Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations
312
Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations
312Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253219688 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2008 |
| Series: | Philosophy of Religion |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope
Postsecular Meditations
By Martin Beck Matu?tìk
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2008 Martin Beck Matu?tìkAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21968-8
CHAPTER 1
Job at Auschwitz
* * *
How do surviving neighbors continue to inhabit a village after they have engaged in deliberate acts of pillage, rape, and murder against one another, or stood by as others engaged in them? The space of our global village has grown fractured. Its lived time languishes in desperation. Another way of posing the opening question is, How do we apprehend that loss which humans experience as even more violent than material deprivation? Let us name this intractable dimension of loss the scarcity of hope.
Hope's disconsolation does not result from an ordinary loss of possibilities or from human demise. As difficult as disease and death can be, they do not of themselves produce this type of violence. Finitude and mortality motivate tears or inspire works of tragedy, but they do not yield the bitter fruit of hopelessness. That graver condition arises from a type of action that affects meaningful human flourishing at its heart. Lévinas (1983:160) reopens this wound of our age by raising anew Job's fundamental question; it "is no longer Leibniz's question why is there something rather than nothing? But why is there evil rather than good?" The past hundred years have provided spaces and times that have become thoroughly disconsolate. I take Auschwitz to be the single name that stands for all others — the gulags, Rwanda and Darfur, Sarajevo and Srebrenica, Kosovo and Grozny, the Twin Towers, to name the more notorious.
With Job in Auschwitz, we ponder in all times and places of scarce hope the same question. Nobody will deny nowadays that the phenomenon of lost hope exists globally, even though each case represents an event of a singular kind. Searching for intelligible meaning and human flourishing while abandoning any search for a theological theodicy, the secular mind-set has at its disposal no name for this type of injury. If there is a dimension of violence that injures the very capacity of humans to sustain free development — to hope — must we not speak of it boldly as an aggravated scarcity of hope?
Can life regain its innocence after a deep moral disaster? How can people come to terms with the truths of a criminal past without having to either reenact them or ignore the perpetrators, bystanders, and victims? How can one begin in time and space in which both reparative forgetting and remembering are required for restoring hope's living sense of innocence? This paradox of impossible hope marks memory as well as its mending. Can any mind, but especially the secular one, confront the aggravated scarcity of hope — that shattering anomie and entropy of possibility — without recourse to the uncanny?
I begin with Job in Auschwitz, meditating on the post-Holocaust horizon that challenges us to face evil and ask whether one can do so without despair. The following two chapters will take up anew the possibility of what I name the redemptive critical theory of hope. In part 2, I will ponder how it is possible at all to corrupt the hope dimension of time. This is why I depict radical evil in ways Kant dared not consider: inhumanity that aims to cleanse our lived time of its dimension of hope would also smother words and crack silence. In part 3, I will meditate on radical evil that, albeit no longer viewed as a privation of the good, parasitically draws its force from the uncanny.
KANT'S READING OF JOB
Kant (1973) considers all philosophical theodicies that rationally plead "God's cause" in face of both moral and physical evils to have failed. This is for Kant the failure of "a reason which presumptuously ignores its own limits in these matters" (283), but not of Job's "authentic theodicy" rooted in a faith response (291). Yet is not theodicy Job's prime temptation to explain away his suffering? Theodicy is offered in the guise of a God who bets with Satan about Job's fate; it is provided by Job's three friends who suggest, among other things, that there must be reasons for Job's suffering. Job is a happy and good father and member of his community who is stripped of his riches, health, and family. Only his believing conscience before God remains his own. However hard he protests his innocence, since he apparently has committed no crime, his friends comfort him by providing rational cause-and-effect explanations sought in views of divine justice that punishes our transgressions. He must have done something to justify the afflictions sent to torture him. In that Job rejects these explanations as less than honest, the projects of mythical or rational theodicies are revealed as presumptions to know God's ways. Job, while questioning the hidden God who does not respond to his appeals for justice, accepts his ordeal as God's decree. The God who finally answers Job is the Creator who now asks Job in turn, Where were you when I made heaven and earth? One cannot answer the Creator's rhetorical question, though in itself it does provide a form of self-justification — a theodicy.
In Kant's dramatization, Job handles his case right because he responds with faith rather than by seeking a rational evaluation of his ordeal. Kant's pietism sympathizes with Job's elemental conscience that eschews rational explanations of suffering in order to make room for faith. What Kant calls Job's "authentic theodicy" is "not an interpretation set forth by ratiocinating (speculative) reason but by an authoritative practical reason, which having in itself authority to legislate can be considered to be the immediate expositor and voice of God in charge of the interpretation of the book of creation" (291). As if anticipating Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor who produces on God's behalf an anti-Job theodicy that allows humans to sin in exchange for their clear conscience, Kant writes, "If Job were to appear before some tribunal of dogmatic theologians, some senate or inquisition, some worthy presbytery or some high consistory today ... he probably would have met with a worse fate." Kant's Job never receives a rational explanation of suffering but embraces a theodicy in the form of a faith response (293).
