Abstract
Discussions of the “problem of evil” in mainstream philosophy of religion publications have been loath to engage with Auschwitz as a symbol of the betrayal of human dignity. At the same time they have not investigated the problem of violence against women. In this chapter I propose to investigate initially, with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt and also of Grace Jantzen, the vital subject of unmerited violence and its relation to the “problem of evil.” Then, in an even more concentrated mode, with a specific focus on the work of Jantzen alone, I will examine the issue of violence against women. In so doing, I hope to challenge the extremely restricted nature of the traditional conceptions of evil and its treatment.
The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe (Arendt 1994 [1945], p. 134).
In 1945 Arendt wrote that the problem of evil would be the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life in Europe, but even there her prediction was not quite right. No major philosophical work but Arendt’s own appeared on the subject in English and French texts were remarkably oblique. Historical reports and eyewitness testimony appeared in unprecedented volume, but conceptual reflection has been slow in coming (Neiman 2002, p. 2).
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Notes
- 1.
For further insights into Arendt’s relationship to Judaism see Arendt, The Jewish Writings (2006), Ring (1998) and Bernstein (2000).
- 2.
Arendt relates her own reaction: “That was in 1943. And at first we didn’t believe it…. But we didn’t believe it because militarily it was unnecessary and uncalled for…. And then half a year later we believed it after all, because we had proof. That was the real shock…. It was really as if an abyss had opened” (1994, pp. 13–14).
- 3.
Arendt’s thesis: Der Leibesbegriff bei Augustin (1929) was undertaken mainly under the supervision of Martin Heidegger. She revised a translation of it later in America in the late 50 s and early 60 s but it was only published posthumously in 1996. See Love and St. Augustine, edited by Scott and Stark.
- 4.
In an interview Arendt defines the polis as: “The space in which things become public as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable” (1994, p. 20).
- 5.
Such a depiction of radical evil can be found in Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
- 6.
It was in this same letter that Arendt expressed her changed understanding of radical evil since her earlier writings on totalitarianism. She now refused to see it as innate and therefore irredeemable. “Evil in every instance is only extreme, never radical” (Scholem 2002, p. 400.)
- 7.
Thinking, for Arendt, is not the same as knowledge or the search for certainty. As Bernstein describes it: “Thinking is the faculty by which we ask unanswerable questions, but questions that we cannot help asking. It is the faculty by which we seem to understand the meaning of whatever we encounter. And in the quest for meaning there is no finality. The search for knowledge and truth, and the quest for meaning are by no means totally unrelated. On the contrary, although we must not identify or confuse thinking with knowing, genuine knowing would be impossible without thinking, and thinking itself presupposes knowing” (2000, p. 283).
- 8.
Freedom of the will, however, is not to be confused with Arendt’s own appreciation of political freedom. This is “the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given not even as an object of cognition or imagination. Action, to be free, must be free from motive on one side, from its intended goal as predictable on the other” (1977, p. 151).
- 9.
Jantzen notes that her “appropriation and expansion, while grounded in Arendt’s writing, goes in directions which she herself did not, and of which she perhaps would not have approved, though it is arguably a response to her call for renewed political thoughtfulness. Be that as it may, my purpose is to explore the dimensions of a symbolic of natality for a feminist philosophy of religion; and for this project I shall help myself to aspects of Arendt’s thought without pretending that she herself sanctioned such usage of her ideas” (1998, pp. 109–110).
- 10.
Jantzen summarized her understanding of this linkage as it came to be expressed by psychoanalytic theory: “The conceptual linkage of death with women … is exposed especially in psychoanalytic writings beginning with Freud and continuing with Julia Kristeva…. [I]n ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ Freud connects the desire of a child to control his mother’s absence with thanatos, the death-drive. …The western obsession with death is therefore connected with the obsession with female bodies, and the denial of death and efforts to master it are connected with a deep-seated misogyny” (1999, p. 132).
- 11.
Neiman gives an overview of this development: “If Enlightenment is the courage to think for oneself, it’s also the courage to assume responsibility for the world into which one is thrown. Radically separating what earlier ages called natural from moral evils was thus part of the meaning of modernity. If Auschwitz can be said to mark its ending, it is for the way it marks our terror. Modern conceptions of evil were developed in the attempt to stop blaming God for the state of the world, and to take responsibility for it on our own” (2002, p. 4). Neiman then states the new “problem of evil” that was posed by Auschwitz: “how can human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and rational norms?” (2002, p. 3).
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Joy, M. (2009). Rethinking the “Problem of Evil” with Hannah Arendt and Grace Jantzen. In: Anderson, P. (eds) New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6833-1_2
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