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ABSTRACT
In Part One of Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), the so-called thesis of innate evil (‘The human being is by nature evil’) notoriously plays a central role. Yet in the General Remark closing that part, Kant minimizes the weight of that thesis. In his view, it is of no use in moral dogmatics, and also in moral discipline its meaning is of a limited nature. Consequently, the thesis of innate evil is both relegated to a short footnote in the Introduction and completely passed over in silence in the Doctrine of the methods of ethics in Kant’s Metaphysical Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue (1797). This article investigates Kant’s assessment of the use of the thesis of innate evil in moral philosophy. It explores Kant’s semantics of the thesis in order to find out why the thesis makes no difference in moral philosophy, and tries to demonstrate why it is silenced furthermore in the methods of ethics.
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Notes
1. Kant, Religion, 6: 50.
2. Frierson, ‘Moral Pessimism’; and Michalson, ‘Kant, the Bible, and the Recovery from Radical Evil’.
3. Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion; Wood, ‘Kant and the Intelligibility of Evil’; and Dicenso, Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.
4. Palmquist, Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion; Firestone and Jacobs, In Defense of Kant’s Religion.
5. Kant, Religion, 6: 50.
6. Ibid., 6: 45: ‘For in spite of the fall, the command that we ought to become better human beings still resounds unabated in our souls; consequently, we must also be capable of it’; 6: 47: ‘(…) duty commands nothing but what we can do’; 6: 50: ‘if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings’.
7. Ibid., 6: 51 (my italics) (in German: ‘In der moralischen Asketik aber will dieser Satz mehr, aber doch nichts mehr sagen als’). Di Giovanni translates ‘Asketik’ with ‘discipline’, yet the translation ‘ascetics’ (used in the English translation of the Doctrine of Virtue) is more reliable.
8. Ibid., 6, 51; compare with 6: 68–69 footnote.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 6: 48 and 51. On this topic see Palmquist, Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion; and Michalson, ‘Kant, the Bible, and the Recovery from Radical Evil’.
11. Palmquist, Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion, 139–140.
12. Wood, ‘The Final Form’; Frierson, Freedom and Anthropology; Dennis, Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals; Trampota, Sensen and Timmermann; and Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics, Kant’s Human Being and ‘Vigilantius’.
13. Kant, Practical philosophy, 6: 380 and 477.
14. Dicenso, Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 81–82.
15. Kant, Practical philosophy, 6: 485.
16. Kant, Religion, 6: 32.
17. Ibid., 6: 33–34.
18. Kant’s semantics of natural or innate evil can be found in the opening paragraphs and in the Remark preceding the first section of Part One of Religion, in the second section (concerning the propensity to evil in human nature) and in the opening paragraph of the third one (concerning the proof of the propensity to evil’s universality and its ground). See also Wood, ‘The evil in Human Nature’.
19. Frierson, Freedom and Anthropology; Engstrom, Reason, Desire, and the Will; and Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character.
20. Kant, Religion, 6: 23–24.
21. Ibid., 6: 27–28.
22. Ibid., 6: 36.
23. Ibid., 24.
24. Ibid., 36.
25. Ibid., 24.
26. Ibid., 6: 22 footnote.
27. Ibid., 6: 58 footnote.
28. Ibid., 6: 21.
29. Ibid., 6: 21, 25, 31–32.
30. Ibid., 6: 21.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 6: 29.
33. Ibid., 6: 21 and 6: 21 footnote.
34. Ibid., 6: 29.
35. Ibid., 6: 32.
36. Ibid., 6: 21.
37. Ibid., 6: 32.
38. Ibid., 6: 29.
39. Ibid., 6: 22.
40. Ibid., 6: 31.
41. Ibid., 6: 25.
42. Ibid., 6: 32.
43. Ibid., 6: 30 and 32.
44. Ibid., 6: 32.
45. Ibid., 6: 29.
46. Ibid., 6: 31.
47. Ibid., 6: 65 footnote.
48. Ibid.
49. Frierson, Freedom and Anthropology (against Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom).
50. Kant, Religion, 6: 32–34.
51. Ibid., 6: 32.
52. Munzel Kant’s Conception of Moral Character.
53. Kant, Religion, 6: 25–26.
54. Ibid., 6: 45.
55. Kant, Practical philosophy, 6: 394 (see also 6: 405). Baxley, Kant’s Theory of Virtue; Denis, ‘Virtue and Its Ends’; Engstrom, “Reason, Desire, and the Will,”; Grenberg, ‘What is the enemy’; and Wood, ‘The Final Form.’
56. Kant, Practical philosophy, 6: 380 and 380 footnote.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 4: 407.
59. Kant, Religion, 6: 19.
60. Ibid., 6: 20.
61. Ibid., 6: 19.
62. Ibid., 6: 12–13; Kant, Practical philosophy, 6: 488.
63. Kant, Religion, 6: 40.
64. Ibid., 6: 42.
65. Ibid., 6: 41.
66. Ibid., 6: 43-44.
67. vanden Auweele, “Kant on Religious Moral Education.”
68. Kant, Lectures on ethics, 27: 571–572; and Louden, ‘Vigilantius’.
69. Kant, Lectures on ethics, 27: 530; and Louden, “Vigilantius, 94–99.
70. Kant, Practical philosophy, 6: 484. Louden interprets ‘strenuus’ as ‘vigilant’ (‘Vigilantius’, 94). Vigilance accompanies a ‘animus strenuus’ for sure, but is not the same. ‘Strenuus’ refers to power, to ‘fortitudo’, and hence to the very essence of virtue itself as ‘fortitude moralis’ (Kant, Practical philosophy, 6: 380).
71. Ibid., 6: 485.
72. See note above 1.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Geert Van Eekert
Geert van Eekert (1964) is master in classical studies and doctor in philosophy. He defended a doctoral thesis on Ernst Cassirer. He lectures on metaphysics, philosophy of culture, Kant and Arendt at the department of philosophy of the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Among other publications, he published a Dutch translation of Kant’s Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft.