Power, Love and Evil: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged

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Love and evil are real - they are substances or force fields which contain us as constituent parts. Of all the powers of life they are the two most pregnant with meaning, hence the most generative of what is specifically human. Love and evil stand in the closest relationship to each other: evil is both what destroys love and what forces more love out of us, it is, as Augustine astutely grasped, privative (requiring something to negate) but it is also born out of misdirected love. Breaking with naive realist and post-modern dogmas about the nature of the real, this book provides the basis for a philosophy of generative action as it draws upon examples from philosophy, literature, religion and popular culture. While this book has a sympathetic ear for ancient and traditional narratives about the meaning of life, it offers a philosophy appropriate for our times and our crises. It is particularly directed at readers who are seeking for new ways to think about our world and self-making, and who are as dissatisfied with post-Nietzschean and post- Marxian 20th century social theory as they are by more traditional philosophical and naturalistic accounts of human being. Wayne Cristaudo is Associate Professor of European Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His publications include The Metaphysics of Science and Freedom: from Descartes to Kant to Hegel (Ashgate), This Great Beast: Progress and the Modern State (with Bob Catley) (Ashgate), Great Ideas in the Western Literary Canon (with Peter Poiana) (University of America Press) and Messianism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th Century German Thought (Introduction by Wayne Cristaudo and edited with Wendy Baker) (ATF). He has also published articles in international journals and chapters in books on Marx, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Eric Voegelin, Ernst Cassirer, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig.