Session 10(a): Evil and Self-Reflection
Concurrent Session 10a: Evil and Self-Reflection
Chair: Peter Mario Kreuter
Communism: The Fine Laboratory of Terrorism and Nicholae Steinhardt’s ‘Diary of Happiness’
Carmen Darabus
Department of Comparative Literature, North University, Baia Mare, Romania
During the XXth century, the number of diaries – some of them with artistic purposes – increased, and this new type of memoirs talks about the degradation brought by fascism (a very good example being Anne Frank’s Diary) or by communism – this being the case of Nicolae Steinhardt, an exceptional personality of Romanian culture. His book, The Diary of Happiness, is part of the memoirs of the communist prisons, part of extreme situations which can be faced with dignity by a human being.
The destiny of an intellectual in such times was a special one: the censorship and the lack of a way to speak freely were difficulties which affected him more than any other categories. In spite of the terror he suffered in the communist prisons (him and his family – the latter not being in detention, but outside the prison, in a false freedom), no one and nothing could stop him from thinking. The intellectual exercise, the intellectual exchanges which took place on a background of hunger, violence and degradation – these were the main ingredients in the art of survival. The intellectual had but three choices: to accept a compromise in his relation with the authorities, to give up, discretely, his destiny or to fight against the authorities, suffering for this in communist penitentiaries. The practice of terror in this system was based on harassing the individuals and their families and friends, the odd aspect being that the torturers used the term “terrorist” against the persons on trial – the term being actually the translation of daring attempts of opposition against the communist regime. Legalization of torture led to a dissolution of the traditional moral values, in the attempt to create the “new man”, according to the Soviet model. Such a construction, based on class hatred, could only bring hatred, suspicion and uncertainty. As Steinhardt said in his book “Anyone, no matter how pathetic, can do evil deeds, whereas good deeds are only meant for strong souls and steeled characters. Evil: milk for children, Good: flesh for adults (page 157). According to Steinhardt, prison is the devil’s world ”because, actually, the devil did not create the second world completely. He acts, as a parasite, on this world, created by God. […] Thus, the devil can offer us only what he possesses: an illusion (p. 93)”
The cynical expression of terror was that the “ideological laboratory mice” were asked to be thankful for the abuses they were subjected to.
Is Wickedness Out There in the World, Or Just in the Brain of the Beholder?
Rita Carter
Neuropyschologist, United Kingdom
Judgements about what constitutes wicked behaviour, as opposed to behaviour which is merely “wrong”, are remarkably similar across widely divergent cultures. Studies undertaken by the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard suggest that this is because all normal humans share a “moral grammar” which is encoded in the neural wiring of the brain and is largely unaffected by conscious decision-making.
Our “kneejerk” sense of what is wicked is the main dictator of societal responses to transgressors, even in formal situations such as courts of law. Indeed, much criminal legislation is informed by it. However, when people are made aware of the normally unconscious computation that underlies this “moral instinct” they invariably recognise that it is irrational, and that decisions based on it are often unfair.
Neurological patients with damage to a particular part of the frontal lobe of the brain appear to lack an instinctive abhorrence of those acts which are generally categorised as “wicked” and do not distinguish a qualitative distinction between these and other transgressions of law or convention.. Their judgement of such acts match those made by other people after they have been made aware of their own unconscious biases, rather than the kneejerk reactions which usually hold sway.
One interpretation of this is that wickedness and “evil” are distinguished by their triggering a particular repugnance in the observer, rather than by any intrinsic awfulness.
Beyond Suffering: The Ethics and Politics of Being Cruel To Be Kind
David Boothroyd
University of Kent, United Kingdom
“To see somebody suffer is nice, to make somebody suffer even nicer – that is a hard proposition , but an ancient, powerful human-all-too-human proposition… No cruelty, no feast” (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals)
“For pure suffering, which is intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit, a beyond takes shape in the inter-human. (Levinas, Useless Suffering)
This paper explores the role of suffering and cruelty in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality and Levinas’ ethics. For both of these thinkers, the ancient and modern actualities of violence and cruelty – both suffered and perpetrated – constitute the context of their respective accounts of morality and moral value. Suffering could be said, moreover, to be for each of them, an ontological ‘condition’ for critical thought per se. For Nietzsche, for example in Genealogy of Morals, it is through the attribution of a meaning to suffering that the sovereign Noble differentiates himself from the Herd and asserts his aristocratic identity. And, Levinas emphasises how what he calls the ethical relation to the other is possible and becomes thinkable to the extent to which the suffering of the other is encountered as a pure passivity ‘in him/her’ which places an ethical obligation upon me.
In the context of a brief critical exegesis of the relation between these, in some respects antithetical and in other respects conterminal, philosophies of suffering, the paper addresses the question of the ethical responsibility for suffering and its bearing on the quest for justice by means of politics. In vie of this, the paper broadly asks: ‘can there be an alibi for suffering’?
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