Narrating Evil

A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment

Maria Lara

• Editore: Columbia University Press
• Anno: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231511667
• Argomento: Philosophie
• Categoria: Éthique et philosophie morale

Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In Narrating Evil, María Pía Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development.

Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a crime can act as a filter, helping us to draw conclusions about what constitutes a moral wrong, and public debates over these narratives allow us to construct a more accurate picture of historical truth, leading to a better understanding of why such actions are possible.

In building her argument, Lara considers Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's depictions of evil, Joseph Conrad's literary metaphors, and movies that portray human cruelty. Turning to such philosophers and writers as Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariel Dorfman, Lara defines a reflexive relationship between an event, the narrative of the event, and the public reception of the narrative, and she proves that the stories of perpetrators and sufferers are always intertwined.

The process of disclosure, debate, and the public fashioning of collective judgment are vital methods through which we make sense not only of new forms of cruelty but of past crimes as well. Narrating Evil describes the steps of this process and why they are a crucial part of our attempt to build a different, more just world.

PART I

The Concepts and the Tools

CHAPTER 1

Why Do We Need to Create a Moral Image of the World?

The history of freedom begins with evil, for it is the work of man.

—Immanuel Kant¹

Kant was well aware of humanity’s propensity for evil. Much has been written on the subject, yet we hardly understand it. That humans are capable of harming other humans, and of choosing to do so, is still one of the most puzzling questions—dramas—that we must still confront. This problem has lately been addressed by several philosophers who have reexamined previous attempts to consider these issues.² I, on the other hand, will employ a different view as my point of departure. As I explained in the introduction, I wish to address the problem of evil as a moral problem in a postmetaphysical paradigm. By using the term evil, I will present a paradigm that encompasses all our historical experiences in which human cruelty against other humans has been the defining experience of a specific type of act. In other words, the word evil cannot and should not be used in political or religious terms, as well-known politicians have recently done. Instead, I will clarify the importance of this paradigm by relating historical atrocities in which humans have willingly participated and propose that our moral theory of evil is a product of what Habermas has called “learning from catastrophes.”³ Within this moral view, “learning from catastrophes” means that societies confront their past as they come to critically understand what has happened. In the first stage, we have acknowledged that actions once thought to be performed only by nonhuman forces because of their horrendous implications are now considered a significant aspect of human behavior. With the second step, we arrive at the certainty that evil needs its own paradigm. Indeed, by distancing ourselves from the idea that those actions can be grasped only within the realm of justice, we seek to provide an autonomous sphere in which to thematize this type of act. In the last stage, evil can be related to the paradigm of justice only once it has shifted from the moral to the legal point of view. That is, we can locate the actions as crimes against humans once accountability and responsibility are the suitable notions where individuals can be held accountable for their deeds. We have learned about the positive normative aspects of human features only after we have dealt with their violations. This is what learning from catastrophes means. Thus, this theory highlights that even when normative definitions of the good have existed before in moral and legal paradigms, we learn about their true content only if some important catastrophes make us aware of them because these notions were violated in the empirical actions of cruelty between humans. Such is the case with the term humanity.⁴ We can realize that the term is a historical construct that has allowed us to build on new normative contents only once we see what human beings are capable of doing to others in order to harm them. Our notions of evil are all historical, which is why literature is a good example of how actions that were not conceived as evil in the past can now be reassessed as such because of our historical moral understanding of those catastrophes.

I also emphasize our awareness of the notion that evil deeds cannot be properly comprehended within the simple context that suffering possesses some kind of moral meaning outside our moral consciousness. If suffering is such an important dimension of our awareness of evil, it is important to stress that it is we who attach the charge of constructing a symbolic meaning to all our experiences of suffering. This is an anthropological need of humans when confronted with cruelty.

