On Evil

By: Terry Eagleton

Narrated by: David Thorn

For many enlightened, liberal-minded thinkers today, and for most on the political left, evil is an outmoded concept. It smacks too much of absolute judgements and metaphysical certainties to suit the modern age. In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defence of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artifact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world.

In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?

©2010 Terry Eagleton (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"An absorbing, stimulating, awfully entertaining discussion." ( Booklist)

"Highly recommended for anyone interested in the intersection between literature, philosophy, and religion." ( Library Journal)

"Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution attacks the new atheism as a kind of secular counter-fundamentalism… Better than any previous book of its kind." (James Wood, The New Yorker)

prescient ride thru linking tunnels beneath glib Gatsby pretense

timely, erudite, current affairs having a very dungeon affair with modern constructs.
Refreshingly neither Main Stream Media propaganda, nor conspiracy, nor fundamentalist dogma.
The greatest thinkers pondered formations of society & it's attendant pressures & needs. Leaders, despots, politburos & Kangaroo courts were the arms of those illuminating & (oftentimes) revolutionary ideas. The poly-sci of hundreds of years of polemics, treatises & doctrine have yielded ... some very rich politicians.

Would it actually were a Shakespearean play.
But, so wonderfully written [★ & Narrated!★ 】 that one feels a gut punch of being involved in it all. Truly here is a book which turns the spotlight on the World as a stage, and we as it's current players - with every role a va
Vaunable one.

Thank you for this education.

Wow. Magnificent book

this book is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually clarifying, as well as intensely funny at times. Eagleton is brilliant, witty, and a good sam

What is Evil?

I’ll be honest, after reading this text, I’m still not really sure it helped me form a seriously concrete definition. What it did do, however, is help me to understand what we should NOT define as evil. The text, like any, should be understood in the historical time and context(s) in which it was written, which in this case was at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. This is especially important because, to The West (especially my country, the USA), evil was best understood as our enemies in the War on Terror: radical Islamism, and rogue states such as North Korea. Surely, if anything is evil, those enemies must be! Not so fast, says Eagleton, as he breaks down the problem with this understanding of evil. That’s really just a somewhat minor portion of the text, yet it seems to me this text wouldn’t have been written, or at least not when it was written, had we not been nearly a decade into that war on terror, and of course just moved past perhaps the most blood soaked century in history (of course he also explores the horrors of the 20th century).

Across the text he dives into a good deal of literature, as he’s done in nearly every text of his that I’ve read up to this point. It certainly helps to have familiarity with the texts he uses as examples in exploring the subject matter, though it’s not necessary to get the points he’s making (I am not very familiar with most of these texts, save for Paradise Lost). It also helps to be somewhat familiar with the most violent events of the 20th century, though again it’s not necessarily required (I think this is more important than familiarity with the literature he explores). He mostly explores these sources to examine what’s been understood as evil, as opposed to using them to help define what it definitely is.

Ultimately, I spent much of the text feeling uncertain of where he was going, and often feeling I was maybe in over my head a bit, in spite of enjoying the ride. I’ll say that it’s definitely the “last chapter”, what here is described as “end credits”, where I really felt I was getting the most out of the text. That’s where I often felt the best insights where being made most clear, and where I felt I was really understanding some important and deep points that I maybe hadn’t thought of so clearly before, if at all.

Highly recommended for any fans of Eagleton, first and foremost, but also for those philosophically and politically minded who are really interested in the idea of “evil”. This may be one of those texts best absorbed as an actual book, but it’s not necessarily difficult.

That Marxist, Terry Evilton!

This is a good philosophical, religious, literary, and political account of the genealogy of evil, but it lacks any connection to biology, ecology, history, or systems theory, and seems to hold that evil can be understood from a purely humanist standpoint. This makes the discourse fairly monolithic, descriptive, moralistic, and reliant upon the author's stylistic flair and critical skills to carry the argument.