceived absolute value: the purity of race and an unthreatened homeland—a value which called for and even justified the extermination of all perceived Untermenchen and the active pursuit of lebensraum. The trouble with Eichmann and the rest of the German nation at the time was not the fact that they acted thoughtlessly—it was the fact that they employed a logic of absolute and infinite duty to determine their action. The trouble with the Nazi regime was, not unlike Abraham, that it sought to actualize a presumed absolute position perfectly in the finite realm of human action.
Isn’t this, after all, what drove Eichmann to obey the order of his masters so diligently: the sincere belief that he was acting in accordance with the logic of some absolute good, an absolute good that absolved him of his concern for those whom he so casually assigned to death camps with the flick of his pen? Wasn’t Eichmann ultimately compelled by some inner zeal for the Nazi order as the dawning of an absolute good through the rise of the German people and nation—an order which instantiated in its emergence its own rationale and logic? How else do we explain the accounts Arendt gave of how selflessly and tirelessly Eichmann worked to achieve those ends, often staying in the office long past the hour when his colleagues had retired to bed—at times even coming in at weekends to cover the shift of his sick employees? Was such dedication borne out of nothing more than “pure thoughtlessness”? Or, is it more likely that Eichmann acted, like Kierkegaard’s Abraham, in accordance with a rationale and logic which transcended the finite realm of human ethical reasoning and called for a new transcendental logic which, in his own words, superseded the demands of a “humanitarian view”?35 Wasn’t it such a logic that convinced him that the orders he received were “superior,” as he put it, in the first place and not, therefore, subject to the limited, pedestrian, and quotidian logic of human value?
This is precisely what Bettina Stangneth argued in her 2014 reexamination of Eichmann’s actions in Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer.36 There Stangneth makes the convincing case that Eichmann was in fact anything but a mild mannered pencil pusher thoughtlessly caught up in a regime he could scarcely comprehend nor resist even if he wanted to or were to try. To the contrary, Stangneth argues that Eichmann saw himself as a true hero for his actions. In his own words, which Stangneth documents faithfully throughout her book, Eichmann defined himself as “a fanatical warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood,”37 a man faithful to what he took to be an absolute value “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate.’”38 Indeed, as Stangneth quotes, Eichmann identified this value with what he called “a sacred order and a sacred law,”39 one which works for the “benefit [of] my people”40 and was, in its transcendental form, “stronger than any so-called moral requirement.”41 It was in fact from this absolute, this “sacred order and . . . sacred law,” as Eichmann stated over and over again in the Argentina Papers, that he deduced his “true duty.”42
What Stangneth makes clear in her research is that Eichmann’s affirmation and assent to the “superior orders” of the Nazi regime were not borne out of some idiocy or “sheer thoughtlessness”; to the contrary, they came from a thoughtful consideration of what he believed to be his duties to the absolute “sacred law” of blood and nation, a law which, for him, transcended the “moral requirements” of “humanitarian views” and called for obedience to superior logic and rationality, one forged in the fires of the absolute. What is this if not a terrestrial and political analog to the logic of faith which we just examined via Kierkegaard’s account of the Akedah? Is Eichmann’s fanaticism for purity not also a version of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in virtue of some absolute duty, only in this case an absolute political duty? If so, I think we must declare the old truism that identifies the path to hell to be paved with good intentions as not only more horrifyingly true than is commonly admitted; we must also admit that that path can be designed, laid out, and graded with a profound thoughtfulness and attentiveness to rational principles, only rational principles which rest upon the bedrock of the logic required by an affirmation of some absolute.
From these excurses it should be all the more clear that the real ground and condition for evil is not some absence or deficit within the subject. Evil is not the result of incompetence, idiocy, or wickedness. To the contrary, concrete manifestations of evil in social and political history are more often than not borne from a profound desire to affirm and instantiate some idea of the absolute. Given this reality it is time that moral philosophers break with any account of ethical deliberation which demands fealty to the idea of the absolute. It is time that we denounce any logical system which is deduced from the affirmation of transcendental values. It is time that we develop a model of ethical reasoning which does not see the absolute as a force to be obeyed, but instead recognizes it as a force to be vigilantly resisted.