Thus, in the use I will give the term evil, we should distance ourselves from traditional religious or political connotations. I propose, instead, that we use the term in its disclosive capacity so that we can take advantage of what literature and stories can offer in terms of moral knowledge, namely, that stories clearly reveal the darkest sides of human nature without the need to offer conceptual developments. Stories describe how our actions can illustrate human beings’ capacity to hurt and destroy one another. They force us to learn about this type of activity by exercising judgment. Stories do not replace moral knowledge. Rather, we gain knowledge only if we are capable of exercising judgment. When facing events that we might eventually define as “catastrophes,” we rely on powerful historical accounts that name events in a certain way and set forth their description with its new conceptualization to the open public. This is what I have called the disclosive-critical capacity of language. Such was clearly the case with the word Holocaust,⁵ a term used by historians to define the catastrophe inflicted on Jews by the Nazi regime. The Oxford English Dictionary dates “the specific application by historians” to the 1950s. As Tim Cole notices, “The word itself did not appear in the New York Times until 30 May 1959, and interestingly was not used at all by Hilberg in his classic The Destruction of the European Jews.”⁶ It is when a historian or a public figure uses her judgment to name an event that the phrase or word is reappropriated by the public because it defines the specificity of the event. The meaning of being a good exemplar—its disclosive capacity—becomes validated by the public when it is accepted as a moral filter to define a catastrophe. It is in this sense that Cole adds, “Around 95 percent of Americans have heard the term and 85 percent claim to know what it means,” allowing him to conclude that the “word entered our vocabulary and an event entered into our consciousness”⁷ after some important contributions from historians’ narratives. If we are aware that historical accounts have interpretative views, then we must conclude that there is no single, clear, determinate understanding we can draw from the past. But if historical understanding depends on social and historical contingencies, we meet our moral responsibility to past catastrophes in our efforts to build up a moral image of the world by adopting a critical view that is open to revisions. We do so when we can deliberate openly about different accounts of the same events—when we have a critical examination of the data and can highlight what makes a story a good example of a moral view of the problem. This historical process requires collective memory to become a critical vehicle of self-examination through the recovery of stories that show examples of evil. It is for this reason that the socially constructed understanding of evil needs the rule of law to reconsider links between collective memory and accountability. The pivotal role in shaping social memory can be played by the law, as Ruti Teitel has well argued.⁸ These historical narratives possess justificatory epistemes that can define the ways in which our future can be shaped.⁹ This is why we must link the idea of collective memories to accountability: it is through the framework of law that language, procedures, and vocabularies of justice can play an important role in shaping our public opinion. Accounting for the past affects and constructs a distinctive view of justice. Learning from catastrophes relates the paradigm of justice to the paradigm of evil as they converge within the realm of law.

The last stage of our ideas about learning from catastrophes can be completed if we stress that only within our historical assessments, by way of connecting our imagination to our moral understanding, can we build a model for our reflective moral judgments. These judgments will constitute the final stage of this postmetaphysical theory of evil.

The Historical Understanding of Evil Through Literature’s Devices

In the past, evil was a term widely used to describe human suffering, natural disasters, and metaphysical fears related to the existence or the absence of God. Theodicies were the narratives chosen by the traditional philosophy because, by creating them, philosophers sought to relate their concerns about evil with the task of arguing about the existence of God. Their attempts to explain the existence of evil actions and human suffering, while maintaining that it was possible to justify God’s existence, were driven to focus more on the logic of the argument than on the capacity to disclose a hidden dimension about evil interactions between perpetrators and victims. If we focus the attention on the cruelty of human actions, then, we can begin to situate this problem as related to responsibility and choice. Thus, the problem of inflicting suffering through cruelty belongs to the realm of morality, and it should be restricted to moral agency. After all, evil actions only concern human deeds. If we can understand this much, then we are capable of assuming our tragic fate—the realization that our most basic right, human freedom, can also be our worst dilemma. This much was clear to Hannah Arendt, who understood that Kant’s greatest achievement with regard to this matter was his proclamation that evil is a problem related to humans, and that in defining the core of human action we are only concerned with freedom and our capacity to exercise judgment.¹⁰ This crucial connection led Arendt to conceive her idea about a postmetaphysical paradigm of evil by relating human freedom to the judgments of our actions. Arendt also clearly separated an understanding of evil from obscure ideas about psychology, from metaphysical theories about the existence of evil, from concepts such as perverted ill will, and even from the idea that a treatise of evil envisions a realm in which the moral subject is still immersed in the philosophy of consciousness (Kant). By rejecting all of the above, Arendt allowed us to create a new postmetaphysical framework for the problem of evil.

