Question Of Evil Research Articles

Evil in Stevens’ “Esthétique du Mal” and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima

Evil in Stevens’ “Esthétique du Mal” and Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima Kathryn Chittick A RECENT SPECIAL ISSUE of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 2010) undertook to explore the affinities between Henry James and Wallace Stevens, studying among other topics the relationship between art and life in the aesthetic outlook of both authors (see MacLeod). This essay continues that exploration by juxtaposing two specific works that highlight these fastidious writers’ engagement with world events: what emerges from this is a discussion of the role of art in the modern world as it engages with evil, which is represented in each case by violent political upheaval. In approaching a topic so traditionally central to American literature as the question of evil, Stevens in “Esthétique du Mal” (1944) and James in The Princess Casamassima (1886) place the discussion in a contemporary context of international war and terrorism, respectively. Just as Stevens’ poem was set against the background of the American campaign in Italy toward the end of World War II, James’s novel came out of the Irish terrorism of the 1880s, when British government leaders in Ireland were murdered by the Fenians, dynamite was laid in the London underground, and bombing attempts were made on Scotland Yard, the House of Commons, and the Tower of London. In neither work is there any hope that evil can ever be definitively vanquished, nor is there any Dantesque sense of a comedic progress toward a divine or absolute good. The only approach toward redemption turns out to be self-referential, as both writers intricately measure the potential of art itself to counteract the evil typified by modern destructiveness. Both works remain in this underworld of terrorism and war, which is made particularly unpleasant by acutely contemporary detail. Milton J. Bates remarks that “Esthétique du Mal” is not a poem one turns to even now “for comfort” in a time of crisis (“Pain” 169). Its response to geopolitical events, moreover, is notoriously indirect. At the same time, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan argues that “Esthétique du Mal” is “a poem that acutely needs to be read in its historical ‘moment’” (71). Alan Filreis, nonetheless, usefully reminds us how painstaking one needs to be in discussing specific historical events in the context of Stevens’ poetry (Wallace Stevens 39–40; “Historical” 213), and Bates warns us that those Stevens poems “written [End Page 175] in response to specific historical events are among the least specific” in their references (“Soldier” 208). In one of his undated aphorisms, Stevens himself simply wrote that “Esthétique” could be seen as “the measure of a civilization” (CPP 910), and Bates usefully argues that Stevens was more interested in history’s “moral possibilities” than in its political intricacies (“Soldier” 204). Stevens’ responses to the changes experienced as his country went into wartime modes of production and rationing can be found partly in “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” and “Repetitions of a Young Captain.” Commenting on these, James Longenbach notes that “During the war years, Stevens began to use the words real and fact with increasing urgency” (202). In May 1941, six months before the United States entered World War II, Stevens delivered a lecture at Princeton University, entitled “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in which he testified to the “pressure of reality” on the mind of the poet (CPP 654). In his lecture, he argued that there was more than one sense of what he termed reality: the reality that had become “violent” in Europe and “spiritually violent” everywhere (CPP 659), and “the reality that is taken for granted,” that is, the reality of “the comfortable American state of life of the eighties, the nineties and the first ten years of the present century” (CPP 658). Against the contemporary upheaval in Europe, he juxtaposed the values of the “comfortable” Edenic America he remembered from his own childhood and youth. Those 1880s wistfully recollected by Stevens, however, the same years when James wrote The Princess Casamassima, were in fact also a time of considerable violence throughout Europe. While writing his novel, James spoke of his deep interest in watching the dramatic spectacle of...

Who Bears the Guilt for the Persecution of Witches?

The question of guilt is among the most enduring and seemingly among the most important themes in European intellectual tradition. It is closely related to the question of evil – as in most of our ...

The Question of Evil in Ancient Egypt

The Question of Evil in Ancient Egypt

Le problème du mal dans le <i>Guide des Perplexes</i> et son arrière-plan talmudique

At first sight, the question of evil is regarded in the Guide for the Perplexed in a paradoxical manner. Thus, in Guide I, 2, Maimonides examines the notions of good and evil as subjective evaluations possessing neither the rigour not the exactness of the notions of true and false. However, the question of evil occupies an essential place in the Guide , as various modern authors have shown. This question is important to Maimonides because he is, in this respect, the heir of the rabbinic tradition and his conception of evil is largely based on an interaction with the Talmudic and Midrasic texts. Therefore, we would like to review thirty-nine rabbinic ‘quotes’ which appear in chapters 8 to 24 in the third part of the Guide and deal with the origin of evil, the meaning of suffering and the evil inclination. Maimonides reappropriates the midrasim that are susceptible of being in agreement with his rationalist positions and also quotes some rabbinic traditions that are too close to mu tazilism, undoubtedly aware of the more profound resemblance that exists between the rabbinic and mu tazilite doctrines of evil and retribution.

