22 April 2024 will mark the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). My New Year’s resolution is to finish a play that I have been planning for the last few years that involves a fictional young Kant visiting Uppsala, Sweden, shortly after the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake, an event that caused the intellectuals of Europe to question the nature of divine justice and the meaning of human life. … [please read below the rest of the article].
Image credit: Thomas Classen via Flickr / Creative Commons
Fuller, Steve. 2023. “Thinking of Kant Just Before his Tercentenary.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 12 (12): 22–24. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-8ol.
🔹 The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers.
Please refer to “SERRC: End of the Year, 2023” and Christmas, holiday, end of year, posts from: ❦ 2012, ❦ 2013, ❦ 2014, ❦ 2015, ❦ 2016, ❦ 2017, ❦ 2018, ❦ 2019, ❦ 2020, ❦ 2021, and ❦ 2022.
In Uppsala, Kant encounters the two Swedes who were making the biggest splash on the European scene at the time, Carolus Linnaeus and Emannuel Swedenborg. They also made a strong impression on Kant himself. Later in life, Kant coined the word ‘anthropology’ to characterize the customs and lifestyles of Homo sapiens, a Linnaean coinage for the upright ape that quickly came to denote a human being. But much earlier, Kant would devote his first book to a denunciation of Swedenborg’s thesis that our big forebrains potentially permitted access to a cosmic consciousness of the sort intimated in dreams and a deep reading of Scripture.
The Finite and the Infinite, the Animal and the Divine
Kant’s standing as the colossus of modern Western philosophy ultimately rests on his keen awareness of humanity as a being suspended between the finite and the infinite, the animal and the divine. As Michel Foucault, who himself spent three formative years in Uppsala in the 1950s, famously observed in Les Mots et Les Choses (The Order of Things), Linnaeus had first crystallized this tension by defining the human as the ape with a soul. It turned the Western mind to find an ever more specific material basis for demarcating the human from the other simian creatures, who have themselves been increasingly seen as displaying signs of intelligent life.
Swedenborg began the charge by focusing on the distinctiveness of the human brain, which of course remains an object of concern today. However, he associated the human brain’s complex neural networking with our spiritual reach. And while this spawned a steady stream of research in ‘psychical’ or ‘parapsychological’ phenomena, Kant made his initial mark by setting a clear skeptical tone, arguing that such alleged powers of mind exceeded the capacity of pure reason. And so, Kant’s 1766 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer set the stage for his 1781 magnum opus, Critique of Pure Reason.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that in defeating Swedenborg, Kant had declared victory for empiricism over rationalism. To be sure, this reading—first popularized by Kant’s more Positivist followers in the nineteenth century—may remain the default position of analytic philosophers who are not heavily invested in Kant scholarship. However, closer to the spirit of the man himself would be to conclude that Kant regarded humans as internally conflicted creatures whose divine aspirations, represented most clearly in the universalism of the Categorical Imperative, were routinely confounded by the sort of cognitive finitude highlighted in Critique of Pure Reason. We are meant to act like gods, but we are provided with minds and bodies that are, as Nietzsche later said, ‘all too human’. In this way Kant effectively secularized St Augustine’s account of Original Sin. It also helps to explain Kant’s intriguing concept of radical evil, which pops up periodically in his writings and helps to explain a wide range of contemporary moral predicaments.
Radical Evil, Theology, and Transhumanism
Radical evil results when we think of God as a scaled-up version of ourselves rather than ourselves as a degraded version of God. Thus, the radically evil person imagines the deity to be as self-aggrandizing as they would be, were they given the capacity and the opportunity to project themselves indefinitely onto the cosmos. The radically evil person is so deprived of God that they don’t know what they’re missing, blinded as they are by the image of themselves. Notwithstanding their delusions of grandeur, they have chosen to take the Matrix’s Blue Pill. Thus, radical evil reflects the unholy alliance of arrogance and ignorance, both taken to their extremes.
When Christian theologians instinctively recoil from the aspirations of transhumanism, they are picking up this sense of radical evil from the movement. As someone who believes in a theological route to transhumanism, I take this point seriously. As evidence for the theologians’ concerns, consider the curious nineteenth century metamorphosis of the doctrine of divine ubiquity into the idea that humanity is destined to populate the universe.
In the fevered imagination of Moscow’s answer to Socrates, Nikolai Fyodorov, it set what he called The Common Task, which inspired the USSR space program through his follower Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, which in turn led to the Cold War ‘space race’ with the US, and most recently Elon Musk’s aim of converting the cosmos into a destination for humans forcibly displaced by climate change or simply bored with the prospect of spending an eternity on Earth.
