1 Kant: The Perversion of Freedom                                     17

2 Fichte and Schelling: Entangled in Nature                           46

3 Hegel: A Wry Theodicy                                               81

4 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Suffering from Meaninglessness         118

5 Levinas: Ethics à l’Outrance                                      158

6 Adorno: Radical Evil as a Category of the Social                   187

Conclusion                                                           212

The question that confronts us, then, is: why should the archaic vision of a battle of moral forces have such resonance for many members of modern societies? Part of the attraction of the concept of evil, I would suggest, is that it offers an experience of moral depth which otherwise so often seems lacking in our lives. It does so in two interconnected ways.

Firstly, we belong to a culture that has become habituated to relativity, to pluralizing its notions of the good. Our liberal political order is based on the premise that we are each entitled to pursue our own conception of the best life, but that we have no right to impose this conception on others. Yet it is difficult to match this tolerant, multivalent conception of the good with an

equally relaxed view of what is morally bad. Multiculturalism struggles hard to process the dissonances which arise when the practices of minorities violatethe norms of liberal individualism. Or, to put this the other way round,modern liberalism, not to speak of its postmodern offshoots, often has a bad conscience about its own implicit universalism. It is reluctant to put its cards on the table, for fear of appearing to promote some particular conception of the good. But there always comes a breaking point.

Predictably, only hours after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on 11 September 2001, commentators began to clamour that the condition of the humanities in the American academy had deprived intellectuals of the will to identify and denounce blatant evil. On 15 October, a noted proponent of fashionable scepticism about principles and foundations, the critic and cultural commentator Stanley Fish, felt compelled to publish an article in the New York Times. He had been provoked by a journalist who telephoned him to ask whether 11 September meant the end of postmodernist relativism.2 Fish denied that postmodernism leaves us with

‘no fi rm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fi ghting back’.Giving up on the ‘empty rhetoric of absolute values’, as he called it, needn’t enfeeble our response. Like any community, Americans can invoke ‘the particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend’. Unfortunately, Fish did not confront the consequence of his argument – that the community of jihadists could do just the same. Of course,Fish could always respond that the mistake made by religious warriors is that they take their worldview to be absolute, rather than simply as an expression of their history and culture. But then he would have to add that this is only a mistake from ‘our’ point of view – interpreted from within, by their own criteria, religious viewpoints which claim unconditional validity can be selfsustaining.

From our (self-consciously relativist) standpoint we have to admit that, from within the enemies’ standpoint, the violence infl icted on us is justified, and that our outraged reponse is less legitimate than their destructive anger against us. These embarrassing philosophical tangles suggest that, even in our pluralistic world, the ‘absoluteness’ implied by the idea of evil requiresus to erect an unbreakable barrier – that not every practice or form of action can be morally defused by being set in its social and cultural context.Sometimes we feel compelled to draw the line, to respond with horror and denunciation to acts which violate not just social and moral convention,but our elemental conception of the human.