Smith College: Kahn Liberal Arts Institute

After leading a session of our Kahn project on Evil this spring, folklorist and children’s literature expert Maria Tatar of Harvard University said her experience conjured “fantasies about what the academic world should be like—a vibrant exchange of ideas across generational, disciplinary, and divisional lines.” And indeed, our weekly meetings brought together students, professors, and staff from all three divisions of the College and the School for Social Work for a sustained discussion of evil that reflected diverse and at times irreconcilable perspectives. One of the project’s greatest strengths, however, would have been imperceptible to the one-time visitor. For even as consensus remained elusive, we made palpable progress in each session, deepening our grasp of the questions involved, opening up new angles of approach, and yielding ever-increasing returns for our own projects, most of which changed dramatically in focus and substance during the course of the year. We may not have come to an agreement on the nature of evil, or what it is we do when we call something “evil,” but we nevertheless developed an increasingly nuanced repertoire of ideas in discussing the issue that could only have come from the kind of sustained intellectual exchange made possible by the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute.

In our mid-year report we described a trajectory for the project that ran from theological and philosophical definitions of evil to what have been considered its historical manifestations in the past and present. We looked forward in the spring to addressing artistic representations of evil, works that not only symbolize or express the human experience of suffering or malice, but also provide one of our most effective tools for comprehending that experience, for coming to intellectual and emotional terms with it. Some of these representations were upsetting, requiring us to set our teeth, close our eyes or even leave the room. Eyewitness accounts of last-moment encounters between victims and guards at Auschwitz or cinematic depictions of cruelty to children or aggressive instances of “evil music,” were especially disturbing to some. But interrogating these responses and the validity of the artistic manipulations that generated them became the basis for much fruitful discussion.

We began the semester with a discussion of that seminal portrayal of suffering, the Book of Job, led by visitor Joel Kaminsky (Religion), followed by project fellow Madeline Zehnder ’13, who discussed Mark Twain’s American analogue, The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899). Justin Cammy invited us to question literature’s ability to portray the real horror of twentieth-century suffering in the shadow of the Shoah. Alexandra Zaleski ’12 considered the possibility of redemption with tale of the rapist knight and faery hag imagined by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, while Craig Davis showed how Grendel’s mother is that most human of monsters, a “mother from hell,” not so very different after all from the hero Beowulf himself. Thalia Pandiri offered a figure even more disturbing in her screening of Lars von Trier’s Medea (1988), a particularly grim retelling of Eurpides’ play. And our trajectory took us all the way to the end-times, to “ultimate evil,” with Gillian Kendall’s examination of apocalypse in Shakespeare, though we eventually looped back to our initial interest in definitions of evil with Tom Derr’s analysis of the way the moral quality of the relationship between humanity and nature has been re-characterized by contemporary philosophers.

Whereas our first semester featured many guest speakers, the second was punctuated by performances. Guest musician Peter Krasinski accompanied Paul Leni’s 1924 silent film, Waxworks, with a public performance on the organ of John M. Greene Hall and met with the group to discuss the challenges of portraying diabolical figures in music. Leni’s film served as a touchstone for Joel Westerdale’s investigation into the supposed prominence of evil in early German cinema. The semester also featured the premiere of an original composition, “The Music of Eric Zann,” by fellow Jerry Noble, who also taught the group much on the subject of evil in music from Boethius to Black Sabbath. Commencement Weekend celebrations featured the performance of a play, The Strength of Stones, written as her Kahn project by Samantha Noble ’12. She and the other student fellows presented the fruits of their year’s work—much still in progress—on a panel at Collaborations that was well-attended and very well-received.

As the semester drew to a close, the seminar sought to synthesize its findings. In groups, we tackled three broad yet lingering issues that had surfaced repeatedly throughout the year: representations of evil, its manifestations in the world, and our personal encounters with it. We made time, especially at the request of our seven student participants, to reflect on our own trajectory of thought and feeling on these questions and are proud of the fact that they all became not only fully contributing members of the seminar, but sometimes its leaders to whose views we listened with much appreciation and regard. So a wide array of questions still found expression in these final sessions: Is the identification of evil an indicator of moral insight or rather a defense mechanism, a way of Othering or objectifying what is unwelcome or incomprehensible? Is use of the term a performative utterance, one that actually creates what it pretends to describe or is it our only means of identifying truly inhuman or dehumanizing behavior? Even at this late stage in the project, conflicting interpretations continued to arise, so that we realized just how rich and important a topic we had found, despite many hours of reading and over fifty hours of concentrated discussion. Whether or not our work together had provoked radical shifts in our personal positions, we all walked away from the seminar not only with a more nuanced understanding of evil, but a deeper appreciation of our colleagues’ perception of it and of what they mean when they use the term. In the end, we may not have come to a definitive understanding of evil, but we certainly came to a better understanding of each other.