The Idea of Evil

Peter Dews

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118394229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

This timely book by philosopher Peter Dews explores the idea of evil, one of the most problematic terms in the contemporary moral vocabulary.

• Surveys the intellectual debate on the nature of evil over the past two hundred years
• Engages with a broad range of discourses and thinkers, from Kant and the German Idealists, via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Levinas and Adorno
• Suggests that the concept of moral evil touches on a neuralgic point in western culture
• Argues that, despite the widespread abuse and political manipulation of the term 'evil', we cannot do without it
• Concludes that if we use the concept of evil, we must acknowledge its religious dimension

Chapter 1

Kant: The Perversion of Freedom

Towards the end of his lecture course on the history of philosophy, delivered in Berlin during the 1820s, the dominant thinker of the age paid homage to the achievement of a great predecessor. It was Immanuel Kant’s decisive insight, Hegel declared, that

for the will … there is no other aim than that derived from itself, the aim of its freedom. It is a great advance when the principle is established that freedom is the last hinge on which man turns, a highest possible pinnacle, which allows nothing further to be imposed upon it; thus man bows to no authority, and acknowledges no obligations, where his freedom is not respected.¹

Hegel’s encomium still succeeds in conveying the original impact of Kant’s thought, the sense of a new philosophical dawn which the Critical Philosophy aroused amongst contemporaries. From the first, Kant’s philosophy was recognized as revolutionary – and in a more than merely metaphorical sense. For as Hegel, with thirty years’ hindsight, insisted in his lectures, the principle that inspired the storming of the Bastille, the principle of rational self-determination, was also the essential principle of Kant’s thinking. The contrast between Hegel’s homeland and France consisted only in the fact that the principle had been developed by philosophers in Germany, whereas across the Rhine a precipitate attempt had been made to bring political reality into line with it: ‘The fanaticism which characterized the freedom which was put into the hands of the people was frightful. In Germany the same principle asserted the rights of consciousness on its own account, but it has been worked out in a merely theoretic way.’² Hegel is critical of the extent to which Kant’s thought still embodies what he sees as the shallow rationalism of the Enlightenment. But he deeply respects Kant’s insight into the status of autonomy, as an aspiration intrinsic to human self-consciousness in its capacity to rise above all natural determinations: ‘there is an infinite disclosed within the human breast. The satisfying part in Kant’s philosophy is that the truth is at least set within the heart; and hence I acknowledge that, and that alone, which is in conformity with my determined nature.’³

For Hegel and his contemporaries, what Kant had demonstrated was that human beings do not possess freedom as a particular capacity (the power to choose a course of action – or to refrain from action – spontaneously, without any prior determination). Freedom must be construed as autonomy, as the capacity to think and act in accordance with principles whose validity we establish for ourselves through insight. And freedom in this sense is the rational core of human subjectivity as such. For Kant, however, there are different ways of acting in accordance with a self-determined principle; not just any action is free in the full meaning of the word. If the principle we accept tells us how we should act in order best to fulfil a specific need or desire, then the motive for our adherence to the principle stems from the need or desire which we happen to have. In this case we follow what Kant terms a ‘hypothetical imperative’: a command which tells us that if we want to achieve b, then we should do a. But Kant also thinks we are capable of acting in accordance with a categorical imperative – an unconditional command always to conform to a specific principle of action. We experience imperatives as categorical, however, only when they do not enjoin us to achieve any particular end. For questions can always be raised about the desirability of an end, however intuitively appealing it may be. To regard an imperative as unconditionally binding because of its particular content would be irrational, for this would amount to saying that I should do whatever I am ordered to do, simply because I am ordered to do it. Hence, an imperative which obliges us in detachment from any determinate end can do so only because of its form. If I obey an imperative because of its general form, I am doing what any other rational being (any being capable of understanding itself as an agent seeking to act – not just randomly – but on the basis of a rule) should do in the circumstances to which the imperative responds. In such cases, it is the universal form of the imperative as such that determines the action, independent of highly variable considerations of personal desire or interest. In Kant’s terminology, pure reason itself becomes practical.⁴

Furthermore – and this is Kant’s next revolutionary step – ‘practical reason’, so understood, is the expression of morality. Duty in the moral sense can be defined in terms of adherence to a maxim, a subjectively chosen principle of action, which we can simultaneously will in good faith to be a universal law. In other words, when we obey the categorical imperative, we act in a manner which we can will all other rational beings to adopt in the same circumstances, regardless of their particular social identities, desires, or aspirations. Of course, if all rational beings were to act consistently on the categorical imperative, their actions would harmonize with each other, since each would be acting in conformity with the will of all others.⁵ As Kant expresses it, when we act morally, we think of ourselves as legislating as members of a ‘kingdom of ends’, an association in which the freedom of each individual could coexist with that of every other individual, without conflict or violence. We can see how the idea of the categorical imperative connects up with habitual expectations of what morality should achieve.

But there is a problem. In the society which we inhabit, to act on the categorical imperative does not necessarily bring us closer to happiness – indeed, in many circumstances we have reason to suspect just the opposite, since we cannot rely on our fellow human beings not treating our conscientiousness as exploitable naivety. At the same time, Kant regards the desire for happiness is an entirely legitimate, natural, and inevitable human desire, given that we are finite and embodied, as well as rational and reflective, beings. Or, to put this in another way, Kant considers that freedom cannot be fully realized if it forever pulls against the demands of our pregiven nature. Yet only if practical reason came thoroughly to imbue the way society is organized, and hence shaped our desires, could this conflict between reason and nature be overcome. Ultimately, then, Kant’s conception of practical reason entails that the world itself be progressively transformed to make the full realization of freedom possible. The achievement of collective autonomy, in the form of an ethical commonwealth, a social and political condition in which the autonomy of each person could be achieved without the sacrifice of happiness or self-fulfilment, is the fundamental project of the human species.

