Levi Haeck | The Actuality of Evil as the Ground of the Possibility of the Good

The Actuality of Evil as the Ground of the Possibility of the Good
“What can I hope?” (KrV B833/Logik 9:25). The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to find a new answer to this ‘third question’ of philosophy, but 2) in such a way that it is relevant to the issue as to what kind of sentiment is to be cultivated vis-à-vis the ongoing violent conflicts across the globe. Specifically, I claim that the good, which represents one of the possible objects human beings can hope for, is possible precisely because evil is already actual. Evil, as Kant explains in the Religion, occurs when, in reflecting on the validity of our actions, we take the moral law into consideration but still choose to subordinate it to our pathological desires. Evil is the rational choice to set our rationality aside (6:36). It is the good in its perverse form; it places matter at the level of form and form at the level of matter. However, the actuality of this perversion confirms the actuality of the modality of matter and form as such. The fact that the world is filled with evil, then, is a ground for the hope that the good can also take place preponderantly, if indeed the good is contingent on this rational ability to subsume matter under form. This, I argue, is one clue to understanding Kant’s views on human progress in his Mutmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte, in which he meditates on our “sorrow” and “discontent” “with the providence that governs the course of the world …” when estimating “the ills that so much oppress humankind”, leaving us “with no hope for anything better”. His point, however, is that “it is of the greatest importance to be content with providence …, … partly so that … we might not lose sight of our own responsibility, which perhaps might be the sole cause of all these ills, and avoid the remedy against them, which consists in self-improvement” (8:120-121). Here too it is the actuality of evil that must propel us to hope for the possibility of the good.
Levi Haeck is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University (Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences), Belgium, funded by the Scientific Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). He is working on Kant’s logic, transcendental logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and more generally on Kantian approaches to the life sciences (e.g., Georges Canguilhem) and neo-Kantianismm but is increasingly becoming interested in Kant’s practical philosophy too. He recently defended his PhD dissertation “Kant’s Epigenetic Segue into the Synthetic A Priori - Deriving the Categories as a Critique of Predication«. An article on the categories of quantity is forthcoming in Kant-Studien. His postdoc project is about Kant’s fascinating but elusive wish to construct a ‘transcendental grammar’ out of the table of categories.
The international philosophical conference War and Peace After Kant (6-9 November 2024, Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana) was organized by Humboldt University, University of Ljubljana - Faculty of Arts , Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade and Goethe Institute Ljubljana. The conference was carried out as part of the project Common Between Substance and Subject, which is financed by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency.
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[@DiamonDaniel]

Sabbatai zevis redemption through sin all over lmao. Literally just "it's good to sin! Hurt everything!"

[@thenatureofnurture6336]

"Moral Sciences" 😂 How confusion of the abstract and concrete, metaphysical and physical, subjective and objective was done to this world will perhaps never be certain, but I believe it's primarily due to recreational drug use. I'm going to have a lot of trouble taking this talk seriously, but I'll try.

[@Ecotechnologist]

Someone's never read philosophy except for liberal nonsense like Mill, Kant, Smith. Try Hegel and Marx