But must not even an "authentic theodicy" be an impossible theodicy? Neiman draws this paradoxical lesson when she, echoing Kant, notes that "God Himself condemns the impulse to theodicy, for He says that not the friends but Job spoke truth." Yet she concedes that our spiritless age is unable to live without some source of meaningful hope. "Job's speeches are no systematic justification but a response to the same impulse that gives rise to theodicy: the need to face evil in the world without giving in to despair" (2002:291). Neither modern reactions to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 nor post-Holocaust thinkers seem to find hope without meeting the deep-seated need to face evil without despair. Don't we need and desire something impossible?
What seems impossible is a rational formula underwriting any, even an authentic, theodicy.
In what sense does the biblical story embrace a Kantian, authentic faith theodicy? Goodhart (1996:168 — 212, 2005) in his fine commentary on Job drives home the rabbinical intent for including this text among the twenty-four books of the Hebrew Scripture: the book of Job dramatizes four failed theodicies. They correspond to what Martin Buber (1982:188 — 98; Goodhart, 1996:174 — 82; and 2005) identifies as four idolatrous sketches of God: a mythic theodicy with the God who spars with Satan about Job, a theodicy of sin of Job's three friends, Job's own negative theodicy, or what Goodhart labels an atheist theodicy of social justice, and an elemental creationist theodicy with the rhetorical accusation against Job. Unlike Kant's rationalized Job tucked within the bounds of pietist morality, the biblical Job only gets negative answers. He finds no rationale for his suffering or evil in the world, for, as Goodhart (2005) notes, "all of the explanations are forms of accusation." Deconstructing four failed theodicies can have but one edifying purpose, defining the Judaic faith as the "law of anti-idolatry," warning that "Jews have become non-Jews," that "Judaism understood as the law of anti-idolatry is absent." If we ask with Goodhart, What is the core of the commandments? we step beyond Kant's announcement of the failure of all philosophical theodicies to his failure of ascribing to Job a religious theodicy bound within the horizon of the possible for the sake of rational faith. "To question suffering as a problem," Goodhart warns, "is to question Judaism, to question the law of anti-idolatry, to question creation itself, which is constituted in Judaism as a response to that problem." Goodhart (1996: 180f.) finds the earnest biblical message about human suffering addressed to the lament of God's hiddenness:
We must function as if there is no God, as if all responsibility for human behavior and human relations falls upon man himself. ... The hidden God, ... far from a stumbling block to Job's lament, is in fact its very answer, an answer we may want to argue God explicitly reveals by appearing to offer Job the discourse of His otherness, His exteriority to man. ... The Answer to Job's question ... is Judaism itself. The God of the sufferers (to use Buber's phrase) is the Jewish God, and has in fact never been other.
Lévinas (1988:161) prompts us to read Job from Auschwitz and from there to embrace our radical responsibility for the world and one another. Auschwitz has definitively ended all theodicies of the God who rewards good and punishes evildoers. Lévinas accepts Nietzsche's word that "God is dead" insofar as it refers to the childish notions of God deconstructed in the book of Job. A certain salutary atheism links Job to Lévinas, yet this linkage appears at first as a dialectical atheism. Lévinas affirms the radically transcendent God, the one we might apprehend as absent and shrouded in divine incomprehensibility (hence the Judaic prohibition on idols). At times hidden and dark, and other times incomprehensible and transcendent, Lévinas's God is present as a trace in our care for the neighbor. This core religious intuition is shared by Jews and Christians in the second central biblical commandment, the love of neighbor. Kierkegaard is as ethico-religious here as Lévinas and Buber, and all three, while espousing the prophetic ethics of neighborly love, teleologically suspend (critically apprehend) the Hegelian communitarian social ethics, or what Heidegger would call the third-person perspective of the conventional "they." With the biblical Job rather than Kant's, Lévinas considers not just Leibniz's attempt in 1710 but any rational or religious theodicy to be a "temptation" (Bernstein, 2002: 169). Lévinas's "why is there evil rather than good?" — moving from theodicy to responsibility — defines our troubling times (2002:166 — 83; Neiman, 2002:291).
