Although I’m obliged to write a review of Abigail Rosenthal’s A Good Look at Evil, I consider myself unqualified for anything resembling a critical evaluation. The author’s a philosopher. I’m not. She’s Jewish. I’m not. That said, I grew up in New York City, went to Queens College, which is part of the CUNY system (Dr. Rosenthal teaches, or taught at Brooklyn College), and have enough Jewish friends and family to know the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel. With those stated qualifications, I timidly proceed.

Rosenthal examines evil construed as the deliberate disruption of the human story of perpetrators, victims and world history writ large. Each of us is trying to live out “the story of you” (p.8) with curiosity (wonder, p. 45) and fidelity of purpose. As I read those words, I thought of Thoreau’s famous observation that most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to their graves with the song still in them, and wondered how the author might respond.

"Story" is defined at depth in the book. At the outset, we read that, “ [a]t  minimum, a story is a purpose transformed into enough experience to allow that purpose to understand itself a little better” (p.13). “Socrates comes to mind immediately – The unexamined life is not worth living,” as well as the California Corollary, which states that the unlived life is not worth examining. One’s story is the lived relationship with ourselves as authors.  Happily, at the very end of the book, Rosenthal includes God as co-author. That put me in mind of another familiar bromide in preaching circles – “if God is your co-pilot, switch seats.” Nonetheless, as a storyteller myself, I was delighted to engage Rosenthal’s conceit of life as story to see where it led.

Next comes some philosophical material about which I am unable to comment. A fair amount of time is spent in critiques of Sedgwick, Moore and Derrida (there’s a marvelous “pomposity puncturing” story in this part), which I found difficult to follow, not being a trained philosopher and not having read any of the works with which the author was clearly familiar. I did enjoy the Keynes quote on p. 29, in which he described Moore’s approach to conflict. If one needed a locus classicus for the origin of the disdainful put-down, that would be it. No logic, no argument, just a distasteful look and a sneer.

I enjoyed the author’s assessment of relativism, especially insofar as it is applied ethics. To Rosenthal, it’s not possible to exempt oneself from ethics and still be a reasonable person. She writes “…some recent writes on ethics…suggest that, insofar as ethical claims would only be accepted by the reasonable, they lack generality. The fact that ethical claims won’t voluntarily be put into practice by the thoughtless, by fanatics, by sociopaths, by nondeviant members of bloodthirsty exotic cultures, and the like, is taken to restrict the scope of its claims.”

“There is, here, a misunderstanding. The good life does not lose its exemplary significance because some people are not up to it….a person untrained to argument, untempered by the prolonged effort to discipline his impulses, and unrefined by constructive outside influences cannot be reliably good and cannot benefit from the study of ethics. Why these admissions, which ethical absolutists made freely, should in our time make it supposed that the good life has its goodness only relative to its being accepted by every sort of person is not clear to me….Taken at face value, it would lead to the surprising conclusion that no one is (objectively) good – unless everyone is.” (p.39) Now there’s food for thought!

Rosenthal then explains her method. To simplify matters, she seeks to establish pure type as models. We are presented with the sellout, the rake and eventually Adolf Eichmann et al. Fundamental to the notion of pure types is the freedom one has to choose what kind of person ne wants to be “freedom is one’s almost never-lost potentiality for voluntarily living or voluntarily debasing one’s ideal story. If freedom were not the potentiality for either the good or the bad, there would hardly be a point to characterizing people in moral terms” (p. 33).

The role of culture is explored in some detail. Of course cultures can be wrong, cultures that are inferior to others can win the day by brute force, and so on, but by leaving the door open to ethical assessment, we leave open the opportunity to reasoned growth.

Rosenthal posit a notion of Negative Identification, almost a “this is what I am not,” uttered as a default response. I’m not sure I grasped the concept entirely, but that would be my problem, not hers. Using Pizzaro and Eichmann as examples, Rosenthal explores genocide and what she terms “the logic of hatred.” At root, it seems to be the choice not to think, given the reality that one actually can. I was reminded in this part of Immaculee Ilibagiza’s description of the Rwandan genocide.

Rosenthal takes issue with Hannah Arendt’s description of Nazi evil as “banal.” To her, it’s anything but that. She describes Arendt’s relationship with Martin Heidegger at length, and suggest reasons why Arendt may have felt as she did. This section had information in it that was news to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have a friend who is a philosopher, who idolizes Heidegger. Can’t wait to show him the passage in which he’s shown asking all the Jews to leave his lecture! That, and victimizing a nineteen-year old student and throwing his mentor Husserl under the bus should be enough to convince him to find another idol!

In summary, this is a tough book to read, especially if one is not a trained philosopher well-versed in the tradition of ethics. The prose can be turgid, and some of the inter- and intra-religious caviling might put one off at times, but the benefits outweigh the difficulties by a wide margin. Fasten your seat belt and give this book a go!

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.