What does it mean to call nuclear annihilation not just catastrophic or criminal, but evil? In this First Friday lecture, Amy Thomas Elder works through the philosophical and theological history of radical evil, from Augustine and Aquinas through Kant and Arendt to Jonathan Schell’s landmark account of the nuclear age, asking whether our current situation represents a threat not only to human life but to humanity itself.
Drawing on philosophy, theology, literature, and political thought, Elder develops a “grammar of evil” in the Wittgensteinian sense: a way of seeing that reconfigures what is otherwise too large to think. She traces how Kant transformed Luther’s radical sin into a new philosophical concept, how Arendt repurposed that concept to describe totalitarian extermination, and how Schell extended it to the possibility of human self-extinction. Along the way she considers Augustine’s privation account of evil, Plato’s image of the great beast, and the question of whether humanity could be destroyed even if the species survived.
Rather than offering policy prescriptions, the lecture invites a deeper inquiry into how we must think in order to confront what seems unthinkable. A rich question-and-answer period takes up whether radical evil is a distinctly modern phenomenon, whether it can be defeated or only resisted, the relationship between game theory and nuclear evil, comparisons between death camps and nuclear extinction, Oppenheimer and the Bhagavad Gita, McCarthy’s Judge Holden, Stanislav Lem on evil and kitsch, and Arendt’s claim that thinking itself may inoculate against doing evil.
About the Speaker:
Ms. Thomas Elder is Claudia Traudt Distinguished Instructor in the Basic Program. She holds a BS in biology and advanced degrees in classics and the study of religion. Her research at the University of Chicago Divinity School dealt with allegory and textual interpretation in early Christianity. She has taught in settings including a museum, middle school, high school, college, and seminary. For many years, she taught in and directed the Odyssey Project, a college-level humanities program for adults living on low incomes, as part of the Bard College Clemente Course. She has been a Basic Program instructor since 1999.