*

Given this exhilarating, emancipatory thrust of the Critical Philosophy, it is hardly surprising that some of Kant’s most distinguished contemporaries were dismayed when, in 1793, he published an essay ‘On the Radical Evil in Human Nature’ in the Berlinische Monatschrift. For Kant began his latest contribution to the leading organ of the German Enlightenment by contrasting the ancient belief that the world has fallen into evil, from an original state of perfection, with the ‘opposite heroic opinion, which has gained standing only among philosophers and, in our days, especially among the pedagogues: that the world steadfastly (though hardly noticeably) forges ahead in the very opposite direction, namely from bad to better’.⁶ Whenever Kant juxtaposes the arguments and proofs devised by philosophers with the deep-seated convictions of humankind, the comparison is likely to be to the detriment of the former. And such an unfavourable contrast is evidently intended here. If the optimistic outlook of some of his fellow intellectuals is meant to apply to moral goodness, Kant argues, as opposed to the progress of civilization, then they ‘have not drawn this view from experience, for the history of all times attests far too powerfully against it’.⁷

Kant’s refusal to equate moral progress with the progress of civilization must have a powerful resonance for us, living in the aftermath of the twentieth century and at the inauspicious beginning of the twenty-first, even though it may have bewildered some of his Enlightenment contemporaries. The devastating discrepancy between the two was registered early in the previous century, as artistic and intellectual movements from Dada to Freudian psychoanalysis responded to the unprecedented slaughter of the First World War; it was emphasized at its end – albeit in indirect ways – by the more melancholy versions of postmodernism. At the purely techological level, the exponential growth of productive capacity, and the power wielded through science and its applications, have far outstripped the capacity of humankind to use them responsibly. But economic and cultural development also often appear to intensify inequality and injustice, and the alienation and hostility between human groups and individuals, rather than reducing them.

At first glance, the upshot of Kant’s reflections, of his counterposing of two visions of the human moral condition, neither of which he fully endorses (although he is evidently more sympathetic to the first), might seem to be the notion that human beings are a mixture of good and bad impulses and motives, neither set of which clearly predominates in the majority of us. We might think of human beings as locked in a struggle between their somewhat unruly natural desires and the – socially imposed – constraints of morality. Much of Sigmund Freud’s thought offers such a picture of the human condition, although made more complex by the introduction of the concepts of the unconscious, repression, and phantasy. Kant, however, rejects this viewpoint: the common sense of modern secularism. We do not stand equidistant between nature and reason, and we do not begin as moral tabulae rasae. On the contrary, Kant insists, human beings are characterized by a ‘propensity to evil’ (Hang zum Bösen); we find ourselves engaged, from the first, in an uphill struggle to do the right thing, against a deeply ingrained tendency to prioritize our particular interests over what we know to be morally required. Furthermore, this propensity cannot be explained as an expression of our biological and psychological nature. Despite its universality, it is we who have allowed it to gain the upper hand, and we can therefore be held responsible for it. As Kant puts it, there is a ‘radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)’.⁸

Given such formulations, it is scarcely surprising that some of the leading intellectuals of Kant’s day took him to be endorsing the Christian doctrine of original sin – and reacted with a revulsion appropriate to the Age of Enlightenment, whose character Kant himself had defined in a famous essay.⁹ Schiller regarded Kant’s claims as ‘scandalous’. And Goethe wrote to Herder that Kant had ‘criminally smeared his philosopher’s cloak with the shameful stain of radical evil, after it had taken him a long human life to cleanse it from many a dirty prejudice, so that Christians too might yet be enticed to kiss its hem’.¹⁰ The claim that there might be some intrinsic taint of human volition, thwarting our capacity fully to realize the potential of practical reason seemed to contradict the revolutionary conception of human freedom which Kant himself had struggled to frame throughout a long philosophical career. The great paladin of autonomy now seemed to be declaring that human beings were incapable of achieving the noblest goals prescribed to them by their own rational nature. Or rather, as became apparent, when the essay on evil was republished the following year as the first chapter of his book on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant was now of the view that, since evil ‘corrupts the ground of all maxims’ (it is in this sense, and not with the modern colloquial overtones of extremity, that Kant describes it as ‘radical’), and is therefore ‘not to be extirpated by human forces’,¹¹ the moral efforts of human beings may require divine supplementation. Turning against the self-confidence of the age, Kant now appeared to believe that humankind was incapable of going it alone.

Yet the notion of divine assistance was not – in itself – a novelty in Kant’s thinking. Already in the Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781, Kant had put forward one version of an argument to which he was clearly deeply attached, since he repea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Kant: The Perversion of Freedom
• Chapter 2 Fichte and Schelling: Entangled in Nature
• Chapter 3 Hegel: A Wry Theodicy
• Chapter 4 Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: Suffering from Meaninglessness
• Chapter 5 Levinas: Ethics à l’Outrance
• Chapter 6 Adorno: Radical Evil as a Category of the Social
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index