In Paradise Lost, John Milton, perhaps inadvertently, casts the rebellion of the devil against God in the Christian tradition in what could be seen as an almost sympathetic light.43 Indeed, it was this fact which famously drew William Blake to lovingly rhapsodize the virtues of Milton’s devil in his pamphlet on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.44 For Milton, the devil’s virtues grow from his “dauntless courage and considerable pride,”45 his commitment “never to submit or yield,”46 never “to bow and sue for grace with suppliant knee”47 to what he saw as “the tyranny of Heaven,”48 but instead to tirelessly “resist”49 and to perpetually fight to be “free, and to none accountable, preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp.”50 Indeed, it was in praise of the devil’s resistance to the absolute command of God that Milton crafted what is perhaps his most famous edict: that the glory of the devil lies in his commitment “to reign in Hell, [rather] than serve in Heaven.”51 It was for this reason that Milton suggested throughout his work that “the undaunted fiend” should be “admired; admired, not feared.”52 Indeed, as Milton goes to great lengths to show throughout the remainder of Paradise Lost, it is only God, as the ultimate absolute, who should properly be feared.53
With this conclusion we must agree. The absolute must indeed be feared. And, inasmuch as we fear the sovereignty of the absolute, we must redouble our admiration for any devil who would resist it. We cannot let this fear command our allegiance and obedience nor call for our respect and worship as it has in the philosophical and religious traditions of the West. To the contrary, with Milton’s devil we must endeavor to transform this fear into the earnest desire to resist. In other words, albeit against Milton’s intended aim, we must recognize that it is not the divine which we should emulate and seek to instantiate in our thought, speech, and action “on earth as it is in heaven”—but the devil. What we must do to move ethical deliberation forward in the twenty-first century and beyond is to summon the courage of Milton’s devil in our reasoning and, with him, commit ourselves to resisting the tyranny of the heaven of philosophers, the tyranny imposed upon us by a history of a moral yea-saying which has conflated the concept of the absolute with the concept of the good. Against this tyranny, we must open ourselves to the possibility that the good appears only when we refuse to bend our knee to the absolute—where we, like Milton’s devil, summon the courage to commit ourselves to perpetual resistance against the possible tyranny of the absolute.54
Note that in calling for an ethics of resistance, I am not denying the reality nor the power of the absolute. I am not saying with Nietzsche that the god of the philosophers is dead. To the contrary, an ethics of resistance must begin with the recognition that the absolute is still very much alive and with us, manifest in the Other and permeating, therefore, our social, ethical, and political institutions and intuitions. The power of God is indeed omnipresent. Our starting point must be an affirmation of the unassailable logic, power, and might of the absolute. But it must be an affirmation which induces fear and prompts resistance—not an affirmation which inspires admiration and prompts acquiescence.
It turns out that the moral “yea-sayers” of the West have been right in part all along: the absolute is indeed a force to be feared and reckoned with. As the proverb goes, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”55 Let no one count himself or herself wise who does not fear the power of the absolute present in the demands of every Other. What we should fear from this absolute is not its judgment nor displeasure however, but the possibility of evil its existence grounds and can justify. Given this fact, the wisdom which should properly arise from a fear of this absolute is not one which should result in our obedience, but one which solicits our resistance. It is my goal to pursue the wisdom of this fear and to craft from it an ethics which is sympathetic to any devil who would say “no, non serviam” to the absolute power of the Other. It is with this goal in mind that we will turn in the remaining chapters to the work of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault.
It has been said that the greatest deception the devil ever spun was to convince the world that he did not exist. To this we must respond that if this were the case, and the devil did not exist, to amend Voltaire’s quip, “it would be necessary for us to invent him”—not in order to have a scapegoat upon which to pin the blame for evil, but in order to have a hero to teach us how to avoid it and to resist its ultimate ground: the absolute manifest in the demands of the Other.56