Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- The Persistence of Subjectivity
- 1 Introduction: “Bourgeois Philosophy” and the Problem of the Subject
- PART I SETTING
- PART II THEORISTS
- 3 Necessary Conditions for the Possibility of What Isn't: Heidegger on Failed Meaning
- 4 Gadamer's Hegel: Subjectivity and Reflection
- 5 Negative Ethics: Adorno on the Falseness of Bourgeois Life
- 6 The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophical Fate of Modernity
- 7 Hannah Arendt and the Bourgeois Origins of Totalitarian Evil
- 8 On Not Being a Neo-Structuralist: Remarks on Manfred Frank and Romantic Subjectivity
- 9 Leaving Nature Behind, or Two Cheers for Subjectivism: On John McDowell
- Postscript: On McDowell's Response to “Leaving Nature Behind”
- PART III MODERN MORES
- PART IV EXPRESSION
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
7 - Hannah Arendt and the Bourgeois Origins of Totalitarian Evil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- The Persistence of Subjectivity
- 1 Introduction: “Bourgeois Philosophy” and the Problem of the Subject
- PART I SETTING
- PART II THEORISTS
- 3 Necessary Conditions for the Possibility of What Isn't: Heidegger on Failed Meaning
- 4 Gadamer's Hegel: Subjectivity and Reflection
- 5 Negative Ethics: Adorno on the Falseness of Bourgeois Life
- 6 The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophical Fate of Modernity
- 7 Hannah Arendt and the Bourgeois Origins of Totalitarian Evil
- 8 On Not Being a Neo-Structuralist: Remarks on Manfred Frank and Romantic Subjectivity
- 9 Leaving Nature Behind, or Two Cheers for Subjectivism: On John McDowell
- Postscript: On McDowell's Response to “Leaving Nature Behind”
- PART III MODERN MORES
- PART IV EXPRESSION
- Bibliography
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
In modern philosophy, “the problem of evil” has become less and less the theological or theodicy problem, “justifying the ways of God to man.” It can appear in that form, of course, in Leibniz, to some extent in Kant, in a revised form in Hegel, and in Marx. And it can assume different but still very similar forms – not as a straightforward question of reconciling God's goodness with the created world in which the innocent suffer but as a problem about the “meaning” of the world as such. The “Grand Inquisitor” passage in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has become a locus classicus for this version of the problem: Could I ever be “at home” in a world with so much evil? What does it mean that there is such evil, or could one ever make sense of the brutal persistence of such events in human history? What sort of burden is it (if it is) to live a life permanently unreconciled to or alienated from such a hostile world, if no such sense can be made? And so forth. But for the most part, the philosophical problem is now more restricted and even prior to such worries. There are two dimensions to “the modern problem of evil,” once the question of “natural evil” for the most part gave way to the problem of moral evil, the evil acts human beings commit. (1) Does the concept of evil really pick out anything in the human world?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Persistence of SubjectivityOn the Kantian Aftermath, pp. 146 - 167Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
- 1
- Cited by