Out of Eden
Paul W. Kahn, a Yale law professor, reads the story of Adam and Eve to ask why people commit evil. Drawing on Genesis, Milton, Freud and modern political violence, he argues that evil springs less from selfishness than from the wish to escape our own finitude and deny death.
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Adam Haslett
The question concerning the nature of evil is a longstanding one but I would go so far as to say that in this profound book, the philosopher Paul Kahn has gone a very long way in answering it. He argues that in our secular age we have given reason such a dominant place in our understanding of modern politics that we can only understand evil acts by individuals or nations as deficits of rationality.
Interview · July 2010
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