You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Richard Bernstein, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, has written an important philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of evil, an inquiry that will be of great value to psychoanalysts as they confront the problem of evil both in their consulting rooms with their patients and in their personal lives as citizens of planet earth. The writing of this book was motivated by the need to comprehend the unprecedented atrocities wrought by totalitarianism in the twentieth century, as epitomized by the horrors of Auschwitz. In agreement with Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas, Bernstein claims that “Auschwitz signifies a rupture and break with tradition, and that ‘after Auschwitz’ we must rethink both the meaning of evil and human responsibility” (p. 4). To that end Bernstein embarks on a series of “interrogations” or “critical dialogical encounters” (p. 4) with the conceptions of evil developed by Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Freud, Levinas, Jonas, and Arendt. The inquiry is a hermeneutic rather than a metaphysical one, aiming not at a theory of evil but at a conceptual understanding of what we mean by evil. In the process, Bernstein gives us a wonderful overview of the history and basic concepts of moral philosophy and moral psychology.
Kant's lasting contribution to moral philosophy, according to Bernstein, was his uncompromising insistence that moral responsibility presupposes transcendental freedom—specifically, the absolute freedom to choose between good maxims (those that conform to the moral law) and evil maxims (those that fail to). Further, contrary to any theory of psychic determinism, Kant held that why a human agent makes the choices he or she makes is “inscrutable”—i.e., unknowable and inexplicable. Thus, although he coined the phrase “radical evil” to refer to a universal human propensity to defy the moral law and adopt evil maxims based on self-love, Kant always insisted on the freedom of a human being to choose