Evil Genius Research Articles

Is the Psychiatrist a Good or Evil Genius for her Patient According to Hegel?

Is the Psychiatrist a Good or Evil Genius for her Patient According to Hegel?

Longing for the Sonderweg

The highly controversial idea of Sonderweg, a special path to modernity, is frequently invoked to depict the history of Germany in the twentieth century. Initially claimed by nationalists as an exceptionalism proudly opposed to the development of both France and the United Kingdom, the German Sonderweg became a stigma after 1945, the mark of the wrong turn that had led to National Socialism. Beyond these debates, the thought remains that, under the shadow of this supposedly unique destiny, Germany was a volcano of aesthetic and intellectual creativity. This article analyzes the mental and cultural inversion produced by the end of the Cold War and the birth of a new “Berlin Republic.” From 1990 on, German politics and society tenaciously pursued a project of “normalcy” that consolidated both its democracy and its economy by establishing Berlin leadership in Europe. But this spectacular accomplishment also meant intellectual dryness and a memorial “wisdom” combined with a conservative “constitutional patriotism.” This inverted Faustian fate—conformist and mediocre prosperity instead of evil genius—is the transitory aftermath of a century of fire and blood.

Retraction Notice to “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity”

Retraction Notice to “Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity”

Guerre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and: Londres by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Reviewed by: Guerre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and: Londres by Louis-Ferdinand Céline Kai Maristed LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE Guerre Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 192 pages. LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE Londres Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 576 pages. WHEN A FIRST novel by an unknown Louis-Ferdinand Céline appeared in French bookstores in 1932, it swiftly sold an unheard-of fifty thousand copies. Voyage to the End of Night, a bitter reckoning with the First World War and the capitalist free-for-all that followed, narrowly lost the Goncourt Prize due to language deemed crude and objectionable, and cynical descriptions of brutal warfare and brutal sex. But Céline's barrier-breaking style (brief sentences in street lingo, yet grammatically deft) would soon liberate a generation of writers in France and beyond, including Hemingway and Henry Miller. Now considered to be one of the great works of European literature, Voyage figures on the Guardian's list of "100 Greatest Novels of All Time." Yet, after informally asking around, I find that few American lit majors today have ever heard of Céline, who went on to write ten or so more novels. In 2019 the sensational unveiling of a secret trove of two thousand unpublished pages brought Céline back into the spotlight, boosted by recent articles in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The light's not always flattering. Many readers and critics reject the man and thus his work. Céline is now known to have penned, in the late 1930s, three anti-Semitic pamphlets, so grotesque that some at the time took them for satire. Fearing arrest as the Allies drew close, he fled Paris in panic and disgrace, sans his drafts but with his wife and their cat under his arm. He's seen as a weirdly gifted pariah: even, in Adam Gopnik's words, "an evil genius." (Gopnik simultaneously advises readers "to admire" Céline.) Most of the current commentary skims lightly over the two novels extracted to date from the trove, Guerre and Londres, before diving into the familiar debate about Morality of the Artist versus Value of the Art. Can there be gradations or mitigating circumstances? Or must an unyielding line be drawn? (My own thoughts can be found in an essay written for Agni shortly after Peter Handke won his Nobel.) What about the two unearthed novels? Edited by Gallimard from pages smeared with corrections and illegible words, they are nowhere near final form, and so thick with argot as to require a dictionary appendix. Otherwise, they are a study in contrast. [End Page 73] Laurel and Hardy, if you will. To the book world's surprise, Guerre, at barely 150 pages, shot to the top of the best-seller lists for weeks last spring and is still going strong. Londres, a dense six hundred or so pages, came out in October to similar buyer enthusiasm, despite reviewers' caveats. Apparently, the French, at least, still have an appetite for Céline, who is regularly set on a level with Proust, and whom Philip Roth termed "a very great writer." Guerre is breathtaking. Its immediacy, its ostinato of physical pain, its lewd and desperate milieu of wounded soldiers in a field hospital behind the front lines, will either repel or draw you in with its sardonic wit and glints of tenderness and trapdoor twists of narrative. Like Londres, it is narrated by Ferdinand, a fictional alter ego, both salty and shy, whose story is informed by Céline's own devastating experiences during the war. Its opening lines set the tone for all that follows: "I must have stayed there for another part of the following night. All my left ear glued by blood to the ground, my mouth as well. Between the two there was an immense noise." Around him lay dead comrades, already being pillaged by rats. It rains. Against the odds, Ferdinand makes it to his feet, is discovered by a friendly British soldier, tries in his brain fog and the barrage of explosions in his ears to escape back to his own missing unit. But the Brit prevails, and Ferdinand finds himself eventually in hospital...

