Session 14: Intelligent Evil

Session 14: Intelligent Evil
Chair: Barbara Knuesli

Falling Under an Evil Influence
Jeffrey Wallen
Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA

In this paper I will examine the ways in which a series of late nineteenth-century literary texts offer new challenges to the possibility of knowing whether actions are good or evil, and to conceptions of free will upon which ideas about evil have often rested.  In these works the invocation of evil is connected with the unconscious mind and altered states of consciousness, with the fear of falling under the influence of some other person or unknown force, and with the post-Darwinian challenge of distinguishing the human from the animal.  What these anxieties all have in common is that they call into question the stable boundaries that give us the confidence to make judgments about evil.  Evil is always to some extent the destabilizing of boundaries and clouding of distinctions.  But I will suggest that at the end of the nineteenth century there is a new crisis concerning the definition of the human, and that explorations and reevaluations of evil are a primary means for reconceiving essential human traits such as consciousness, suffering, and autonomy. Some of the texts I will briefly touch on will be The Island of Dr. Moreau, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which imagining evil is necessary in order to think beyond conventional categories of understanding.  I will conclude by contrasting these late nineteenth-century explorations with the tendency of many contemporary discussions, where it is frequently asserted that the category of evil is a relic of a religious past and a hindrance to understanding how individuals and groups of people act.  I will argue that the rejection of the category of evil is a sign of a complacency arising from the (unwarranted) belief that our current categories of knowledge are now sufficient to comprehend all human actions or behavior.

In the third canto of The Inferno, as they stand before the gates of hell, Virgil says to Dante that he is about to come across people ‘for whom there is only grief’ and, then he adds: ‘Those who have lost the benefit of the intellect.’ One might wish to retort that politically and socially created hell is invariably built by a group who exercise their intellect to manifest their own idea of heaven. This was as true of the inquisitorial wing of the church, as of the Jacobins, as of the Stalinists and National Socialists, as of the present day Islamists. In fact, as any reader of The Comedy will know, Dante’s understanding of the intellect is shaped by an ontology in which love is the source of all. Hence, Dante’s statement is not simply a reiteration of the Socratic/ Platonic formulation that evil is ignorance. Just as he empowers and perfects the classical virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance and courage by conjoining them with the Christian powers of faith, hope and love, Dante enhances our understanding of the purpose of the intellect by judging its presence or absence not merely by cognitive operations — those in hell have not arrived there through an inability to  provide ‘reasons’ for their judgments and deeds. Instead he grasps that doing evil is bound up with the intellect not being guided by love’s light. Hence the damned are unable to see the world they are making until it is too late. There is a fundamental hiatus between the illusions they have about what they are doing and what they actually do. They have lost the one God-given power to discriminate between the two. In this paper I will take Dante’s insight and discuss how systematized evil is generated by widespread substitution of the false intellect for the real intellect— a job performed time and time again historically by people entrusted to be the brains of their respective collective. Hell becomes inevitable when a group becomes sufficiently steeped in its illusions that it does not see the awaiting terror. Concomitantly, when a group reaches this stage they cannot be touched by true words: the group, then,  literally belongs to (the d)evil.

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