Treatment Of Evil Research Articles

Agota Kristof’s The Notebook: Child Evil and Trauma

The paper gives a reading of AgotaKristof’s novel The Notebook regarding its treatment of evil and child trauma in the light of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, the concepts of Martin Stringer on urban violence and children, and child response to trauma as seen by Jesse Harris and Jon A. Shawn. Its aim is to pose the extremely rational and cruel actions of the novel’s protagonists as a defense mechanism against the traumatic experiences experimented in wartime. In order to do so, the paper analyses the Victorian archetype of the inherently innocent child, and how this conception is challenged in Kristof’s narrative by the possibility of the children being either intrinsically mean or deeply traumatized by the horrors of wartime; the paper also deals with the concepts of evil as a social construction and with the objectiveness of the narrative as a way of portraying rationality.

William Golding between Pessimism and Optimism in Lord of the Flies

William Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies, published in 1954,
 
 is still widely considered as his major work. It is one of the most widely-
 read, widely- admired, and widely- discussed novels in the last few
 decades. Throughout the novel, he shows a consistent struggle between
 good and evil; goes in parallel with his pessimistic view of human nature
 and his optimistic aspect represented in the characters of Ralph, Piggy
 and Simon. This thesis makes Lord of the Flies one of those novels which
 can be given several interpretations and be subject to controversial,
 critical and analytical approaches. Some perceive a bleak picture of
 humanity offered in Lord of the Flies when the symbol of reason and
 common sense is forced into an outlaw existence, and evil is chasing it.
 While others celebrate the shining hope of Ralph’s rescue and see the
 sacrifices as a homage good humanity pays for reaching to a more mature
 and higher state of being. What is so interesting in this novel is Golding's
 treatment of evil and his raising a subject of so much concern to the
 twentieth century people who have witnessed two horrible world wars.
 Such concerns were becoming the subject of critical controversies in
 popular and scholarly publications.
 
 The Struggle between Pessimism and Optimism in Lord of the Flies:
 Of the many great events of the 20th century, the two World
 
 Wars played a great and decisive role in forming new attitudes and
 opinions. William Golding was among the many writers whose lives were
 touched by the calamities and horrors of war, which left an unforgettable
 stamp on his literary career. The horrors of the World War 11 helped him
 to perceive some kind of innate human evil, like that explored in Lord of
 the Flies. Golding himself stated that "Lord of the Flies takes the
 supposed innocent experience of the island- like life in order to test it
 against the experience of Nazism and Second World War." 1 His work in
 the navy where he became a lieutenant and was placed in command of a
 rocket launching ship helped him to formulate this new vision about
 human nature. During that war, Golding learned how brutal people can be
 to one another, and witnessed all kinds of inhumanity and persecution

“The War ‘twixt Sun and Moon”: Evil and Gender in William Blake’s Early Illuminated Books and Alan Moore’s From Hell

ABSTRACTBlake’s two sides of evil—as revolution or as repression—are present in Alan Moore’s From Hell. There are two fundamental distinctions between them: although Moore uses similar criteria to judge inequalities, the magical dimension of his story is amoral, and Blake’s revolutionary evil fails to envision a satisfactory future for women. This article discusses Blake’s female allegories of revolution and male figures of domination in his early illuminated books; by contrasting them with Moore’s characters I will argue that Moore’s villain William Gull is neither punished nor rewarded by the supernatural. The distinction between the forces of revolutionary freedom and those of domination is not as clear as in Blake, as the same energies that fuel the villain allow female characters to challenge patriarchal oppression. This article explores evil as repression in Blake and in Moore, and addresses Moore’s treatment of evil and its connections with Blake’s ideas about gender.

Kant, Schopenhauer, Saul Bellow: Evil in Mr. Sammler’s Planet

This essay examines Saul Bellow’s treatment of evil and his use of Kantian and Schopenhauerian ideas as an antidote to moral and ethical malaise in postwar American society. In my view, after two world wars, evil became a formidable competitor to good in the conduct of human affairs. I interpret Bellow’s moral and ethical approach to evil in Mr. Sammler’s Planet in light of Kant and Schopenhauer, who deeply influenced him in this novel. I reexamine Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” keeping in view Sammler’s and Bellow’s other protagonists’ responses to the prevalent moral anarchy in society.