An intuition that radical evil is becoming the defining question of our times haunts many post-Holocaust thinkers. Arendt (1965) became famous with her controversial thesis about the "banality of evil" with which she describes Eichmann's duty-bound comportment and pseudo-Kantian conscience during his trial in Jerusalem. Evil's banality was supposed to preclude eulogizing an evil genius, and this is what originally worried Jaspers, who used the notion of "banality" in his letter to Arendt in 1946 (Arendt, 1992:62). But its banality was also to drive the nail through the coffin of all theodicies. Neiman (2002:302f.) begs to differ with Arendt on this. Calling evil banal offers at once "a piece of moral rhetoric" and also "the aestheticization of evil as one way to respond to the absurd. ... To call evil banal is to offer not a definition of it but a theodicy." Arendt hoped that if evil could be stripped of its inscrutability and magnitude, rendered finite and boring, we would grasp and face it without despair. Arendt's demythologizing intent was to view even radical evil as banal in some sense.
Arendt (1994:134), like Lévinas, views the twentieth century through the prisms of the problem of evil. Kant's pious admission of Job's authentic religious theodicy — and the suffering Job would be relating to God in this way according to some rabbinical readings — seems just as hopeless as it is impossible to philosophically justify at Auschwitz. Pressing the critical side of Kant, Neiman (2002:314 — 28) concludes that in facing evil without despair we might be regenerating a continually secular need of theodicy if not of finite theism. "The impulse to theodicy is not a relic of monotheism but goes deeper than either. Indeed, it is part of the same impulse that leads to monotheism itself" (318). If the collapse of all attempted philosophical theodicies were to lead to a failure of comprehending evil, then, she submits, we would abdicate honest, nondespairing ways of facing evil (325). This thought concedes much to Kant's Job.
We stand between the relentless, critical drive of reason for the unconditioned and the law of anti-idolatry that prohibits all positive representations of the redemptive. Reason demands answers to all relevant questions in search of the unconditioned in which it could rest its quest. The monotheistic prohibition of idolatry, as in genuine Buddhism, proscribes divinity that could be paraded as an object, conceived of as an answer to arguments or problems. Between a critical redemptive theory of hope and prohibitions of its positive images, what must our honest, nondespairing response to evil be? It benefits us to meditate on hope available in the secular milieu. Jonas formulates an impossible, desert-like theodicy; thinkers in the early Frankfurt School of social criticism introduced in dialectical atheism a possibility of redemptive critical theory.
IMPOSSIBLE THEODICY
Buber (1993:178) poses the question most poignantly for the survivors of Auschwitz by identifying them with "the Job of the gas chambers": "How is it still possible to live with God in a time in which there is Auschwitz?" Jonas (1996:133) reveals Job's "paradox of paradoxes":
it was the ancient people of the "covenant," no longer believed in by those involved, killers and victims alike, but nevertheless this and no other people, under which the fiction of race had been chosen for this wholesale annihilation — the most monstrous inversion of election into curse, which defied all possible endowment with meaning.
Every theodicy, even the authentic one praised by Kant, of a God who would consent to Auschwitz or its continuing incarnations would seem to both a critical and a pious mind to be nothing but perverse. To answer Job from Auschwitz, while not giving up on God altogether, Jonas decides to square the circle of theism and atheism. He requires of us nothing less than to rethink God otherwise than presented under the guise of the Lord of history who is an omnipotent sovereign.
Jonas brings us to two intuitive openings. In the first he adopts the prophetic voice of Etty Hillesum (1984); in the second he conjures up the myth of a self-limiting God. Hillesum was a young Dutch Jew who went of her own will in 1942 to the Westerbrook concentration camp in order to partake in the suffering of her people. She died in the Auschwitz gas chamber in 1943. Jonas (1996:192) cites her diary testimony:
I will go to any place on this earth where God sends me, and I am ready in every situation and until I die to bear witness ... that it is not God's fault that everything has turned out this way, but our fault. ... And if God does not continue to help me, then I must help God. ... That is the only thing that matters: to save in us, O God, a piece of yourself.
Inspired by her, Jonas narrates the myth of a suffering, becoming, and caring God. Rather than borrowing from the Christian myth of the suffering God, Jonas retells the Kabbalistic myth of the intelligible Creator who gives up power in order to suffer with all creation. Not unlike Whitehead's Christian process God, who is our fellow sufferer, Jonas's God, now revealed to Jews from Auschwitz, "abandoned Himself and his destiny entirely to the outwardly exploding universe and thus to the pure chances of the possibilities contained in it under the conditions of space and time." This deity "had to renounce His own power," and with it went out the classical attribute of omnipotence (189f.). "In the beginning," Jonas mythologizes, "for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give up itself to the chance and risk an endless variety of becoming." In an ongoing kenosis, God has been "effacing himself for the world" (134). Creation "involved suffering on the part of the God" who is "a becoming God ... emerging in time ... and affected by what happens in the world" (136f.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope by Martin Beck Matu?tìk. Copyright © 2008 Martin Beck Matu?tìk. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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