Whitehead and Aurobindo On The Question of Evil: Does the East Contribute Anything New to this Enigma?

"NO ABSTRACT"

The Problem of Evil in Sand's La Mare au diable and Carl Jung, The Ideology of Sentiment

My thesis insists on the theme of evil implicit in Sand's title to her pastoral novel, La Mare au diable (1846). The question of evil as death (le mal métaphysique) stands out in her preface, opens her novel, and defines the challenge faced by the hero in social prejudice (le mal social) and in the heroic journey to overcome internalized obstacles such as fear (le mal psychologique) in order to transform his values. The interplay between good and evil culminating in “the devil's pond” intuits Jung's theory of the convergence of good and evil and the necessity of the latter in the maturation process. The victory of the hero, Germain, is also that of Sand who rises above the ideological partisanship of her opening chapters to bring to life inspirational values open to all.

Response to Ter Haar and Ellis

In his review article, Terence Ranger raises two major issues. First, he is concerned about the relation between exoticizing ideas about an 'African occult' in Western societies (for example, Scotland Yard investigations, media reports, etc.) and Africanist work on this topic. This is a pertinent issue. Pointing out worrisome overlaps between popular ideas about bloodthirsty ritual practices and scholarly research, Ranger urges us to reflect more deeply about the political field into which the knowledge we produce about 'occult matters' is being launched. Second, Ranger critiques a certain type of study-especially work on 'occult economies' and 'the modernity of witchcraft'--for inventing an 'aggregated African occult' that is too generalizing and present-centred to achieve real insight into the modes through which different African societies grapple with questions of evil. Instead, he advocates a historically grounded, ethnographically specific perspective. Both issues raised by Ranger are central to Africanist scholarship, and need our utmost attention. Therefore it is laudable that Africa is creating space for further debate. There is a tension in Ranger's argument. For even the position of 'splitter' rather than 'lumper' (2007: 277) is predicated on acknowledging a broader category such as that of the 'occult' (a notion which Ranger clearly uses with unease). This tension can in my view not be resolved by retreating into the study of the particular, but needs to be acknowledged as intrinsic to our scholarship. Even though I have great sympathy for detailed studies (and if pressed would certainly side with the 'splitters'), I consider it unproductive to play off the level of the particular (or local) against that of the general (or global). At least in my understanding, the notion of 'occult economy' and the framework of the 'modernity of witchcraft' (interestingly, Ranger as well as ter Haar and Ellis, notwithstanding major differences, converge in their critique of the Comaroffs) may well be employed for the sake of detailed research. Highly diverse societies may still face similar challenges. As I have also tried to show in my own work, attention paid to modernity and globalization does not necessarily imply a disregard for local specificities, but may, on the contrary, entice a historical and ethnographic study of how the aggregation of the occult occurs in particular settings. Examples that come to my mind are missionary demonizations of local religious traditions, or Nigerian films of the Nollywood type that excel in visualizing witchcraft, revenge ghosts, ritual murder and the like, and which certainly enhance prejudices about Nigerians as 'occultist' throughout Africa. Remarkable figures such as Credo Mutwa--'this old charlatan' (ibid.: 274)--also partake in practices of aggregating an African occult, suggesting spectacular links between Zulu visionary practices and Hollywood movies such as Spielberg's ET. In my view, such phenomena require more than unmasking them as inauthentic. They call us to pay detailed attention to actual practices of aggregation that mobilize resources from far away and close by. It goes without saying that such research requires historical and ethnographic specificity. At the same time we need to keep on reflecting on the very notions and concepts we employ to make sense of what we find 'on the ground'. How far is the proposition made by Gerrie ter Haar and Stephen Ellis useful in this endeavour? Their main point is that Ranger, notwithstanding his plea for a more specific approach, still mobilizes a broad notion of 'the occult', and thus takes part in the very project be critiques. Explaining that they do not use the notion of the 'occult' in their own work at all (hence they feel misinterpreted by Ranger, who charges them with being party to the project of 'aggregating the occult'), these authors advocate discarding this notion altogether. As an alternative, they introduce religion as a more 'neutral', 'value free' and more encompassing term (p. …

