Radical Evil: Robert Stolorow on the Work of Richard Bernstein

At The Huffington Post, Robert D. Stolorow has written an introduction to Richard Bernstein's philosophical research on the phenomenon of evil. Here is an excerpt. Follow the link at the end of the article to read the rest of the article:

Richard Bernstein, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, has written an important philosophical inquiry into the phenomenon of evil (Bernstein 2002), 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.

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