Murder among the Mormons

Murder among the Mormons

Mad scientists in H. G. Wells's early fiction

This article analyses six mad scientist characters from H. G. Wells's early fiction. The analysed mad scientists are as follows – the Bacteriologist from "The Stolen Bacillus", Hapley from "A Moth – Genus Novo", the Time Traveller from The Time Machine, Doctor Moreau from The Island of Doctor Moreau, Griffin from The Invisible Man, and Cavor from The First Men in the Moon. The article uses a broader definition of the mad scientist, one that includes not only evil scientific geniuses but also other, more benign characters, as long as they are eccentric enough to be considered mad. The said mad scientists are divided into three different categories, depending on whether they are evil, benign or neither of the two. The article shows that the analysed mad scientists reflect the early Wells's disbelief in the power of science to change the world for the better. It is also argued that Wells's varied body of mad scientists enriched and diversified the mad scientist trope in the history of the SF genre.

I HAVE ALL SORTS OF VOICES IN MY HEAD MEDITATIONS ON GEORGY CHERNAVIN’S BOOK THE CONSCIENCE’S DOUBLE Chernavin G. The Conscience’s Double. Moscow, 2023. (In press)

The review analyzes the book The Conscience’s Double by Georgy Chernavin. I focus on the concepts of false twins of conscience, guilt, and duty in the extended context of philosophical and artistic discourse. The problem of the difference between conscience and its ersatz forms, which give rise to a distorted ethical consciousness, is considered. The main emphasis is opportunistic conscience, neurotic guilt, and false debt. The review suggests that Chernavin’s book studies the “sad theory” of moral disorientation and requires the supplementation with a hypothetical “cringe theory.” In this case, the “sad theory” makes it possible to expand the phenomenological discourse by including a discussion of conscience, illustrating the uncertainty of the boundaries between the phenomenological and the symbolic, and highlighting the subject’s dependence on what they are not. In this work, there is a potential for developing an original ontology of the relationship between conscience and its evil counterpart, especially between a “spiritually sighted” and a “blindly corporeal” person. The scrutinized guilt for the lost absence of guilt is an experience that, although not lived, is important for the subject’s self-constitution. This experience, like the inner side of the subject, determines its conscious functioning and forms something like a Mobius strip. An Evil Genius makes this bond, and I am trying to conceptualize their “weakened” being.

Why Fans of the Evil Genius Remain Fans: The Case of Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival

An enduring feature of public life has been the social death of prominent artists, impresarios and entertainers after moral transgressions. But not everyone is shunned. Often fans and general audiences continue to consume, advocate and revere the artistic product of tainted but gifted individuals. How is this love of the ‘evil genius’ possible? The article provides answers with reference to the paradigm case of Richard Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival that he founded. The composer and event remain contaminated by deep association with antisemitism, Hitler and the Third Reich. We draw from an interview study with Wagner fans and opera connoisseurs to report on the interpretative techniques, justifications and folk-logics through which Wagner’s operas can still be listened to and found pleasurable in light of a troubled history. These involve articulations between and over four domains: (i) self (ii) artwork (iii) artist and (iv) history. These are variously connected and disconnected. We speculate that this four-factor model will be applicable in other domains where art, politics and morality make for uneasy bedfellows and the ‘evil genius’ remains culturally salient.

Resurrecting the evil genius: examining the relationship between unethical behavior and perceived competence

PurposeUsing the stereotype content model (SCM) as a framework, the authors examine how the negative relationship between peoples’ unethical behavior and perceptions of their competence only holds when the unethical act is simple.Design/methodology/approachIn two studies, participants (n = 401) evaluated the competence of an employee who behaved unethically. In one condition, the unethical behavior was complex (e.g. computer hacking), while in the other it was simple (e.g. stealing items from a closet).FindingsOur findings are built on prior work by showing that employees are considered significantly more competent when their unethical behavior is complex as opposed to simple (“evil genius” effect).Practical implicationsEmployees may not be discouraged from engaging in complex unethical behavior if they recognize that it might not affect their reputation as a competent employee. Given the negative impact of unethical behavior, this is a consequence that organizations would likely seek to avoid.Originality/valueThe authors expand on the SCM by making a clear distinction between how certain behaviors (unethical and complex) influence trait perceptions (warmth and competence). In doing so, the authors identify a moderator – act complexity – that weakens the negative relationship between individuals’ unethical behavior and perceptions of their competence.

