Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties

324 Pages·2016·4.398 MB·English

by  Sami Pihlström, Sari Kivistö (auth.)

Sari Kivistö
Sami Pihlström
Kantian
Antitheodicy
Philosophical and
Literary Varieties
Kantian Antitheodicy
Sami   Pihlström • Sari   Kivistö
Kantian Antitheodicy
Philosophical and Literary Varieties
Sami   Pihlström Sari   Kivistö
University of Helsinki University of Tampere, Finland
Helsinki , Finland
ISBN 978-3-319-40882-8 ISBN 978-3-319-40883-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40883-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958756
© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016
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Acknowledgments
Chapter 2 of this book grew out of our joint essay, “Kantian Anti-
Th eodicy and Job’s Sincerity”, in P hilosophy and Literature 40:2 (2016),
© Johns Hopkins University Press, used here with the permission of the
publisher.
W hile none of the other chapters have been published previously—
and even Chap. 2 is a signifi cantly expanded version of the original arti-
cle—some of the material has been presented as conference papers and
guest lectures at various institutions as follows:
Chapter 1 was partly presented by Sami Pihlström as guest lectures
at Åbo Akademi Philosophy Research Seminar and the University of
Helsinki Moral and Political Philosophy Seminar (March 2015), at the
Philosophy Colloquium of the University of Tübingen (October 2015),
as well as in the ethics lecture series at Joensuu Central Hospital (January
2016).
Th e early Kant sections of Chap. 2 were presented by Pihlström at
the 12th International Kant Congress (University of Vienna, September
2015) and in much more detail at the Kant Reading Day (University of
Tübingen, February 2016). Related conference papers titled “Th eodicy as
a Failure of Recognition” and “Th e Aesthetics of Antitheodicy” were pre-
sented (jointly by both authors) at the conferences, Issues of Recognition
in Pragmatism and American Transcendentalism (University of Helsinki,
December 2015) and Th e Cultivation of the Aesthetic Imagination (Kyoto
v
vi Acknowledgments
University, March 2016). Sari Kivistö delivered a guest lecture on “Job’s
Sincerity and Insincere Narratives” at Paideia Society, University of Turku
(April 2016).
Chapter 3 is partly related to Pihlström’s conference paper, “Forgiving
God and Forgiving Human Beings”, presented at the symposium,
Reconciliation and Forgiveness (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
Studies, June 2015); related material was presented by Pihlström at
the UBIAS Intercontinental Academia, T ime (University of Nagoya,
March 2016). Pihlström’s keynote talk at the European Philosophy of
Religion Conference, Evil , in Uppsala (August 2016) is also connected
with this topic.
Th e parts of Chap. 5 dealing with pragmatism are partly based on
Pihlström’s presentations at the P hilosophy as Translation symposia co-
organized with Naoko Saito (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies,
November 2014; UCL Institute of Education, London, February 2015);
related conference papers were presented by Pihlström at the Nordic
Society for Philosophy of Religion Conference, Th e Origins of Religion
(University of Helsinki, June 2015), the Second European Pragmatism
Conference (ENS, Paris, September 2015), and a conference on the
argument from evil in analytic theology (Philosophisch-Th eologische
Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt am Main, September 2015).
Chapter 6 is related to Pihlström’s guest lectures on “Transcendental
Antitheodicy” at Forschungsstätte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft
in Heidelberg (February 2016) and at the University of Helsinki History
of Philosophy Seminar (May 2016).
Th e organizers and audiences of these various occasions have obviously
provided us with important insights and criticisms. We are, moreover,
deeply grateful to a large number of friends and colleagues whose feed-
back has been invaluable at various stages of the writing process, espe-
cially Hanne Appelqvist, Vincent Colapietro, Jari Ehrnrooth, Russell
B. Goodman, Dirk-Martin Grube, Sara Heinämaa, Ana Honnacker, Simo
Knuuttila, Timo Koistinen, Heikki J. Koskinen, Heikki A. Kovalainen,
Sandra Laugier, Olli-Pekka Moisio, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Martha Nussbaum,
Panu-Matti Pöykkö, Phillip Rossi, Henrik Rydenfelt, John Ryder, Risto
Saarinen, Naoko Saito, Magnus Schlette, Th omas Schmidt, Jonathan
Sheehan, Chris Skowronski, Lauri Snellman, Paul Standish, Ken Stikkers,
Acknowledgments vii
Kirill O. Th ompson, Sigridur Th orgeirsdottir, Teemu Toppinen, Ioannis
Trisokkas, Niels Weidtmann, Aku Visala, Emil Visnovsky, Oliver Wiertz,
and Ulf Zackariasson. We would also like to warmly acknowledge Maija
Väätämöinen’s excellent assistance with the bibliography. Our general
thanks are extended to the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies as
well as the Faculty of Th eology at the University of Helsinki, particularly
the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence, “Reason and Religious
Recognition” (hosted by the Faculty of Th eology), for providing us with
excellent conditions for academic work. Sami Pihlström would also like
