In this three-part interview, the illustrious Irish philosopher Richard Kearney explores the human experiences of evil. Part I of the interview considers theodicy and human responsibility for evil by contrasting Gnostic understandings of cosmological evil to St. Augustine’s understanding of evil as the privation of the good. During the course of this conversation, Kearney characterizes the human imagination as a creative capacity that can be turned to both good and evil purposes, and he urges us to develop “an ethical imagination responsive to the demands of the other.”     The Other Journal (TOJ): I’d like to begin our discussion by taking you back to one of your earlier books, The Wake of Imagination. This book, as well as much of your subsequent work, defends the importance of the imagination in human life and seeks to retrieve this capacity from the philosophical and religious neglect it has suffered in modern Western intellectual history. Yet you also show how our imaginative capacities can be turned toward evil purposes. I’m thinking here especially of your first chapter, which discusses the Old Testament’s prohibition of the divine image as well as the Hebraic suspicion of our mimetic desire and ability to imitate God’s creative activity. In this discussion, you also introduce the rabbinical golem legend, a cautionary tale that issues a warning about the destructive potential of human creativity. Could you elaborate on whether the golem legend and the Hebraic understanding of imagination still have lessons for us today, particularly in terms of how we’re to come to terms with evil?[1]   Richard Kearney (RK): There’s a lot in that question. Let me begin with the golem legend. I provide more details about the background of the legend in The Wake of Imagination, but it is clearly a Jewish tale from the late Middle Ages. In the Judaic tradition, this creation of a homunculus in our own image and likeness was seen as a repetition of Yahweh’s creation, God’s creation of Adam. So the Golem is in a way the one we create in our image and likeness just as God created Adam in His image and likeness. In that sense, the creation of the golem by Rabbi Loew of Prague was a very holy act, and the golem served to protect the people and do all kinds of chores in the ghetto. The catch was that to render the golem lifeless…

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