Evil’s Empire

By Assaf Sagiv

Adi Ophir's philosophy of doom.

Since very little can be gained from trying to improve the system from within, only one substantive option remains for the moral actor: Subversion. This, in essence, is the moral mission that Ophir assigns to man: “To sabotage the patterns of production of unnecessary evils, to stop their duplication, to halt the machinery that reproduces evil.”⁶⁵ “To sabotage,” “to stop,” “to halt”—at the end of the arduous path on which Speaking Evil leads us, Ophir’s monumental work reveals itself to be little more than another anti-establishment manifesto. Any hope the reader may have had of discovering a substantial moral program is dashed upon reading the actual practical ideas that the author proposes. After agonizing over the kinds of actions that will give force to his moral call, all Ophir can muster are the tired tactics of public protest:

Just as one strike in a factory can launch a wave of strikes that will cripple the economy and frustrate government policy, just as one petition can get people to take to the streets and trigger civil opposition to war—certain actions possess some chance, something greater than zero, of effecting a breakdown in the patterns of the production of evils in a particular realm, in a certain period of time, in a certain sector.⁶⁶

In other instances, Ophir recommends the tactics of internal subversion: “It may be more effective to try and engage in viral activity that disrupts systems through the operation of the tools of the systems themselves, instead of attempting to stop them in a head-on collision.”⁶⁷ Finally, if other means are not effective, a strategy of opting out may be the only recourse: “Frequently, the only thing possible is to refrain from participating in the systems of discourse and action that create evil in practice; the only thing possible is to initiate local acts of resistance.”⁶⁸

It is hard not to become frustrated by the inadequacy of this kind of answer to the omnipotent, ubiquitous evil that Ophir describes. And it is difficult not to rebel against the underlying assumption that every order—social, political, economic—should be seen as a hothouse for the production of evil. Ophir appears unwilling to imagine a system that does not function primarily as a “pattern of the production of evils,” and he seems to prefer undermining all establishments over any kind of activity within their framework. He allows no room for the possibility that the “social order” which he reviles may at times be far more effective at thwarting these evils; it is inconceivable to him that the long-standing presence of many of these systems—government, police and military forces, criminal justice systems and institutions of education and welfare—may owe to their success as a bulwark against the horrific evils that reign whenever the public order totally collapses. Ophir pays little heed to the lessons of history, which teach that even when such systems are deeply flawed, they are usually preferable to the violence, corruption, poverty, and starvation that rage in their absence.

Presented in such a sweeping fashion, and lacking any expression of idealism or a desire to reform the world, Ophir’s particular brand of anarchism offers only the darkest of visions. He clings to a slim hope, “some chance, something greater than zero,” of reducing pain, exploitation, and oppression—while arousing the reader’s deepest suspicion that his method may only make matters worse.

In the final analysis, the failure of Adi Ophir’s moral theory is to be found in its opening assumptions. Not only does Ophir accept at face value many of the axioms that have led moral philosophy to its current predicament, but he also takes them to an extreme. Following Kant, he argues that the moral imperative must be determined without regard for man’s natural inclinations. Following Levinas, he identifies morality with absolute devotion to the other, a self-abnegation that obligates us at all times to overcome all egoistic considerations. But Levinas, at least, draws a distinction between “ethics,” which is concerned with the articulation of absolute principles, and “morality,” which must take into account the limitations of social and political conditions and interests that are not ethical. Without morality and its compromises, Levinas asserted, ethics would always run into trouble at the point where theory meets reality.