Foucault's Strange Eros

Foucault's Strange Eros

From Metapsychology to Magnetic Gnosis: An Esoteric Context for Interpreting Traumatic Modes of Transcendence in Sándor Ferenczi'sClinical Diaryand Elizabeth Severn'sThe Discovery of the Self

It has been argued that the essential themes in Sándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1932) centre around three major axes (theoretical, technical and personal). This paper proposes a fourth: namely, an occult or esoteric axis. To make the case for its presence in the Clinical Diary, the article provides a brief introduction to the academic study of Western esotericism in order to more adequately situate its proximate fin de siècle occult precursors vis-à-vis psychoanalytic metapsychology. A brief account of Ferenczi's correspondence with Freud on the role of the occult in psychoanalysis is then provided. This constitutes the necessary context for embarking upon an investigation into the ‘psychognostic’ metapsychology co-developed during the course of Ferenczi's ‘mutual analysis’ with the so-called ‘evil genius’, Elizabeth Severn. By way of conclusion, James Grotstein's account of a ‘numinous and immanent psychoanalytic subject’ is highlighted as the locus for a synergistic rapprochement between pre-Freudian and contemporary psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the subject congruent with the ‘Orphic trajectory’ outlined in this paper.

The Party of Evil Genius in Orwell’s 1984

This paper explores the strategies of Evil Genius for manipulating people’s principles, thoughts, orientations, and ideologies in favor of promoting the logic of the party of Evil Genius, as found in Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Relying on Descartes’s definition of Evil Genius, we argue that the party in 1984 deploys the strategies of delusional propaganda, memory resetting, and doublethink to convince people of the significance of Big Brother for their peace and prosperity. The paper examines the party’s approach towards Winston, who has always been suspicious of the party, contending that the party successfully toys with Winston’s mental and emotional perspectives, thus leading him to view his own ego or rationale as his worst enemy. Such a reading is significant due to potential similarities between Winston’s experience of victimization and people’s feeling of being victimized by the party of Evil Genius in the postmodern society.

The “Evil Genius”: Examining the Relationship Between Perceived Competence and Unethical Behavior

Given the importance that perceptions of competence play in the workplace, a field of research has emerged identifying predictors of competence. One variable that has been identified is unethicality, with greater unethical behavior indicating lower competence. However, across three experiments (N = 602), we challenge this potentially misleading notion and present evidence that this relationship only holds when the unethical behavior is simple (e.g., stealing items from a storage closet), but not complex (e.g., computer hacking). Drawing on the stereotype content model, we explore the “evil genius” archetype in more detail. We find that the interaction between unethicality and complexity on perceptions of creativity and leadership is mediated by perceptions of competence. However, when the perpetrator is caught for complex unethical behavior, it acts as a leveling agent, thereby removing any heightened perceptions of competence. While expected, we did not find evidence that getting caught influences perceptions of the perpetrator’s social intelligence. We believe these findings offer a significantly more accurate picture of the connection among unethical behavior in the workplace, competence, and being caught for one’s immoral actions.

