Susan Neiman. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. xii + 358 pages.

Reviewed by David R. Larson
(February 3, 2003)

By making the problem of evil its central theme, this provocative book recasts and revitalizes the history of modern Western philosophy. Many accounts of this period of thought begin with René Descartes’ separation of mind and matter in the seventeenth century and then examine the attempts of subsequent thinkers to understand their relationships. This one begins with the Lisbon earthquake in the eighteenth century and then investigates how philosophers interpreted it and other calamities. What a fascinating and informative story it is!

Written with nerve, wit, and insight by Susan Neiman, an American philosopher from Atlanta, Georgia, who now directs the Einstein Forum in Pottsdam, Germany, this volume is prompting lively discussions around the world. It should be of special interest to those of us who have long thought of the Lisbon earthquake as one of the "signs of the times." It may teach us that this trembler possessed greater cultural and philosophical significance than we realized!

Confidently asserting that nothing is easier than reformulating the problem of evil in nonreligious terms, Neiman distinguishes two forms of theodicy and traces their relationships. "Theodicy, in the narrow sense, allows the believer to maintain faith in God in face of the world’s evils. Theodicy, in the broad sense, is any way of giving meaning to evil that helps us face despair," she writes (239). By making it more difficult to have confidence in the universe as God’s orderly creation, the Lisbon earthquake on November 1, 1755, a natural evil which "was said to shock Western civilization more than any event since the fall of Rome," threatened the first type of theodicy. By leaving it at least as challenging to trust humanity, Auschwitz, a moral evil of unspeakable dimensions, imperiled the second (240). She contends that both events intensified and crystallized changes already under way in how we understand our selves and the universe.

Neiman thematically presents selected major figures of modern Western philosophy in four clusters. She writes that Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Karl Marx "would reject each other’s company. But despite occasional elements of melancholy, all are united by some form of hope for a better order than the one we experience." She holds that Pierre Bayle, François-Marie Arouet Voltaire, David Hume, the Marquis de Sade, and Arthur Schopenhauer, "by contrast, share a brilliant, cheerful bleakness that concluded with Schopenhauer’s stupendous pessimism." Because Friedrich Nietzche and Sigmund Freud "maintain a sort of heroic scorn toward discussions of the subject that preceded their own, and any straws we might be tempted to clutch thereafter," she treats them separately. She writes that figures in the twentieth century such as Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Ardono, Max Horkheimer, and John Rawls "display humility born of a sense of fragility and awe" (12). The title of Neiman’s last chapter expresses how many now feel about their places in the universe: "Homeless." Her book’s gray and gloomy dust jacket features Francisco Goya’s 1797 etching, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters."

Neiman’s own views about these matters center upon what she calls "the principle of sufficient reason." This is the belief "that we can find a reason for everything the world presents" (320). She holds that we necessarily presuppose this principle in everyday life. "Belief that there may be reason in the world is a condition of the possibility of our being able to go on in it," she writes. (324). Her last sentence is: "Between the adult who knows she won’t find reason in the world, and the child who refuses to stop seeking it, lies the difference between resignation and humility" (328). Neiman casts her lot with the child and so should we.

Honorable and poignant though it is, this conclusion is probably unstable. If we think of it as the middle dot in a continuum with five evenly spaced points, one mark to its left is the kind of compassionate pessimism we respect in Buddhism. Two dots to the left is the immoral complacency or mayhem we revile in nihilism. One dot to the right of Neiman’s position we find non-coercive monotheism, the view that not everything that happens throughout the universe can be attributed solely to divine omnipotence. Two dots to the right is coercive monotheism, the claim that everything now is precisely as God wants it to be. How long Neiman and others will be able to hold their ground between these competing alternatives is an open question.

This is why I find it unfortunate that Neiman does not give non-coercive monotheism more attention. Theistic or non-theistic, many of the positions she studies assume that the word "God" refers to a supreme actuality that wholly and solely determines everything. Many thinkers, believers and nonbelievers alike, dismiss with scorn almost every qualification of this assumption. "God was supposed to be omnipotent," they scoff (25).

True, but what does divine omnipotence properly mean? Must it signify the unilateral and complete determination of all occurrences? Some notable philosophers think not. I therefore hope that in the next edition of her book Neiman will devote an additional chapter to this distinct alternative. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2000) might provide a good entrance to this literature.

Neiman rightly concludes that the meaning of our lives is found at least in part in what import we give them. Nevertheless, it is also possible that, while attempting to give our lives significance, we will discover, as some report, that the universe is not wholly and forever indifferent to our efforts. Perhaps there actually is One who non-coercively fosters truth, beauty, and goodness in all circumstances, and is therefore worthy of our trust and cooperation. It might be rewarding not to dismiss this option too quickly, either by preempting the possibility that such a "still, small voice" actually works for good without totally determining everything, or by insisting that only a wholly controlling cosmic sovereign is worthy of the divine name.

© 2003 Spectrum/AAF