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The Origins of Human Evil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

R. M. Burns
R. M. Burns
Affiliation:
Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, E-mail: r.burns@gold.ac.uk
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Extract

Enlightenment optimism concerning man's ‘natural goodness’ is out of fashion. The many instances of monstrous evil on a mass scale (Nazi extermination camps; Gulags; Cambodia; Kosovo, etc.), the widespread reporting of the activities of sadistic torturers and killers, the great increase in violent crime and drug addiction in the most affluent and welleducated societies, expose to ridicule Condorcet's prediction that 'the time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason … the human race, emancipated from its shackles [will] advance with a firm and sure step along the path of truth, virtue, and happiness. Yet there have been few recent philosophical or theological attempts to consider afresh the nature of human evil, and most of them still tend, if mutedly, to cling to the notion of mankind's essential moral goodness. Thus the hesitant conclusion of Ricoeur's reconsideration of human moral responsibility is that ‘however radical evil may be, it cannot be as primordial as goodness’, and that we should think of an ‘existential superimposition of radical evil on primordial good’.2 In 1963, Hannah Arendt declared that ‘evil is never “radical”, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension … Only the good has depth and can be radical.‘ Instead she wrote of the ‘banality of evil’, generalising from the case of Eichmann.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , August 2000 , pp. 292 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2000

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References

1 Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (tr. Barraclough, J.. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), pp. 179, 199, 201.Google Scholar

2 Ricoeur, P., The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 156–157.Google Scholar

3 Quoted in Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 369Google Scholar. Cruelty in concentration camps she explained as ‘sadism, and sadism is basically sexual’ (p. 368), presumably implying that it is a physically-based disorder potentially curable by scientific advance, rather than ‘evil’ per se.

4 Fromm, E., The Anatomy of Human Destrucliveness (1973) (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 575–576, 380–4, 397–432, 490–524, 241, 578.Google Scholar

5 Midgley, M., Wickedness. A Philosophical Essay (1984) (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 7, 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Translated by Theodore M.Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1960). Henceforth cited as ‘RE’.

7 KPW stands henceforth for Kant's Political Writings (ed. Reiss, Hans, tr. Nisbet, H. B.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 2nd edn, 1991.Google Scholar

8 7 June 1793 letter to Herder, quoted Despland, M., Kant on History and Religion (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973), p. 169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Michalson, Gordon E. writes of a ‘historical continuity between Erasmus and Kant’ which ‘marks the continuity between Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment optimism’ (Fallen Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but I find Erasmus's Renaissance Platonism only superficially and, at most in part, comparable to Kant's doctrine of ‘radical evil’.

10 For a full modern expression of this theme see Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, IV/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956, tr. Bromiley, G. W.)Google Scholar. Moral evil is ‘always pride’ or ‘megalomania’ (p. 437) for ‘man … wants to pass his limits, to be as God’ (p. 419), even though frequently ‘it does not look as though man wants to be as God’ (p. 420). Thus the religious man seeks to be his ‘own helper and redeemer and saviour’ (p. 461), which is precisely what Kant insists man must be (RE 41).

11 See for instance Maximus the Confessor's version The Philokalia (tr. Palmer, G. E. H., Sherrard, P., and Ware, Kallistos, Vol. II. London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 75, 92Google Scholar. ‘Almost every sin’, he writes, ‘is committed for the sake of sensual pleasure.’ He identifies the temptation to be ‘as Gods’ and know the difference between good and evil (Gen. 3:4–5) as a wish to know the secrets of bodily pleasure and pain, p. 194. Meanwhile Gregory the Great, following Augustine, reordered the list of capital sins, putting pride at the beginning, and this became standard in the West. See, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–I. 84.2.

12 See De Civilate Dei XIII.13 and 16. He writes that ‘the corruption of the body, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause of the first sin, but its punishment. And it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible’ (XIV.3).

13 Arguably another problematic feature is the suggestion that the propensity to evil comes from a timeless decision by the noumenal self (RE 20, 61–5).

14 Descartes, R.The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (tr. Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R. and Murdoch, D.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, Vol. 1), p. 352.Google Scholar

15 Countess Spencer confessed ‘I’ m an addict, alcoholic and anorexic … Addiction … wears many hats, those most frequently worn being drugs, alcohol, and food … Addiction is a life of fear, loneliness, desperation, and shame’. She explained that her husband had ‘bullied and belittled her … until her confidence was gone’. London, Evening Standard, 21 October 1998, p. 3.

