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On Evil (2010)

by Terry Eagleton(Favorite Author)

3.66 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0300151063 (ISBN13: 9780300151060)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Yale University Press

review 1: Eagleton doesn't provide a super coherent argument about evil (mostly due to his cloudy reluctance to define it). Does evil exist? In nature? Is it part of the Dionysian "dark center" of consciousness that leads man to waste? I'm basically not a believer in "evil" because it implies a kind of self-determinism in humans and nowhere else. He lost me for a bit in his introduction where he reduces hard determinism as some trendy progressivist stance without getting into the real gunk of relativism. But once he sifted through theology and Freud, I was absorbed. Overall, really interesting, despite it's general lack of persuasion.
review 2: This is my first experience with Eagleton, so maybe I'm just not accustomed to his style, but if all of his work is like "On Evi... morel," I don't think I'll be getting back to his work any time soon. He tries to take on a broad, difficult topic, a philosophical obstruction that has been an obsession of philosophy and literature since people started making words, but nothing profound or illuminating emerges from the exercise. The only thing deep about On Evil is the topic itself, and Eagleton only manages to skim its surface.The lack of structure in the book is its first weakness, and perhaps this is the bottleneck that kept anything else from really flowering in this conceptual garden. Eagleton organizes a 150-page intellectual treatise into three chapters, and within these chapters, there is no signposting, no logical trail to follow, no central theme to link the various diversions. Halfway through each section, I was struck by the feeling that this book is, in fact, ONLY diversions, without any real claim to make.Eagleton's ideologies -- Western literature, continental theory, and a preoccupation with Catholic doctrine and classical Marxism -- are clearly on display here. One of his central tenets is that evil, by definition, isn't the product of circumstance, nor motivated by objectives outside itself... to truly be evil, it has to hate purely for the sake of hate. This gives him some material to wrestle with -- whether evil is derived from good, whether the universe is actually manichean, whether evil can be neutralized by sublimating it or rationalizing it away -- but the central principle is a premise, not an argument, and all the resulting discussion is just a reflection on the obvious consequences of that premise.At the very least, the book gave me some ideas for more books to read, and it massages some of my long-neglected cognitive constructions: Freudianism, moral theory, political economy. But I'll never cite it, never refer to any argument or perspective it contained, never bring it up to add something to a conversation... its problem is that it just talked at me for three weeks, waxing poetic about well-worn ideas, but stubbornly refusing to give me anything new. less

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