Thus, we must begin by thematizing human cruelty and our capacity to choose to act cruelly in terms of actions exemplified by narrated stories. We highlight how emplotted actions are unfolded as stories that disclose their moral content—not only through the interconnection with our understanding about the complexities of human beings but also because those actions help us configure our moral identities by teaching us to form moral judgments reflectively.¹¹ These stories become the material sources by which we can frame our historical perspective. Because we can recognize in stories the concrete meanings of our evil deeds, this process gains a dimension of moral understanding. I use the notion of “historical understanding” much in the same way that Gadamer used it with his concept of “Wirkungsgeschichte.”¹² In other words, “effective history” is built on the interpretation of a past event as conditioned and valuated through its reading in the present. This important interplay between past and present leads us to make historical judgments by a type of “fusion of horizons” between past and present.¹³ This normative condition also speaks of the impossibility of declaring something evil if it is not reconstructed in light of these two historical stages and with the contrast gained through applied judgment along with our moral imagination. Learning from catastrophes gives rise to a dynamic—a dialectic movement—with our effort to understand what happened in light of the present stage. In that same effort, we gain a space in which to develop our reflective qualities, which allow us to become autonomous moral beings. If we look at the past, we see that in ancient literature, for example, an act such as rape meant something entirely different from what it means now. In Homer’s stories, for example, when the Greeks or the Achaeans won a battle, the spoils of war included the right to take women and rape them (Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women illustrates this point). Only through the evolution of our moral and historical understanding are we able to think of rape as a weapon of war to destroy other humans. We recognize this now because we have heard about the way Serbs raped Muslim women during the Balkan war¹⁴ and that many of these acts were committed during and even after the Sebrenica massacre.¹⁵ Furthermore, because we have made moral judgments about those kinds of actions, we are able to discuss in the public sphere why it is possible to translate the moral meaning of wrongdoing into a positive legal framework within the realm of international law.¹⁶ With our historical understanding of what happened in the Balkan war, we can define rape as a crime against humanity.¹⁷

Let us take a closer look at the way narratives have offered us different notions of the meaning of evil. If evil was ever characterized in ancient times, it was through the idea of Greek tragedies. The notion of evil that these plays reflect is still tied to a metaphysical idea of evil. Tragedies relate to the daimon, emphasizing the relationship between the divine and the human and their inevitable links.¹⁸ It is for this reason that Bernard Williams argues that “tragedies involve supernatural conceptions, in particular of necessity.”¹⁹ Evil, in Greek tragedies, is seen as the product of destiny. It is interesting, however, that Greek tragedy is concerned mainly with action. This dimension deals in one way with what Williams calls “our historical notion of responsibility,” and, on the other hand, with understanding how Greek tragedies became so important to understanding the complexity of human actions. This is why Aristotle believed that such complexity could be shown only through the literary devices of the genre of tragedy—that is, through a plot represented in action.²⁰ It is already known that Martha Nussbaum’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ideas about tragedy emphasizes the role of judgment. According to Nussbaum, tragedies represent action well because one can see the characters choosing and doing (379). She argues that pity and fear are emotions spectators can feel because they understand that our world is fragile and that anyone can make mistakes without necessarily being evil. Pity is the response to witnessing an action of undeserved suffering, says Nussbaum, while fear is produced by the idea that such terrible suffering could occur to any of us (385). In Nussbaum’s interpretation, both pity and fear are “sources of illumination or clarification.” Thus, the representation of actions depicted by Greek tragedies portrays some important knowledge (388). The idea of evil, nevertheless, comes out of the complex web of necessity and chance—out of divine and human sources.²¹ Things happen to the characters or they are driven to some kind of action that is already predestined to be their fate. This concept of action is an important source for the more general historical understanding that sees evil as a paradigm that includes both dimensions—metaphysical and natural disasters—along with our human mistakes and our human frailty.

It is for this reason that the complex relationship between literature and evil can be historically thematized based on how much we have learned about humans from the ways poets and writers have written about them. In this sense, no one has more fully developed the complex idea of modern subjectivity than William Shakespeare. This is also why Harold Bloom has argued that Shakespeare invented the human.²² We see that Shakespeare’s characters “develop, rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves” (xvii). The questions arise: Why is the development of characters the result of the process in which they struggle against evil? And how do they redefine themselves after such struggles? Consider, for example, Shakespeare’s historical evolution through his characters Richard III and, later, Macbeth. The first is a true villain. He is portrayed as the premodern notion of the demonic. He has no doubts, he excludes “piety,” and his naturalism “makes us [aware that we are] all beasts” (65). Richard III has no goodness in his soul. He personifies, or rather simplifies, our view of human character. This play already involves a stylistic change in Shakespeare’s approach because of the new rules that the character establishes with the audience. What is strikingly new about this character is that he is the first to consciously establish an intimate relationship with the audience (70), as if he were its moral conscience. We do not need a chorus, as in Greek tragedies, to make us participants in the performance as witnesses and judges. We are now in a position to establish our dialogue with the main character. Thus, when reading Richard III, we learn about ourselves as we become aware that we are “incapable of resisting Richard’s terrifying charms” (71), which are displayed consciously in front of us—indeed, directed to us—addressing us with his evil self-assurance. He is, nevertheless, a transitional figure of Shakespeare’s modern notion of evil.

Macbeth, on the other hand, is considered Shakespeare’s greatest evil character. As Bloom explains, “In the Renaissance sense of imagination (which is not ours), Macbeth may well be the emblem of that faculty...