16 However, Hume's theory of the passions develops the view that there are four passions at the core of the person, pride, humility, love and hate, which are ‘indirect’, i.e. they have no direct terminus, but nevertheless together exercise hegemony among the ‘direct’ passions which cluster around them. He asks his readers to believe that amongst themselves these four passions are intrinsically ordered as automatically self-righting polarities, being ‘placed as it were in a square or regular connection with, and distance from each other from each other.’ A Treatise of Human Nature (ed. Nidditch, P. H.. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 333Google Scholar. Hume's stress on the ‘vast weight and importance … of our reputation, our character, our name’ (p. 316) is, unquestionably in part a reflection of the impact of Roman moralists such as Cicero.

17 London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974, tr. B. Foxley. I replace ‘sin’ by ‘perversity’. Henceforth cited as ‘E’.

18 Cassirer, E., The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (tr. Gay, Peter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 74.Google Scholar

19 Compare Augustine: ‘not even the nature of the Devil himself is evil, in so far as it is a nature; it is perversion that makes it evil’ (De CivitateDei XIX 13).

20 RO is used to denote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. It contains both the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and On the Social Contract and these are signified by DI and SC added to RO quoted variously in this article.

21 Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, excerpted in The Indispensable Rousseau (compiled and presented by Mason, J. H.. London: Quartet Books, 1979), p. 234Google Scholar. Henceforth cited as ‘LCB’.

22 Ferguson, A., Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1980), pp. 24, 26.Google Scholar

23 The artificiality of Rousseau's contrast between the savage and civilised man becomes clear in analysing his pivotal distinction between amour de soi and amourpropre for they both blend into a continuum. See Morgenstern, M., Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), especially pp. 84–95Google Scholar, O'Hagan, Timothy, ‘Amour-propre’ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sources of the Self (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997), pp. 66–84Google Scholar, and Dent, N. J. H., Rousseau (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar, chapters 3 and 4.

24 Smith, A., The Theory of Moral Sentiments (ed. Raphael, D. D. and Macafie, A. L.. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Henceforth cited as ‘TMS’.

25 Few Adam Smith scholars have paid any attention to the relationship: Campbell, T. D.'s Adam Smith's Science of Morals (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971)Google Scholar is typical in this regard.

26 Hume stresses very strongly concern for‘the opinions of others’ but does not make it the basis of morality (see footnote 16 above).

27 Most commentaries on this passage have not read it in this way. So far I have come across only a passing reference to a ‘social theory of the self … formed in our interaction with other people’ in Haakonsen, K.Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 131)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in Griswold, Charles L. Jr, Jr. Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 105–106)Google Scholar, which endorses the reading proposed here. Note that in TMS 192–3 it is less clear that Smith rules out some kind of consciousness of self prior to social interaction.

28 ‘Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged’ Phenomenology of Spirit (translated by Miller, A. V.. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979), para. 178Google Scholar. Sartre typically expresses the widespread view of Hegel's originality, congratulating him on the ‘immense progress’ of his ‘brilliant intuition’; see Being and Nothingness, tr. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), pp. 237–238Google Scholar. To some extent no doubt, Smith has been influenced by Rousseau's remark on the exchange of looks by human beings quoted above, and by Hume's fleeting references to others as ‘mirrors’ of oneself in his Treatisep. 365, without the import Smith gives it.

29 See T. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, la 78.4.

30 See Frankfurt, Harry G., ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ in Free Will (ed. Watson, G.. Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 83–84.Google Scholar

31 See, for example, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar and his contribution to Shoemaker, S. and Swinburne, R., Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).Google Scholar

32 Samuel Fleischacker considers that ‘Smith is practically unique, among eighteenth century British thinkers (and perhaps all Enlightenment moralists, with the important exception, I shall argue, of Kant) in making the dishonesty of the self to itself a prime issue of moral philosophy’ (‘Philosophy in Moral Practice: Kant and Adam Smith’, Kant Studien, 82, pp. 249–69), p. 256. This is certainly the case for Kant (e.g. RE 178) but perhaps both Smith and Kant are influenced by Rousseau, who in turn derived it from La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and Montaigne.

33 Nietzsche, F., The Genealogy of Morals, 2:8 in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1954).Google Scholar

34 I believe Griswold, pp. 199–200, exaggerates Smith's egalitarianism.

35 Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 26–8.

36 Sartre, op. cit., p. 238.

37 Pensée 139, Pascal, B.Pensées (tr. and ed. Krailsheimer, A. J.. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).Google Scholar