Dialogues Concerning Radical Evil : Augustine, Kant, and Kierkegaard

The perennial enigma of the human condition is our propensity—seemingly innate—to subvert the universal moral law that ultimately corrupts our character.

Erik Hanson examines the perennial enigma of the human condition: What Immanuel Kant identified as radical evil, the seemingly universal, innate, and inexplicable propensity to subvert the universal moral law that ultimately corrupts our character. Hanson explores this phenomenon through the perspectives of Augustine, Kant, and Kierkegaard, attending to the problem of culpability inherent in Augustine''s account, while demonstrating that Kierkegaard''s assessment retained much of the existential and theological intuition he shared with Augustine, even as he wrote in critical dialogue with Kant.

Hanson shows that Kant''s analysis of radical evil (das radikale Böse) presents a philosophical counterpart to Augustine''s theological description of original sin (peccatum originale). Augustine held that human evil is the outworking of an inherited corruption of human agency, arising from the Edenic transgression of our forebears. This account presented a problem that medieval theologians struggled to resolve: If human evil is a transgenerational penalty, how can succeeding generations bear responsibility for what lay outside their agency? If it is an inherited sickness, how can they remain culpable? This tension between inherited guilt (reatus) and inherited corruption (vitium) lies at the heart of the Augustinian dilemma.

Hanson shows that while Kant''s response retains the centrality of individual liability, it cannot account for evil''s origin, a shortcoming Kierkegaard takes up in The Concept of Anxiety. Yet Kierkegaard also retains the Augustinian basis for evil''s universality in his account of despair (fortvivlelse) as developed in The Sickness Unto Death. For Kierkegaard, despair is not merely a Kantian subversion of the moral law, but an ontological misrelation of the self to itself before God. This defiance against the possibility of a God-relation, rather than mere moral transgression, accounts for every subsequent human evil.