The signal shortcoming of philosophical modernity is its failure to compass evil in its way of thinking. Nietzsche pointed out that there is no philosophical argument against murder, which is to say that Thrasymachus is less defeated than he is skirted. Politically, Machiavelli says that the Prince might need to enter into evil in order to achieve legitimate political ends that justify his doing so, but at least he acknowledges the problem of evil. Later, determinism, the paradigm of which is Spinoza, would become the vogue, and Spinoza is very blasé about saying that right reason dictates morality to us, without accounting for the genealogy of right reason, as Nietzsche does. Precisely because he is Jewish and operating from a position of hatred, as Nietzsche recognizes – differentiating himself from the Jewish community by slandering it – he fails where Nietzsche succeeds in bracketing the problem of the origin of evil, and equally, let it be said, the question of the origin of goodness, which on the religious model is something other than merely pleasure.

Hatred is causeless, as the rabbis say – its cause is no One, or the devil, who is, like Pan, legion.