Dews - The Idea of Evil

This paperback edition first published 2013

2013 Peter Dews

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2008)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The idea of evil / Peter Dews.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-1704-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-1183-4630-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Good and evil. I. Title.

BJ1406.D49 2007

170dc22

2007012577

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Photo Simon Norfolk / Millennium Images.

Cover design by Nicki Averill Design & Illustration

List of Abbreviations

in memory of

Franois Chtelet (192585)

and Tony Manser (192495)

for whom philosophy was custodian

of an undiminished world

Preface

As my friends and family know only too well, this book has been a long time coming. I must thank Richard Bernstein for planting the seed, by asking me to contribute to a Hannah Arendt Symposium while I was teaching at the New School for Social Research, in the autumn of 1996. The topic, Evil and Responsibility, resonated. Over time I became aware that I could use the idea of evil to access strata of our modern moral and existential orientation that often lie concealed, and to prise open significant rifts in the geology of the culture.

I would like to thank Alan Schrift for providing me with an excellent opportunity to pursue my thinking further, as a visiting professor in the Center for the Humanities at Grinnell College. The weekly faculty seminar on Modernity and the Problem of Evil, which I led there in the autumn of 2001, produced some tough, but amicable exchanges of views, and I am grateful to all those who participated. I am also grateful to Dorothea von Mcke, who invited me to spend a period in the spring of 2003 as Distinguished Visiting Max Kade Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University. There I had the luxury of teaching an intense, rewarding graduate seminar on Adornos Negative Dialectics , and of thinking and writing late into the night about the theory of evil. Mark Anderson, who had succeeded as Chair of the Department by the time I arrived, went out of his way to provide office space and facilities, and I would like to record my thanks to him for being so accommodating to a philosophical interloper.

Over the past decade my thinking about evil has been exposed to the scrutiny of several generations of Essex graduate students. I am grateful to them for their alert engagement, and also to my department and its members for steadfastly protecting a micro-climate that encourages philosophical scope and adventurousness, as well as rigour. The University of Essex accorded me a years study leave in 2002, which enabled me to lay some of the foundations of this book, and an award from the same institutions Research Promotion Fund, in the spring of 2006, gave me additional time to work on some of the chapters. Michael Schwarz of the Archive of the Akademie der Knste in Berlin was tremendously helpful in email correspondence, and I would like to thank the Archive for permission to quote from the transcript of Adornos notes for his seminar on Schellings Die Weltalter, from the Winter Semester 19601. Philomena and Bernard Wills kindly gave me the use of their flat, close by the sea, for several spells of concentrated writing. And Robert Farrow provided vital assistance, at just the right moment, with the finalization of the manuscript.

Among friends and colleagues with whom I have profitably discussed issues addressed in this book, I must mention Andrew Bowie, Paul Davies, Alexander Garca Dttmann, Karl Figlio, Katrin Flikschuh, Raymond Geuss, David McNeill, Mark Sacks, Gareth Steadman Jones, Mike Weston, and Joel Whitebook. A number of people have been kind enough to read all or part of the manuscript in draft, and I am immensely thankful to them for making the time to do so, and for providing such helpful critical comments. They are Nick Bellorini, Maeve Cooke, Sebastian Gardner, Batrice Han-Pile, Wayne Martin, Stephen Mulhall, Jacqueline Rose, and Nicholas Walker. I also received important advice from the report of Blackwells anonymous reader. I owe a special debt to Paul Hamilton who has followed this project with generous interest nearly all the way through, and has helped to keep me going with his enthusiasm, even during times when I felt I had reached a dead end. Finally, I must thank Maude Dews, and Jacob, Luan and Philomena Wills for not allowing me to take myself too seriously, even on this topic; and Clair Wills for her loving support, which makes everything possible.