Evaluation and selection of creative ideas in organizations

Creativity scholars suggest that innovation involves idea generation, idea evaluation and selection, and finally, idea implementation. Yet, until recently, creativity research has mostly focused on idea generation. While work on idea generation has provided influential insights, it paints an incomplete picture of innovation in organizations. This is because only a small subset of the generated ideas ever reach the implementation stage, and numerous types of biases can hinder the identification of the best ideas. The purpose of this symposium is to discuss new theory and research on the evaluation and selection of creative ideas in organizations. The papers in this symposium highlight different biases in the evaluation process and how they could be mitigated. The compound of the papers provides a comprehensive view of the evaluation and selection of creative ideas at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., individual, dyadic, group), with a variety of methods (i.e., grounded theory, laboratory experiments, archival study), and across a range of contexts (e.g., internal idea selection panels, leader-member creative collaborations, and crowdfunding platforms). How Preference Diversity Amplifies Uncertainty and Reduces Group Preference for Novel Ideas Presenter: Wenxin Xie; U. College London Presenter: Sarah Harvey; UCL School of Management Presenter: Haoyue Zhang; Washington U. in St. Louis, Olin Business School Presenter: Poornika Anantha Ramakrishnan; Rotterdam School of Mgmt Presenter: William Bottom; Washington U. in St. Louis Expand Your Scope to Engage the Tension: How Leaders Overcome a Bias against Novelty Presenter: Jennifer Mueller; U. of San Diego Presenter: Yidan Yin; U. of California, San Diego Presenter: Mathias Simmons; U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences Evil Genius? How Unethical Pro-Organizational Behavior Impacts Creativity Recognition Presenter: Qing Gong; Georgia Institute of Technology Presenter: Jiani Zhu; Georgia Institute of Technology Presenter: Christina Shalley; Georgia Institute of Technology Stereotyped as a Creative: Cues of Unconventionality Bias Idea Evaluation Presenter: Jack Anthony Goncalo; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Presenter: Ozias Moore; Lehigh U. The Effect of Geographical Discrimination on Investment Decisions Presenter: Xingye Liang; Vrije U. Amsterdam Presenter: Markus Baer; Washington U. in St. Louis Presenter: Jung Hyun Lee; Washington U. in St. Louis, Olin Business School

Becoming a Name

Becoming a Name Seamus Perry (bio) Michael O'Neill has shown how closely Tennyson read Shelley, and that Alastor in particular possessed a special "centrality" to Tennyson's "poetic vision and practice."1 The poem certainly anticipates a recurrent theme in many of Tennyson's most powerfully unresolved poems, which is what sort of duty the imagination might (or might not) owe to the world outside imagination—the kind of question you see explored in "The Poet's Mind" and "The Palace of Art," and, in more oblique ways, "The Lady of Shalott" and several others. For it is in Alastor that Shelley's passionate commitment to the truth of the imagination is most strikingly wrapped up with something almost exactly the opposite: the "powerful sub-theme," as O'Neill calls it, which is "the sense that idealistic quest may be fated only to find images of its own longing" (p. 186). The poem presents its readers with two contradictory attitudes toward the figure of the Poet-protagonist, who seems all set up to be criticized for his "selfcentred seclusion" (as Shelley puts it in the preface) but who ends the poem acclaimed as "some surpassing Spirit, / Whose light adorned the world around it."2 Some of the allusions in the poem might suggest that these contested attitudes stem from the way Shelley felt about Wordsworth: he quotes admiringly from The Excursion in the preface, and identifies "natural piety" as a virtue in the invocation; but the Poet's loss of powers is also unmistakably Wordsworthian in its cast ("Whither have fled / The hues of heaven").3 Whatever the truth about Wordsworth's role, Alastor clearly portrays a figure who is both heroic and admirable and yet, no less possibly, is a warning example of precisely what not to do with one's gifts. That sort of poised rhetorical indecisiveness was a phenomenon that seems to have interested Tennyson very much: as O'Neill says, many poems by Shelley and Tennyson "convey duplicity of intent through adroit formal manoeuvres" (p. 185). "Duplicity" is a striking and characteristically astute word for him to use: for to bring in the idea of duplicity acknowledges a tradition of more simply negative responses to Shelley, which sees in him a man altogether too ready to take the wish for the deed. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, for instance, considered him "altogether incapable of rendering an account of any transaction whatsoever, according to the strict and precise truth, and the bare naked realities of actual life," not because of an inclination to falsehood as such but because of his "irresistible [End Page 127] imagination." Thomas Love Peacock quotes Hogg to agree that their friend was disposed to "narrating, as real, events which had never occurred": analogously, the only thing wrong with his poetry, Peacock said, was "the want of reality in the characters."4 When he uses the word "duplicity," Michael O'Neill has uppermost in mind Shelley's "England in 1819," a poem at once full of revolutionary hope and vivid despair, a mixture of feelings caught in what O'Neill calls the poem's "calculatedly dithering firmness" (p. 185): the analogy he draws is with Tennyson's speaker at the end of Maud, passionately full of a conviction of God's purpose and yet really still adrift in the neurosis that has stymied him throughout. Shelley's duplicity of intent is a well-meant attempt to feel better about things pour encourager les autres; Tennyson's is a more selfconsciously dramatic interest in the predicament of one who is badly at odds with himself. Peacock reports in his Memoir that Shelley "was at a loss for a title" for Alastor, and that it was he, Peacock, who suggested what it should be called: "The Greek word 'Aλάστωρ is an evil genius, κακοδαίμων, though the sense of the two words is somewhat different, as in the Φανεὶς ἀλάστωρ ἢ κακὸς δαίμων ποθέν, of Aeschylus." The Greek phrase comes in a speech from Aeschylus's Persians in which a messenger is trying to explain Xerxes's defeat at Salamis: it must have been owing to "some destructive power [alastor] or evil spirit [daimon]," he says, which are indeed not the same thing. Peacock goes...

