Abstract

Evil has always been a main interest in the field of philosophy of religion, and lately in the field of ethics – in both continental and analytic traditions – the idea of evil seems to be making a comeback. This paper asks: What is the relation between transcendence and evil? Why is it such an uncanny one? Are there any new possibilities in thinking about it? The propensity in modernism is to understand evil in radical immanent terms. Lars Svendsen, in A Philosophy of Evil, argues for example that evil is about inter-human relationships, not about a transcendent, supernatural force. Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, describes evil as something that cannot be integrated into the world, something that’s always on the outside: the radical Other. Furthermore, evil appears to us as something chaotic, defying comprehension. Does this mean evil is something transcendent? In this paper, I will analyse the concept of evil in terms of the typology of transcendence that was developed by Wessel Stoker in Looking Beyond?. Some critical questions to answer in this regard are: if evil is something transcendent, what does it imply for human responsibility? Is a radical immanent understanding of evil a better alternative? I will argue that there are, within the modern discourse, and due to new developments in the understanding of transcendence, new nuanced possibilities of thinking about evil and its relation to transcendence.