Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation

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Summary: The history of the term 'radical evil'
Review: Much discussion of the Holocaust, perhaps influenced in part by Hannah Arendt, invokes the phrase 'radical evil'. But the term springing from Kant, in his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, speaks what seems a different almost technical language of the will, in the context of the critique of practical reason. There the surface complexity of the lore of Kant's distinction of Wille and Wilkur seem to obscure the analyis, although Kant, too out of fashion, and bespeaks the question with underhanded profundity. One needs perhaps to get the knack of noting, if not understanding, the implications of these abstractions blind before the noumenal dragon's lair--of what do we speak, if of the 'will'??! As Arendt seems to suggest, Kant was not quite letting on.
This work is an invaluable history and compendium to any discussion of 'radical evil', and of the passage of the them via Kant through Hegel and Schelling to Nietzsche and Freud, concluding with the post-Holocaust thinkers Levinas, Johas, Arendt. This history should be better known in an age when the discussion is either positivistic discussion of the next robot advance in value free science or some mythical strain from the spiritual Hollywoods of too long ago. After Kant, 'at war with himself'(the point is debatable),the author critiques Hegel's great system with the sure fate of this question in a tighly conceived teleology, and then the surprisingly refreshing views of the less well known Schelling. It is hard to take the analysis of the inscrutable beyond these seminal sources (in my view,I find Nietzsche less profound that his reputation would suggest), but the remaining discussions are compelling none the less as the question explodes from its airy quality in the context of the twentieth century. Very fine study, although one might have thought Marx/anti-Marx a pole of this history. The question of 'radical evil' in relation to Hannah Arendt is also considered in the author's Hannah Arendt and the Jewish question.