The Cogito Paradox

The Cogito formulation in Discourse on Method attributes properties to one conceptual category that belong to another. Correcting the error ends up defeating Descartes’ response to skepticism. His own creation, the Evil Genius, is to blame.

El cuerpo del terror: el genio maligno en La Casa Muda

This paper investigates the nature of the ghost and terror into philosophical thought, and how it allows us to reconsider, in the field of epistemology, the experience of terror in the perception, understanding and knowledge about reality. This analysis is developed, firstly, by means of the recovering of the evil genius figure mentioned in the Metaphysical Meditations by Rene Descartes, which provides a key to reconsider terror as an element present in the conformation of subjectivity. Besides that, it is based on the considerations on Jacques Derrida’s cinema as a device for the production of spectra, meanwhile it allows us to understand the figure of the ghost as that which disrupts and alters the reality. Both lines of study converge in the analysis of the Uruguayan horror film The Silent House, directed by Gustavo Hernandez, which opens the possibility of appreciating how terror is a bodily experience that allows the subject to access a new understanding of himself and his world.

The evil genius of Iranian constitutionalism? ‘Bloody Shapshal’ at the Qajar court

Late Imperial Russia’s multifaceted presence in Persia retains many fascinating life-stories of its actors, who often exerted crucial influence on the course of the history of Russian-Iranian relations of the time. Drawing on international scholarship about the Russian-Iranian relationships at the turn of the twentieth century, but mostly on documents from Russian and Georgian archives and the diaries of his contemporaries as well as his own private notes, this article examines the activities of Seraia Shapshal (1873–1961), focusing on his embeddedness both in the Qajar court and in Late Imperial Russia’s policy towards Iran during the period 1900 to 1908. The paper for the first time in Iranian studies sheds light in sufficient detail upon how Shapshal found himself in Persia and what enabled him to reach the highest levels of power at the Qajar court. In so doing, it also identifies his leading role in the June 1908 anti-constitution coup.

Précis of The Illusion of Doubt

Abstract The Illusion of Doubt shows that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of our evidential situation—the view that my epistemic grounds in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cases must be the same. It is this picture which issues both a standing invitation to radical scepticism and ensures that there is no way of getting out of it while agreeing to the sceptic’s terms. The sceptical problem cannot, therefore, be answered ‘directly’. Rather, the assumptions that give rise to it, need to be undermined. These include the notion that radical scepticism can be motivated by the ‘closure’ principle for knowledge, that the ‘Indistinguishability Argument’ renders the Cartesian conception compulsory, that the ‘New Evil Genius Thesis’ is coherent, and the demand for a ‘global validation’ of our epistemic practices makes sense. Once these dogmas are undermined, the path is clear for a ‘realism without empiricism’ that allows us to re-establish unmediated contact with the objects and persons in our environment which an illusion of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond our cognitive grasp.

Державний секретар США Джон Фостер Даллес: курс на особисту дипломатію?

The article analyses the figure of John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State during the Dwight Eisenhower Presidency. Sufficient scientific background of the question is devoted mainly to the analysis of this figure from negative positions, attributing to him the role of “experienced evil genius”. The author provides brief biographical information on the life of the Secretary of State in order to find out the conditions under which his character and worldviews formed, which subsequently formed the basis of his political behavior. It is stated that in general, John Foster Dulles was one of the most influential statesmen in the history of the American political establishment. In fact, J. F. Dulles was a reflection of the tension that was so vividly observed in the United States of America in the late 1940s and 1950s, and therefore these factors could not but affect his personal life and career.