Ophir, on the other hand, has no interest in such compromises. His own distinction between ethics and morality is instructive. Ophir maintains that whereas “ethics” is concerned with the self, in determining what are the qualities of correct, restrained, and polite behavior, the interest of a “moral” theory is in “measureless devotion to the other.” Ophir’s altruistic moral system knows no bounds—which is precisely why it is of no use outside the theoretical sphere. Moral philosophy is based, to no small degree, on the careful measurement of the distance between principles and interests: When it is too small, hypocrisy is liable to take the place of conscience; when it is too great, the link between moral philosophy and reality is lost. The gap between the principles laid out in Speaking Evil and the world in which they are meant to work is vast and unfathomable: While the moral standards that it sets are impossibly high, the reality it depicts is unbearably debased. Ophir seeks to find in the phenomenon of evil the fulcrum for his moral theory, but in his attempt to make the latter objective and tangible—what he argues is missing from the concepts of good and justice in other moral philosophies—he sinks so deep into its substance that he cannot extricate himself. Despite Ophir’s assertion of the lack of any “radical” difference between what is and what should be, it would be difficult to imagine a work that does more to widen that gap than Speaking Evil.

Ophir enlists “practical wisdom” to bridge the chasm between an intolerable reality and an impossible morality. But even as he erects this bridge, he methodically dismantles it. Thus is revealed the clash between Adi Ophir the humanist, who believes in the power of the intellect to serve as a guide in a Godless world, and Adi Ophir the postmodernist, who denies man’s ability to adopt an objective and comprehensive perspective regarding the world in which he lives. The thread of argument that is advanced in Speaking Evil is constantly woven and unraveled between these two poles.

But many of these problems are not unique to Adi Ophir or to his particular moral philosophy, even if they reach exceptional proportions in his work. On the contrary, what Speaking Evil ultimately offers, despite the author’s intentions, is a vivid illustration of the problems currently plaguing all of moral philosophy. Unwilling to accept Sartre’s dictum that “there are no signposts to guide us in this world,” Ophir has built for us another empty doctrine, testimony to the weakness of an entire discipline.

Assaf Sagiv is Assistant Editor of Azure.

Notes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (Brooklyn: Haskel House, 1977), pp. 35-36.

2. Sartre, Existentialism, p. 36.

3. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: MacMillan, 1969), p. 57.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Paris: Angel, 1970), p. 47. [French]

5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason,trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1956), pp. 17-59.

6. The outstanding examples in this context are Bernard Williams, Stuart Hampshire and Alasdair MacIntyre. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985); Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1988); Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard, 1983).

7. Adi Ophir, Speaking Evil: Towards an Ontology of Morals (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Am Oved and Van Leer, 2000), p. i. [Hebrew]

8. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. vii.

9. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 11.

10. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 280.

11. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 290.

12. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 290.

13. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard, 1971).

14. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. iv.

15. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 337.

16. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 212.

17. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 1.

18. Edmund Husserl, Ideas (New York: Collier, 1913), p. 74.

19. Ophir emphasizes that his analysis, as opposed to classical phenomenology, does not seek the primary structures of experience, and is incorporated in a structural analysis of the societal and cultural conditions of the very existence of experience.

20. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 12.

21. Ophir, Speaking Evil, pp. 211, 267.

22. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. i.

23. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 276.

24. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 212.

25. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 279.

26. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 291.

27. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 289.

28. Aristotle, The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson(New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 209.

29. Aristotle, Ethics, p. 213.

30. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985).

31. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. iv.

32. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. v.

33. Ophir, Speaking Evil, pp. iv-v.

34. Ze’ev Levi, Other and Responsibility (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1997). [Hebrew]

35. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism,trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone, 1990), p. 293.

36. According to Levinas, the objective dimension enters interpersonal relationships only upon the appearance of the “third,” who disturbs the intimate connection between the subject and the “other.” This is the transitional point between the ethical sphere and the political, in which the egalitarian demands of “objective” social justice take the place of the asymmetrical responsibility between the subject and the other. See Levi, Other and Responsibility, p. 93.

37. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. v.

38. Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon, 1996), p. 133.

39. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 323.

40. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 236.

41. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 70.

42. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Differend,” Theory and Criticism 8, 1996, p. 141. [Hebrew]

43. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 232.

44. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 237.

45. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 273.

46. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987).

47. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 320.

48. Ophir, Speaking Evil, p. 212.