In het teken van Kaïn. Een theologische exegese van Genesis 4

Present day reflection upon the burning questions of evil an violence increasingly dominate the agenda of modern society. Biblical scholarship can contribute meaningfully to this discourse by analysing biblical narratives in which the themes of violence and animocity occur. In this regard it becomes necessary to unmask the mechanisms of violence, and to examine the judgement of violence from a biblical-theological perspective. Violence and animocity are displayed very soon in the Old Testament. Genesis 4 recounts the well-known story of Cain and Abel. The story of the world’s first children turns out to be the story of the world’s firs murder. YHWH’s role in this process is of particular interest: his warnings (vss 6-7), his interrogation (vss 9-10), his sentence (vss 11-12) and his promise (vs 15). This article investigates Genesis 4:1-16 and focuses especially on the remarkable promise to Cain, the nature of Cain’s mark (vs 15) and the theological significance of YHWH as the keeper of Abel’s brother. Genesis 4 turns out to be a chapter with paradigmatic value for today.

The Problem of Evil in Józef Tischner's Philosophy

The problem of evil is a metaphysical problem bound up with the conditions of human existence. The radical evil of fascism and communism, according to Józef Tischner, opens up the possibility that we live in the time of a modern Manichaeism, understood as having two faces: nihilism and pessimism. The possibility of thinking of such a modem form of Manichaeism necessarily calls for a new inquiry into the question of evil. For Tischner, evil, like good, is not an object, but something in which man participates, and for this reason it cannot be objectified and defined. One can only ask how it appears.

L’Image à la lettre ed. by Nathalie Preiss, Joëlle Raineau

854 Reviews disturbed by grossmiscarriages of justicewithin theFrench judicial system, thecauses celebres involving La Barre, Calas, Sirven, and de Lally. His campaigns reflectedwhat was his greatest message to his times and our own-the need for tolerance in all matters of belief and ideology.Voltaire provided himselfwith a smallmeasure ofpro tection against persecution by the French authorities by setting his fiction in the late seventeenth century-his massive documentation forLe Siecle de Louis XIV greatly assisted him in this regard, of course- but since the system in France had barely changed since thatperiod, his contemporaries can have been in no doubt about the work's relevance to their own age. As Richard A. Francis notes in his introduction to this superlative edition of the novel, 'an oppressive legal and political systemwas still at the service of an intolerant religious establishment' (p. 49). Voltaire's use of a Huron Indian as hero seemed to exploit awell-worn Enlightenment technique of seeing Europe through thenaive eyes of a traveller froman exotic culture; in fact, the centrality of 1'Ingenu to thenarrative and his victimization, aswell as thatof his lover Saint-Yves, at thehands of the system reveal how Voltaire recreated and renewed the genre. In his lengthy introduction, after a brief section entitled 'Prehistory', Francis goes into great detail in dealing with Voltaire's sources, dividing these sections or chapters, usefully, into background (Brittany and Huronia), events (I689, I767, and autobiographical allusions), debates (the religious issue, the savage and his education, the question of evil), and forms, concluding his presentation with the publication and reception of the novel and-standard in the Foundation's monumental edition of the complete works-sections on editions inVoltaire's lifetime, translations, and his edition's principles. In every case, Francis betrays wide-ranging and judicious scholarship (including mastery of theVoltaire corpus), serene weighing of the evi dence, measured argumentation, and enlightening annotation, all ofwhich make this themost scholarly and insightfuledition of thework ever published. SWANSEA UNIVERSITY MICHAEL CARDY L'Image i la lettre. Ed. by NATHALIE PREISS and JOELLERAINEAU. (Les Rencontres de laMaison de Balzac) Paris: Paris-Musees. 2005. 314 PP. E49. ISBN 978 2-87900-882-0. This carefully edited book will be particularly useful for scholars who work on the relationship between image and text innineteenth- and twentieth-century French art history, culture, and literature.The essays are all well argued, amply illustrated and documented, with up-to-date bibliographies; they often offeroriginal insights into lesser-known aspects of thiswell-trodden field.They provide us with a vast explo ration of the image fromdifferentperspectives: aesthetic, historical, and literary. We might not be able todraw ground-breaking conclusions, but we are kept alert and we do learn about many overlooked aspects of the image. The book is divided into three sections. The first, 'Lire et interpreter', contains essays by Bernard Vouilloux, Christophe Genin, and Annie Duprat. Vouilloux's 'Textes et images en regard' establishes what he calls 'the logic of the image' (p. 21), contradicting some of the 'shortcomings' normally associated with images: no univer sal reference, lack of temporality, lack of principles of causality or contradiction-all the common attributes of verbal language. Vouilloux explores these alleged 'lacks', via the detour of linguistics,Roger de Piles, Panofsky, focusing on writings on art by Flaubert, Zola, Huysmans, Balzac, Diderot, and Ponge. Genin's essay isparticularly enlightening on thenotion of 'ecritures' found inpaintings, van Eyck's Arnolfini Por traitand thebrilliant tags byMiss Tic, 'je ferai jolie sur les trottoirs I de l'histoire de l'art'where writing, tagging, and painting are intertwined togive the 'flaneur' a shock MLR, 102.3, 2007 855 experience and call forchallenging views of contemporary French culture. Duprat's essay 'Jacques-Marie Boyer de Nimes et l'image polemique' provides the readerwith an in-depth analysis of this caricaturist, who did his best work during theTerror before being executed in 1794. This excellent essay cannot but enhance the study of caricatures and their function in shaping public opinion, with theTerror being seen as awatershed in thepopularity and impact of caricatures. The second section of the volume focuses on nineteenth-century illustrations. Anne-Marie Bassy's essay on the inventor ofMonsieur Prudhomme...

