Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation
About large solutions to the issue of evil, Bernstein is  pessimistic: there can't be a general theory of evil, and we  can't finally understand evil. There can be no happy ending to  human history. But he is cautiously optimistic about overcoming  particular evils. He brilliantly untangles the strings with  which Kant tied himself in knots and looks at Hegel's attempts  to disentangle them. But, he says, "we can no longer accept  Hegel's dialectical account of good and evil." There is no final  reconciliation that could allow Hegel's "Spirit" to heal  "without leaving any scars." Nietzsche and Freud are used to  cast light on "our ineradicable psychic ambivalence." Bernstein,  who now teaches at the New School in New York after a career at  Yale and Haverford, has latterly focused on continental  philosophy: as Susan Neiman does in the final parts of her  recent Evil in Modern Thought a work this book complements he  devotes his final discussions to it. Emmanuel L vinas, Hans  Jonas, and Hannah Arendt take center stage. It would have helped  to connect Hegel's use of the infinite with L vinas's, as  L vinas does not believe in happy endings because he does not  believe there can be an ending. Yet in a world fueled by the  infinite there is always hope. Readers will also miss the  hopeful philosophers Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North  Whitehead, and, more recently, John Leslie (Infinite Minds).  Bernstein addresses academics, but he writes clearly, and his  subject will attract others. Leslie Armour, Univ. of OttawaCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.