to specifi cally acknowledge the Alfred Kordelin Foundation for a sab-
batical grant he received for the academic year 2015–2016 (as part of
the Finnish Foundation’s Professor Pool intended for professors’ sabbati-
cal arrangements) as well as the Forum Scientiarum at the University of
Tübingen, Germany, where he spent part of the year as a visiting fellow
writing signifi cant portions of his parts of this book. Finally, we would
like to kindly acknowledge the role smoothly played throughout this pro-
cess by our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Brendan George and Grace
Jackson.
Helsinki, May 2016
Sari Kivistö & Sami Pihlström
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Kantian Antitheodicism and Job’s Sincerity 29
3 Suff ering and Forgiveness in Kafka and Post-Holocaust
Antitheodicism 73
4 Evil, Absurdity, and Nonsense: Beckettian
and Wittgensteinian Refl ections 139
5 Pragmatism, Suff ering, and Truthfulness: From James
to Rorty to Orwell 187
6 Conclusion: Th e Transcendental Antitheodicy
of the “Sick Soul” 257
Bibliography 291
Index 307
ix
1
Introduction
Th is book defends what we propose to call a ntitheodicism through historical
and systematic discussions of what we fi nd its most interesting versions, both
literary and philosophical. Generally, we may say that t heodicies seek a justi-
fi cation, legitimation, and/or excusing of an omnipotent, omniscient, and
absolutely benevolent God’s allowing the world (His creation) to contain
evil and for allowing humans and other sentient beings to suff er. Classical
formulations can be found, for example, in Augustine’s appeal to God’s
having created human beings with the freedom of the will as the reason
why there is evil, articulated in his C onfessiones and De civitate Dei , and in
G.W. Leibniz’s view, formulated in his famous Th éodicée (1710). According
to Leibniz, God could not have created any better world than the one he,
as omnipotent and absolutely good, did create; hence, we live in the best
possible world, and while there is some evil there, it is necessary for the
overall good. 1 By antitheodicism we mean the rejection of any such, or
indeed a ny , theodicies, or better, of the very project of theodicy.
Our study is based on a somewhat unusual double perspective provided
by literary criticism and theory, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the
other hand, for approaching the problem of evil and suff ering through a criti-
cal analysis of certain (philosophical and/or theological) texts and characters
constructed and represented in them, beginning with Kant’s 1791 Th eodicy
© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016 1
S. Pihlström, S. Kivistö, Kantian Antitheodicy,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40883-5_1
2 Kantian Antitheodicy
Essay and its most important pre-text, the Book of Job, and moving on to
modern philosophy and literature. Th is methodology opens a novel per-
spective on the issue of theodicy versus antitheodicy. Our approach diff ers
from the more standard ways of examining philosophical ideas expressed in
literature (e.g., in works of such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus,
Samuel Beckett, and Siri Hustvedt, among many others). In the cases dis-
cussed here, the use of literary fi gures and characters in a philosophical
argument, rather than v ice versa, is central. Our discussion of the problem
of evil and (anti - ) theodicy seeks to show that certain ways of writing—
especially of authoring a t heodicy—could themselves be argued to exem-
plify moral vices and thereby to contribute to evil, instead of excusing or
justifying it. Th at is, even intellectually outstanding academic contributions
to the problem of evil may be vulnerable to devastating ethical critique. 2
Theodicies: Still Going Strong
Th e mainstream approach to the problem of evil in contemporary Anglo-
American (broadly analytic) philosophy of religion is, arguably, strongly
theodicist . By “theodicism” we may refer to all those attempts to deal with
the problem of evil that regard theodicy as a desideratum of an acceptable
theistic position, irrespective of whether they end up defending t heism or
rejecting it. 3 Th e theodicist can, then, be an atheist, insofar as he or she
concludes that God does not exist (or probably does not exist, or that
there is no justifi cation for the belief that God exists) precisely because the
theodicist desideratum cannot be fulfi lled. Also those who off er a mere
“defense”—instead of a theodicy proper—can be regarded as theodicists
in the sense that they also seek to defend God and account for God’s jus-
tice by arguing that, for all we know, God c ould have ethically acceptable
reasons to allow the world to contain evil, even on the massive scale familiar
to us. 4 Accordingly, the theodicist project in contemporary philosophy
of religion (which we obviously cannot review in any detail here) is not
restricted to those thinkers who off er us explicit theodicies, such as Richard
Swinburne (defending a version of the “free will t heodicy”) and John Hick
(“soul-making theodicy”)—in most cases with an admirable history going
back to, say, Augustine and Irenaeus, respectively—but also includes those
philosophers who provide us with mere “defenses”. Th e latter include,