The Question of Evil and Feminist Legal Scholarship

In this article, we argue that feminist legal scholars should engage directly and explicitly with the question of evil. Part I summarises key facts surrounding the prosecution and life-long imprisonment of Myra Hindley, one of a tiny number of women involved in multiple killings of children in recent British history. Part II reviews a range of commentaries on Hindley, noting in particular the repeated use of two narratives: the first of these insists that Hindley is an icon of female evil; the second, less popular one, seeks to position her as a victim. In Part III, the article broadens out and we explain why we think feminist legal scholars should look at the question of evil. In large part, the emphasis is on anticipating the range of possible objections to this argument, and on trying to answer these objections by showing how a focus on evil might benefit feminist legal thinking – specifically in relation to the categories of perpetrator and victim and, more generally, in relation to laws motivated by a desire to secure women’s human rights.

Discourse, agency and the question of evil

This paper addresses the question of evil from an ethical and discourse-analytical perspective, taking Joan Copjec’s commentary on Kant’s notion of ‘radical evil’ and its relation to human freedom as its point of departure. Specifically, Copjec’s argument, that for Kant (and, one may add, for Lacan) the subject is always “in excess of itself”, provides an important foil for, or corrective to what may seem to be the upshot of Foucault’s notion of discourse (its heuristic value notwithstanding). The latter entails that, insofar as the subject is ineluctably discursively constructed, its actions could be understood as being ‘determined’ by the discursive structure of (its) subjectivity. That is, the subject as agent may seem to lack volitional freedom in the sense that it is merely an instrument of a certain discourse by which it is ’spoken‘. However, Kant’s idea of ’radical evil‘, it is further argued, presupposes that the subject is free, in other words, that it always exceeds itself. In Foucault’ s terms, this would mean that the subject of discourse is able to adopt a counter-discursive position - something Foucault sometimes seems to make room for. What Kant calls ‘radical evil’ may be understood as something that occurs in the world through human agency, in the face of the possibility of an alternative course of action; that is, it is chosen - even if we only know this in retrospect through the phenomenon of guilt. i, in contrast, it is understood as being ‘diabolical’ in the sense of being unavoidably and irresistibly part and parcel of human ‘nature’, no one could condemn it in moral terms. This line of thinking is fleshed out, or given concrete significance by means of a discourse-analysis of documents pertaining to the so-called ‘ripper-rapist’ (criminal) case in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in the mid-1990s.

Hannah Arendt on conscience and evil

Though there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on evil in general and Adolf Eichmann in particular, few attempts have been made to assess Arendt’s position on evil by tracing its connection with her reflections on conscience. This essay examines the nature and significance of such a connection. Beginning with her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously published studies in The Life of the Mind, Arendt’s oeuvre exhibits strong thematic continuity: the triad thinking–conscience–evil forms its most enduring core. A puzzling core, to be sure, considering the controversies triggered, especially regarding her notion of the ‘banality of evil’. By placing the role of conscience at the very center of Arendt’s lifelong reflections, this essay explores the – in many ways related – influence exerted by St Augustine and Heidegger. Heidegger’s conception of conscience in Sein und Zeit is identified as a crucial source for understanding – so the claim holds – why Arendt found Heidegger’s philosophy particularly wanting as regards the question of evil.