While I don’t wish for a moment to suggest that this broadly ‘Russian Cosmist’ strand of transhumanism is ‘radically evil’ in Kant’s sense, it is clearly doing something that radically evil people do—namely, to model the divine on the human, rather than the other way round. In that respect, it is in the spirit of the task that Thomas Hobbes set for himself in Leviathan. Having survived the English Civil War, Hobbes realized that while there was little chance of agreement on theology, there might be agreement on an artificial entity that has all the requisite features of the deity. Such a being could then provide the basis for permanent social order; hence the social contract.
To be sure, Hobbes’s legacy has been all too often one of vilification, arguably comparable to Machiavelli’s. At the same time, Hobbes opened a strand of thinking, sometimes called ‘theological materialism’, which includes such eighteenth-century followers of John Locke as David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and indeed John Wesley and Emmanuel Swedenborg. They all tried to mold emergent developments in psychology and physiology into instruments of spiritual craftwork. The nineteenth century witnessed still more ambitious versions of this strategy, including Russian Cosmism, alongside the US Mormon and Christian Science movements.
The red thread that runs through this heterogeneous lineage is the idea that humanity’s spiritual improvement is made possible by substantially addressing material conditions, which starts by focusing on the individual but quickly implicates society at large. Of course, it is important to be clear about how much spiritual improvement can be outright achieved by addressing material conditions. After all, anyone alive to the Augustinian sense of Original Sin—which received a modern revamp with Calvin—will recognize Divine Grace in its secular forms: moral luck and moral hazard. In more theistic times, these phenomena would be regarded as evidence for God acting orthogonally to human wishes or even their self-understood interests—and regardless of the ‘good works’ done in their name. In the end, a stairway to Heaven can’t be built without divine authorization. But what do such concepts mean in a secular world?
To avoid the temptations of Kant’s radical evil, we might need to promote moral luck and moral hazard from anomalous to core moral phenomena. In other words, what if we live in a world governed largely by moral luck and moral hazard, and where the difference between the two shifts over time? This would capture in secular terms the moral sensibility associated with theodicy, which led to much cooler moral judgements than we have seen in more recent times. Put provocatively, today’s easy impulse to righteous indignation may be nothing more than an expression of the Narcissism that Kant’s concept of radical evil was designed to condemn.
Steve Fuller, S.W.Fuller@warwick.ac.uk, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, @profstevefuller; profstevefuller.net.
Categories: Comments
When facing a difficult moment or a catastrophe, Muslims (believing or secular, Arab or non-Arab, Sunni or Shi’a) often resort to one or both of the following exclamations: “Allahu Akbar!” and “Hasbunallah wa ni’ma lwakeel!”
In the truncated understanding and the lazy, self-serving imagination of the West and other societies that harbor a general subtext of hostility towards Islam, “Allahu Akbar!” is almost invariably translated to “God is Great!” or “God is the Greatest!” Unsurprisingly, neither is correct, or even approximately so.
“God is Great” translates to “Allah Kabiir”. “God is the Greatest” translates to “Allahu huwwa Al-Akbar”. As such, both are trivial statements of fact for the believer that needlessly assert the obvious but do no useful work. (In fact, one never hears either of these expressions, as they both would carry an undertone of sophomoric familiarity with the divine if spoken.)
“Allahu Akbar,” in contrast, translates literally to “God is greater than…” — it is literally an elided, unfinished statement that leaves the object against which God is compared unmentioned, a variable — an X. It is an expression that one utters in active engagement with a difficult situation. As such, the work that the expression does for those who speaks it is a sort of a fortifying reminder that whatever “it” may be, no matter how bad, God is greater than that “it.””
The expression is most often uttered by Muslims when faced with a tragic event or news or a catastrophe. For example, upon being told by someone that so-and-so has passed away, the proper reaction to the news would be, “Allahu Akbar!” The expression is also used by someone about to engage in something that may result in a tragedy or a catastrophe (when about to engage an enemy in battle, for instance). (The lighter version of “Allahu Akbar,” the expression that one uses when undertaking a mundane, everyday endeavor, is “Bismillah” — “In the Name of God.”)
The second expression, “Hasbunallah wa ni’ma lwakeel” is also a common expression that does work for those who speak it, and it is uttered when facing difficult news or an unbearable burden — from an event that has resulted in economic loss, to unwelcome health news, all the way to the death of one’s child. Translated literally, it means, “Sufficient for us is God, and He is the best Disposer of affairs.” When uttering it, the afflicted is submitting to the fact, according to their faith, that God alone and no one else can remove any harm or any affliction. The work that is done here, however, is more than Allahu Akbar’s fortifying reminder, but a sort of speech act whereby the mere act of reciting the expression will move those who recite it toward getting the help that they need — in the immediate term, the fortitude to bear the unbearable burden, and in the longer term, better days ahead.
I have been watching Al-Jazeera Arabic daily since Saturday October 7th, 2023. It is these two expressions that one hears more than any other from Palestinians as they pull twisted, dismembered, decapitated bodies from buildings bombed by Israeli planes and tanks, rush the injured to hospitals in ambulances under fire, and bury their mangled dead in a hurry. Do they believe in radical evil, and if they do, are they therefore narcissistic? I don’t know, but the question feels morally out of place and, given the facts on the ground, not without a tint of obscenity.
What you’re saying, while moving in its own right, may be missing the point of radical evil. Radical evil is ‘Narcissistic’ in the sense that the radically evil person thinks that whatever they themselves do is what God requires or would do. But of course, in so doing, they would never see themselves as Narcissistic. They would simply see themselves as acting righteously. Nevertheless, they will have created God in their own image — a form of idolatry. The second Arabic phrase, “Hasbunallah wa ni’ma lwakeel”, seems specifically designed to *oppose* radical evil.
The point was not missed. The two expressions cited make the following counterpoint: One may believe in the reality of radical evil — as in, the belief that bombing hospitals, shooting at ambulances, slaughtering civilians in the thousands, are radically evil — without tipping into idolatry or thinking that whatever one does (in the case of the Palestinians, in retaliation to the radical evil, as they see it, inflicted upon them) is what God requires or would do. The expressions are examples of people who believe that radical evil exists but that something greater than it also exists(“Allahu Akbar”), namely God, and that the best that one can do, given His inscrutability, is to believe that He knows what He’s doing (“Sufficient for us is God, and He is the best Disposer of affairs”), resist and fight back against that radical evil.
I get it — and Kant got it too. However, his point is that radical evil can still exist even without God because the source of the evil is humanity itself.
In that case, and not to force anything as such, would it be unfair to ask: What sort of helpful work could this proposition about the possibility of “radical evil without God because the source of evil his humanity itself” do for one — e.g., me — facing a morally stark situation where the open and documented and ongoing slaughter of Gazans in broad daylight is financed and justified by the very Kantian West, whose embodiment of Kant for International matters, the ICC, has not only remained inactive on the slaughter, but has deployed a couple of crude delay tactics, courtesy of the Kantian spirit of evidence-based judging, such as launching a web page in three languages — Arabic, Hebrew, and English — several weeks ago, asking people to pass on to them “evidence” of war crimes?
True. But suppose God exists on the terms you suggest. He’ll be doing his thing regardless. His existence is not dependent on humans believing in him. So, in that sense, “Hasbunallah wa ni’ma lwakeel” will prevail. Of course, there is another anthropocentric way to resolve the matter. The Israelis could disavow the Netanyahu government and the Palestinians could disavow Hamas — and then declare a ceasefire and resume negotiations. I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened (at least on the Israeli side), though maybe it will. But I’ll let you have the last word.
At the risk of coming across as ungracious, I conclude with this question: Does the introduction of the concept of “theodicy” lead one to write something like, “The Israelis could disavow the Netanyahu government and the Palestinians could disavow Hamas,” or does one start off with that perspective and the introduction of the concept of “theodicy” has no effect on the perspective (or maybe, worse, hardens it)? I am astonished that any advanced thinking intellectual would write about the situation in such airy terms: ‘Israelis disavowing Netanyahu’ makes as much sense and contains as much meaning as ‘Palestinians disavowing Hamas’ or ‘Ukrainians disavowing Zelenskyy’ or ‘Russians disavowing Putin’ or ‘Americans disavowing Biden,’ etc. Not that the situation is that complicated or that complex to describe and understand. One can talk about it in clear, easy to understand terms, but in terms that explain and predict behavior, and show a path to a solution: As in, we have a country (Israel) that has been engaged for more than 75 years in inexorable land seizure and population caging and humiliation, seizing the moment (October 7th, 2023) to further accelerate the work (for it has been accelerating it the last few years) needed to complete its project, with the template in its long pursuit, anachronistic as it may feel today, being The United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, and how they dealt with their respective natives, i.e., taking over the land, the whole land and nothing but the land, and reducing the natives to residual-relic populations for whom autonomous reservations and protected zones are set aside, museums built, and annual tribute conferences organized when the dust has eventually settled. Meanwhile, those who are following the conflict soberly are telling us important things that we should pay close attention to — for instance: “A quarter of [Gaza’s] population could die within a year due to outbreaks of disease caused by this unprecedented conflict.”[1]
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Ref.
[1] Devi Sridhar, December 29, 2023, “It’s not just bullets and bombs. I have never seen health organisations as worried as they are about disease in Gaza”. The Guardian.