Kurjus ja tema teisik

This paper about theater fiction tries to enlighten the problem of the figurative representation of forces of evil. Incidentally we notice that some very actual productions are based on dramas from the 16th century transgressing the period and updating the figures of violence. On this way, assistance is leaded „behind the mirror“ and required to ask herself what is representing evil in our world? To try to understand the mechanism or a part of it we have chosen three figures of contemporary stage as example. The first is La Furie, from Jean Virey du Gravier’s tragedy La Machabée (1596) and staging in 1985. This figure without any reality is only visible from the assistance but she manipulates all the figures of the play. Her nonexistence let her possibility to say truth. The second is a muted figure in Wolfgang Mitterer’s opera Massacre (2003) witch is based on Marlowe tragedy Massacre à Paris (1596). She is mixing the old age and the new one and show explicitly the concordance amongst stages on which the character of the 16th century are performing and Iraqi’s war video. The last one is Ariel in Thomas Adès’ opera The tempest (2004) based on Shakespeare’s eponym play (1611). This character has no representation as la Furie. Ariel is also fiction witch mixed evilness and goodness, an avatar of the two previous characters. In the present case Evil is shown as the will of Prospero who wants have revenge. Ades insist on the total obedience of Ariel, who brings out his incoherencies. Obviously, origin of evilness is not in the mind of the executor but in the contract that bind him to another force: jealousy of Duke of Milan who takes off Prospero from his throne because he was not an action man. These characters make a bridge between the Renaissance and now a day and show how permanent is the question of evil. The man hopes through civilization get rid off from aggressiveness but he hasn’t found yet how to struggle against evil. Through the parallelism between the both historic period, the writers and composers are going on to explore the question finding this composite material as inspiring today as it was in old time. They put on the stage same violence and same blinding of the human being, let us know that we haven’t progress in treatment of evil.

Bonum est causa mali

How to explain the existence of evil if being by its very nature is good? My paper examines an interesting and perhaps significant parallel between two exponents of the metaphysical tradition usually thought to stand widely apart, Thomas Aquinas and Hegel. I argue that Hegel's system shares certain features of Aquinas' convertibility thesis (S.T. 1, 5, 1), that upon closer inspection will yield a set of interesting reflections not only about the problem of evil, but also about the limits and possibilities of metaphysical method. I discuss Aquinas' thesis of the convertibility of being and good and how it determines his treatment of evil. I then construct a Hegelian version of convertibility and argue that Hegel's system fails for similar reasons to provide a satisfactory account of the problem of evil. This leads to my central question: should the inadequacy of traditional approaches to evil call for a reversal or abandonment of metaphysics, or invite a deeper reflection about reality that would not subsume the world's darkness under what Hans Blumenberg once called "metaphysics of light"?

The Treatment of Poverty and Theodicy in the Syriac Translation of Ben Sira

Abstract This paper is aimed to address the relationship between the Hebrew and the Syriac versions of Ben Sira—and it will try to expose a coherent agenda on the part of the Syriac translator, explaining at least some of the differences between the two versions. The Syriac translator felt obliged to change the content of the original text's treatment of evil. He tended to stress human choice and mute Ben Sira's allusions to predestination and God's creation of Evil. Pointing out this tendency offers new perspectives on earlier scholarship, especially Winter (1977), who claimed that the Syriac version was biased against wealth.

Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality

George Kateb Existential Values in Arendt’s Treatment of Evil and Morality EXISTENTIAL VALUES DOMINATE HANNAH ARENDT’S POLITICAL THEORY.* The result is that morality often ends up either subordinate in impor­ tance to existential values or sidelined by them. Morality must struggle to be heard. Most famously, her espousal of political action grows not out of moral concern, but out of her existential values, which politi­ cal action is intended to serve. But the story does not end there. The existential values present in Arendt’s writings that I consider are the two that I believe (with some encouragement from Arendt) constitute human dignity: human status and human stature. Human dignity for Arendt rests on human uniqueness, the human difference from the rest of nature. The salient element of Arendt’s concept of human status is not being animal-like, the salient element of Arendt’s concept of stature is the creative and audacious use of freedom in thought, art, and action. I do not quite mean to say that Arendt is a philosopher of exis­ tentialism, properly speaking, though she has noteworthy affinities to it, especially to some of its French variants. Although my explicit discussion of The Human Condition, which is her most extended treatment of existential values, is concentrated in the last pages of this paper, that book is always in the background of my discussion. HANNAH ARENDT’S UNDERSTANDING OF POLITICAL EVIL IS HARD TO match. The depth of her understanding, however, does not stop her social research Vol 74 : No 3 : Fall 2007 811 from condemning such evil with a force that is also hard to match. The more she perceives, the more unforgiving she grows. She has no doubt as to what evil is and why certain political phenomena should be called by that name, the worst of all names. Is there anyone more trustwor­ thy in illuminating this darkness and guiding people’s response to it? I doubt it. Yet I think that it is fair to say that thinking about morality is not congenial to her talent. One might expect that one who writes so powerfully about evil would publish a general view of all kinds and degrees of wrongdoing, and at least by implication, right conduct. Even if political evil is in some respects discontinuous with, say, either oppression or injustice, even if evil is qualitatively different and not only worse in intensity ofinflicted suffering, isn’t it a bit odd that a great theorist of evil showed such a reluctance to publish more extensively on the general subject of morality and immorality? She seems suspi­ cious of morality, as if she had an allergy to it. Perhaps evil blots out all other phenomena of wrongdoing? Are they only to be taken as inevi­ table and as posing no great philosophical mystery or even perplexity? Another possibility, which I take more seriously, is that Arendt believes that too much attention to morality would dilute adherence to existen­ tial values, which I believe to be her deepest commitment. Thanks to the splendid editorial labors ofJerome Kohn, to whom any student of Arendt’s work owes a tremendous debt, Arendt’s rela­ tionship to morality, and the connection of morality to evil, become much fuller. The volume he put together, Responsibility and Judgment (2003), with a fine introduction, helps us see Arendt’s hardest thinking about morality and immorality in themselves, and in relation to evil. The main text is “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (1965), but the full version of “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship” (1964) and several other items, including the hitherto unpublished presentation at the American Philosophical Association, “Collective Responsibility” (1968), also enhance our knowledge of what Arendt thought about the general subject of morality and its relation to evil. I do not say that in these texts Arendt gives us a fully worked-out view of morality; much less that the view that appears is free of difficulties. But we can now 812 social research make a better sense of Arendt’s moral thinking; and just by that, we can, I believe, make something more of Arendt’s thought as a whole. In this paper, I first sketch Arendt...

Kant's practical philosophy: from critique to doctrine

The whole range of Kan't philosophy is examined in this book. Unlike the majority of studies, this work traces the evolution of Kant's practical concerns from his 'pre-critical' works to the culminating Metaphysics of Morals and argues for a remarkable continuity in Kant's treatment. In demonstrating Kant's commitment to a material understanding of ethics, Gary Banham cogently argues that they have to be understood as teleological and perfectionist. Tracing in detail the connection between Kant's critique of morality and his account of rational religion provides a new setting for Kant's treatment of evil. In distinguishing Kant's critical works from his doctrinal ones, this study sets out the importance of Kant's accounts of property, right and virtue. Providing a comprehensive treatment of Kant's enquiries, Banham shows the extent of Kant's creative engagement with tradition and challenges the reception of his work current in moral philosophy and political theory.

Much Ado about Nothing: Karl Barth's Being Unable to Do Nothing about Nothingness

Often a source of concern to commentators about the adequacy of Barth's theology is his treatment of evil, in particular Church Dogmatics III/3 §50 with its depiction of evil as das Nichtige (the nothingness). Against the impression that Barth has little time in his systematic theology for doing justice to evil it is worth attempting a reading that indicates the importance of this section and what it seems that Barth is doing with it. Das Nichtige belongs to a conflictual and dramatic account, and talk of its, for Barth, ‘absurd’‘existence’ belongs there. The dramatic flavour of this discussion further impresses that there is more to be said about ‘Barth on evil’ than any focus on the paradoxical and negative language used to depict it could express – this ‘more’ should come specifically through ethics.