Therapy and the challenge of evil

This paper expresses the author's personal view on the question of evil as considered by psychotherapeutic theories. It challenges the psychotherapeutic tendency to avoid the moral and existential dimensions of evil via the transformative language of psychopathology which allows theorists and practitioners either implicitly or explicitly to rely upon metaphors of disease or immaturity-be it physical or psychic. The author argues that such views are problematic not least because they mimic the separatist attitudes of those persons who have been labelled as evil since both rely upon notions of being 'less than fully human'. Further, taking a perspective that is informed by existential-phenomenological theory, the author highlights the inconsistencies and limitations that arise when the issues surrounding evil are considered from an intrapsychic perspective. As an alternative to this dominant tendency within psychotherapy and psychology, the author presents an inter-psychic viewpoint derived, in part, from the writings of Martin Heidegger and seeks to demonstrate that while such a perspective illuminates further complexities with regard to our understanding of evil, nonetheless, it also provides a more adequate, if disturbing, interpersonally focused viewpoint.

The place of the Other: A Lacanian challenge to humanistic psychology.

Abstract This essay proposes a more intense exchange between humanistic psychology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Certainly, the two fields are aware of one another but an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and superficial knowledge characterize their relationship. If we examine some of the suppositions governing each approach, there are points of similarity. Both see “psychology” in its truest meaning as defined by ethics. Both countenance the importance of the social and the unique individual (the particular for Lacan). There are also glaring differences on key questions. With respect to these differences, the author reads humanistic psychology through a Lacanian lens to indicate how Lacanian concepts can answer some of the recognized impasses of humanistic psychology (such as the question of evil) where humanistic psychology is other to itself.

Uncivil Religion: Interreligious Hostility in America

Our rhetoric of pluralistic sweetness and light notwithstanding, one doesn't have to dig very far to find interreligious conflict in the United States, the homeland of freedom of religion. Bellah and Greenspahn have picked four major categories of such conflict and have presented us with two or three mostly thoughtful essays on aspects of each. The four categories of hostility covered are JewishChristian tensions, Protestant-Catholic tensions, liberal-conservative tensions, and tensions between established and emerging groups. The main part of the book is bracketed by a brief introduction by Greenspahn and a moving conclusion by Bellah. As is the case with virtually any edited volume, the essays are a bit uneven and head in somewhat different directions. Judgments of quality and insight among the various essays will undoubtedly vary from reader to reader, depending on one's interests and prior knowledge. An overview of the ten essays, along with a few comments on them, thus seems in order. In the first essay on tensions between Christians and Jews, Jonathan D. Sarna finds that Christianity, even among adherents who have proclaimed deep love for the Jews, has historically been triumphalist, seeing itself as the ultimate religion and Judaism, therefore, as religiously primitive and incomplete. Then John Murray Cuddihy weighs in with what is, to this reviewer, easily the most provocative essay in the volume. Cuddihy argues that Jewish theodicy centers on anti-Semitism, postulating that Jews are blameless and that the question of evil becomes, essentially, How do bad things [read: anti-Semitism] happen to this good people? (25). The resultant Jewish moral holiday, Cuddihy argues, is often irritating to non-Jews. Cuddihy builds his case on good evidence, and his tone is fair, but a number of readers, by no means all of them Jews, will be put off by his heretical approach to a topic which just isn't talked about in terms like these.

Topiques de la question du mal

Many questions never receive an answer because they are badly put or put incompletely . So the difficult andever recurring question ofEvil. The hypothesis put forward and the thesis tested is that the problem of evil should be asked in more radical theological terms thon is usually done. Notwithstanding their relevance, the classical topics ofthe Contra Deum ofthe unbeliever or ofthe Pro Deo of Theodicy are insufficiant . Evil has to be carried as far as in Gbd, In Deo, as a question penetrating through God, carried by God. Ii is only after such a real Theo-logical (question about God) movement, that man can once again pick up the question of evil, as Job did, as a Ad Deum, where the accusation of the He is replaced by the questioning ofthe You. At the end ofthis process, the question ofevil is transformed into a Cum Deo, God unveiling Himselfto man as the one who really is, with him, the adversary of evil. So we corne to an inversion : from evil as objection against God, God becomes the objection towards evil. Far from thus being an idealistic solution, the theological resolve may well appear as the closest to what this problem of man, if there is one, demands.

The Question of Evil Re-examined

The Question of Evil Re-examined