The Possibility of a Metaphysical Conception of Evil in Contemporary Philosophy
Since the 1990s, the concept of evil has gone through a philosophical “renaissance”. In contemporary philosophy of evil, the eliminative naturalism typical of the earlier twentieth century is usually rejected, and evil is conceived of as an irreducible concept essential for understanding human moral life in practice. In this study, I trace the roots of contemporary thought on evil to Immanuel Kant, who worked out his theory of “radical evil” at the end of the eighteenth century. According to Kant’s theory, taking our moral agency seriously requires not only philosophical justification of freedom from the causality of nature and the ability to present moral duties to ourselves, but also an innate propensity to subordinate those duties to our selfish will, that is, a propensity to do evil. Kant introduced an anti-naturalistic conception of evil, which is also free from theological presumptions. In this study, I refer to this kind of view as “a purely moral conception of evil”. I argue that a purely moral conception of evil is vulnerable to Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical and moral psychological critique, in which the idea of evil is judged as subjective, historical, and ultimately based on will to power.
As an alternative to a purely moral view of evil, I take up Friedrich Schelling´s metaphysical theory of evil. In Schelling’s pantheistic framework, nature is characterized as the interplay of two opposite “directions” of God’s will: lawful, teleological, and unifying “existence” and its “ground”, which is described as blind, selfish craving. According to Schelling, human will is a specific open bond of these two principles, which makes evil possible as a free decision to subordinate existence to its unruly ground. My central argument is that Schelling´s metaphysical theory of evil can provide a wider understanding of evil than purely moral theories of evil, and also a better reply to Nietzsche’s naturalistic critique.
This study consists of four chapters. In Chapter 2, I explore the development of the dominant modern narrative on evil and outline the essential ideas of the central philosophers discussed in the following chapters. In Chapter 3, I discuss at length Kant’s critical philosophy, with a specific focus on his theory of radical evil. Chapter 4 is dedicated to Schelling and his metaphysical theory of evil. In Chapter 5, I compare the strengths and weaknesses of metaphysical and purely moral theories of evil, and argue that despite the strong presuppositions of the metaphysical approach to evil, it at least deserves more attention. I also take up the attempt of some so-called “new realists” to combine the most appealing aspects of both metaphysical and purely moral theories of evil, but I will show that it involves a major risk of falling prey to the problems of both approaches.
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Jyväskylän yliopistoISBN
978-951-39-8074-0ISSN Search the Publication Forum
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