Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi, a major Italian poet of the nineteenth century, was also an expert in evil to whom Schopenhauer referred as a “spiritual brother.” Leopardi wrote: “Everything is evil. That is to say, everything that is, is evil; that each thing exists is an evil; each thing exists only for an evil end; existence is an evil.” These and other thoughts are collected in the Zibaldone, a massive collage of heterogeneous writings published posthumously. Leopardi’s pessimism assumes a polished form in his literary writings, such as Dialogue between Nature and an Islander (1824)—an invective against nature and the suffering of creatures within it. In his last lyric, Broom, or the flower of the desert (1836), Leopardi points to the redeeming power of poetry and to human solidarity as placing at least temporary limits on the scope of evil.

Meat and Evil

In a world where meat is often a token of comfort, health, hospitality, and abundance, one can be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the conjunction “meat and evil.” From another perspective, the problem is obvious: meat—the flesh of slaughtered animals taken for food—is the remnant of a feeling creature who was recently alive and whose death was premature, violent, and often gratuitous. The truth is that meat has a checkered history in the west. From its origin-story in Abrahamic religion to its industrial production today, meat is well-marbled with evil and its minions: sin, violence, injustice, destruction, suffering, and death. My aim is to consider meat’s fitness for a place in the Western history of evil by reflecting on its outsized roles at the bookends of this narrative: meat’s primeval history in Genesis, and its contribution today to ethical and environmental problems of arguably apocalyptic proportions.

What Happened to Evil?

This chapter explores the reasons why the problem of evil was ignored in twentieth-century mainstream philosophy. It first examines the belief that the problem of evil is a religious problem and argues to the contrary that while the problem of evil is one of the major impulses behind the development of religion, religion is not the source of the problem of evil. It then argues that the problem of evil is the driving force behind most of modern philosophy. Special focus is given to nineteenth-century philosophy, which was often largely ignored in the analytic tradition precisely because it was so focused not only on understanding but also solving the problem of evil. While sometimes expressed in secular form as a claim about progress in history, the problem of evil plays a central role in the work of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, each of whose work is briefly explored with reference to that role.

Is Don Giovanni Evil?

Although Mozart’s librettist for Don Giovanni, Lorenzo Da Ponte, explicitly invoked Dante’s Inferno as a source of his inspiration, both text and music tell a much more ambivalent story. The parts of the action familiar to its first audiences (the night-time escape and duel, the country maid, the statue of the dead Commander coming to dinner) were complicated by Don Giovanni’s persuasive, even heroic music and the hyper-dramatic self-justifications by his would-be conquests. Chronicling the Don’s last day, the opera focuses on his behaviors both nonchalant and impassioned as well as the inability of patriarchal norms and punishments to contain him. The opening scene, the episodic introduction of the women, and the serenade in Act II are seen here as telling examples of Mozart and Da Ponte’s desire—as in their other two collaborations, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte—to accommodate a serious moral tale to the poignant delights of comic opera. They reveal a vision of the Don beyond good and evil.

Feminine Evil and Witchcraft

The brief Reflection looks at the history of witches in both early modern Europe and the New World. Thousands of women were condemned as witting or unwitting sources of physical and metaphysical evil. Witches were blamed for a variety of misfortunes including illness, crop failure, and the deaths of babies or mothers during childbirth. Evils committed by witches were objects of lurid fascination attributed to demonic forces, documented by monks, priests, and church authorities. Eroticized accusations reflected profound misogyny and suspicion toward those who did not conform to the patriarchal norms of church and society. Many of these witches were put to death in horrible ways, thereby adding rather than subtracting from the evils in the world.

Dante on the Evil of Treachery

Dante is a superb Thomist; and, in his Divine Comedy, he puts flesh on Aquinas’s sophisticated philosophical and theological views by means of an allegory with novelistic elements. In the Inferno, Dante the traveler exemplifies the way in which to do well what the sinner in hell did horribly. The punishment of the sinner shows the ugliness of a particular evil, and the actions of Dante the traveler show something powerfully good that is the alternative, the near neighbor, of the evil. By this twinned means, the nature of the seven deadly sins is vividly exposed, and true goodness and love, opposed to all the seven deadly sins, is illuminated and poignantly depicted. Furthermore, Dante is not only a superb Thomist and an insightful philosopher in his own right, but he incarnates the philosophy in narrative; and that makes all the difference in the world to his ability to give us insight into evil.

Hell as a Problem of Evil in Medieval Women Mystics

In the thirteenth century, it was unusual to regard the doctrine of hell as generating a problem of evil that needs to be solved. For most scholastic theologians it was, rather, a large part of the effort to create a theodicy for evil. Nevertheless, there were dissenters. In this Reflection, I consider the resignatio ad infernum tradition—most powerfully articulated by a number of women mystics writing in the vernacular—in which love of God, love of neighbor, and a willingness to be damned in solidarity with reprobates were simultaneously upheld. I also consider some later iterations of similar ideas in Dostoevsky and Camus.

On Google and Not Being Evil

In this Reflection, an early product manager at Google discusses his view of the way the famous motto in the company Code of Conduct—“Don’t be Evil”—functioned to prevent certain kinds of ruthlessness, but also to improve the relationship with the customer and the corporate bottom line. The author argues that, contrary to popular opinion, Google in fact tried to avoid exploiting the user data that they collected, as well as data from Google Analytics, and that the “Don’t be Evil” motto was important in helping employees make good decisions. The Reflection is thus a kind of apologia on behalf of Google (at least in its early days) against now-familiar charges that it is part of the company’s essential strategy to engage in various nefarious activities.

Satanically Great Instigators and Banal Compliers

This Reflection focuses on three of the great threats we confront in thinking about evil. First, we often forget to distinguish clearly between instigators of evil and compliers with evil. Second, we are too often tempted to think of the instigators as satanically great embodiments of pure evil—outside the moral domain. Second, we are also tempted to think that compliers are all banal and, in some sense, less guilty than the instigators.

Evil After the Holocaust

After the Holocaust, we have a new appreciation of the concept of radical evil. Radical evil is evil that is not defined in comparison to the good; it is evil even when there is no good. Crimes against humanity, or crimes that challenge the concept of humanity, are challenges to the whole code, not infractions of some rule. Because radical evil transcends the law, the commission of radical evil is inexpiable. Since such a crime has a conceptual basis, instigators are as guilty if not guiltier than perpetrators. The Holocaust, by linking radical evil to mass extermination, marks a new phase in our historical experience. The contrast between good and evil is replaced by the contrast between good and neutral. Since radical evil reconfigures the good as the neutral, and then also reconfigures the evil as neutral, neutrality in the face of radical evil is no longer an option.