Raising Cain: the problem of evil and the question of responsibility

[E]vil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people
recognize it--the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis ...
must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their
neighbors go off to their doom, and not to become accomplices in all
these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned
how to resist temptation.
--Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1)

[It is] through evil that suffering is understood.
--Emmanuel Levinas, "Useless Suffering" (2)

And Cain said to Abel ...
--Genesis

Evil--what makes people go wrong and more significantly how do we define what counts as evil? In this essay I explore the problem of evil by taking seriously Emmanuel Levinas's claim cited in the epigraph above. According to Levinas the role of rationality in the propagation of evil has been underestimated, and the Shoah has taken the otherworldly mystique out of evil. It infused the everyday with evil and transformed the 'temptation,' that which was forbidden, into the impulse to do good. Levinas's approach to the problem of evil is to discount the traditional view of theodicy which serves to 'justify' or rationalize the evil and suffering that are inflicted on others. Certainly we could agree that the wanton destruction of life is evil. But Levinas's work helps us to see evil in a different light. For Levinas, evil is not about the wanton destruction of life, though certainly he would not disregard these acts. For him the source of evil is rather the inability to be attuned to the other. This kind of evil, the capacity to be so detached from humanity that one cannot see one's own responsibility in the order of things is, one might say, the precondition of all other evil.

When Levinas claims that it is through evil that we understand suffering, his point is twofold. On the one hand, he seeks to invert the relationship between suffering and evil. Levinas rejects a conception of suffering where suffering is a necessary part of what it means to be human. On the other hand, he wants to claim that it is through evil, and hence through the suffering of the other, that we become attuned to the other. This is not to say that suffering and evil are necessary; only that the presence of evil and hence the presence of suffering should attune us to the other. Levinas's intention is to invert the relationship. Evil and the suffering that results from it can be useful to me, even if useless to the one suffering. Again, this is not to justify the suffering. Rather it is to point out precisely the opposite: we cannot justify the suffering that exists. There is a sense in which evil is that which both inflicts suffering on the other and ignores the suffering of the other.

My essay begins by looking at the story of Cain and Abel, with a particular focus on Levinas's portrayal of Cain as detached from humanity. Although the murder of Abel was horrific, what worries Levinas more than the actual murder is Cain's detached reply to G-d: 'Am I my brother's keeper?' This reply indicates that he is unable to assume responsibility for the death of his brother, but it also implies Cain's detachment from humanity in general. Cain has no attunement to an 'other,' or at least no attunement that he is able to access. From Levinas's point of view, Cain's lack of attunement, his 'sober coldness' as Levinas calls it, signals Cain's undeveloped subjectivity. He is not yet ready to respond to another, though his defensive response to God indicates a space for doing so.

I follow this discussion with Levinas's conception of maternity, which is offered as the antithesis to Cain's lack of subjectivity. Maternity, the epitome of an unmediated relationship characterized by a pre-reflective response is for Levinas the example par excellence of responsibility and response to the other. My essay thus moves from Cain, who exemplifies complete detachment to the other, to maternity, which exemplifies complete pre-reflective attunement to the other.

In closing, I will turn to a recent tragedy, one where a woman killed her five young children, in order to raise questions about the model of the ethical that Levinas provides. We can use Levinas's description of maternity to help us see how this relationship is understood and misunderstood. That is, we can use his description to see where we go wrong in simplistically and romantically defining the maternal relationship such that we are unable to admit of, and therefore try to prevent, the tragedies that result from maternal relations that do not conform to the ideal. In this essay I use the example of Cain's 'sober coldness' to illustrate the problem of evil as arising from a lack of attunement to others. I then link this problem to Levinas's conception of maternity, an example of that attunement par excellence. The failure of the maternal relation is, I argue, not merely a failure of the mother to be attuned to her child. Rather it is also a failure by those who surround the mother to be attuned to her and her children, and one that we need to place within the larger context of the society in which the mother lives.