What Evil Means to UsCornell University Press, 1997 - 185 páginas C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil--in themselves, in others, and in the world. What people meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would "give anything to be a vampire." Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination--in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative--offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil. Our society suffers from a paucity of shared narratives and the creative imagination they inspire. |
Dentro del libro
... Dictionary of Quotations from the Bible . New York : Penguin Books , 1988 . Mitzman , Arthur . The Iron Cage : An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber , with new intro . New Brunswick , NJ .: Transaction Books , 1985 . Nietzsche ...
Contenido
ONE I Felt Evil | 1 |
TWO Evil Is Pleasure in Hurting and Lack of Remorse | 21 |
THREE The Ground of Evil Is Dread | 35 |
FOUR Suffering Evil Doing Evil | 60 |
SEVEN Evil Spelled Backward Is Live | 99 |
EIGHT Evil Is Nothing | 117 |
NINE Scales of Evil | 141 |