Evil in Modern Thought

An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton Classics)

By: Susan Neiman

Narrated by: Susan Neiman

This compelling audiobook narrated by Susan Neiman sheds critical light on the problem of evil in modern thought, from the Inquisition to global terrorism.

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For 18th-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.

Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts - combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade - eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed God had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.

Beautifully researched and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense. Featuring a substantial new afterword by Neiman that raises provocative questions about Hannah Arendt's take on Adolf Eichmann and the rationale behind the Hiroshima bombing, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of listeners to this eloquent and thought-provoking meditation on good and evil, life and death, and suffering and sense.

©2015 Susan Neiman (P)2021 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles, 2003

Winner of the Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, American Academy of Religion, 2003

Winner of the Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Philosophy, Association of American Publishers, 2002

"Eloquent...[Neiman argues that] evil is not just an ethical violation, it disrupts and challenges our interpretation of the world." (Edward Rothstein, The New York Times)

"Neiman argues that, confronted with the enormity of the Holocaust, 20th-century thinkers found new grounds to conclude that what we call evil reflects nothing so much as the unintelligibility of the world.... [Her] conclusion is that we should neither abandon reason nor demand the impossible from it but rather rely on it as much as we can to identify the forms of suffering and acts of cruelty that we have the power to prevent, remedy or diminish." (Peter Berkowitz, Washington Post Book World)

"Neiman follows the argument like a sleuth, and, indeed, her book is a kind of thriller: What is it that menaces us? Will we find what evil is? And how may we escape it? The path leads from a God found absent past a Nature that's indifferent till it fetches up at the house of a man himself.... Neiman leads the reader through a careful analysis of the relation of intention, act, and consequence to kinds of useful knowledge and degrees of awareness." (William H. Gass, Harper's Magazine)

"This is an accessible work of philosophy in the best sense, sharply focused on matters of vital human concern and free of the domain tics that mar even allegedly popular works by Anglo-American philosophers." (Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books)

This Book Caused Me to Think

This is a great book if you want to develop your skills to critically think.

Genuinely enlightening

I am decently familiar with some movements in philosophy - epistemology, the philosophy of math, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and certain specific schools of ethics. I am familiar in passing with figures like Kant.

This book makes a very compelling argument, but just as importantly to me, it provides a phenomenal overview of the philosophies of many important thinkers. I thought I understood the rough shape of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies, but Evil in Modern Thought both showed me how poorly I understood their philosophies, and also showed me how much I had understood their philosophies through a modern, secular lens. By placing these philosophies and others in their proper historical context, Neiman paints a picture of the broad arc of the philosophy of theodicy, and shows how a true understanding of many famous philosophers’ works require understanding them in the context of that arc. I feel now that, regardless of my views on Neiman’s core thesis, I understand those philosophies far better than I did before (and for what it’s worth, I also find her argument compelling).