The Concept of Evil in Kant and Schelling
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Smith, Daniel James
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 12, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Robert Bernasconi, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Robert Bernasconi, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Sarah Clark Miller, Committee Member
Amy Allen, Committee Member
Daniel Purdy, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Evil
Kant
Schelling
Theodicy
Practical Philosophy
Ethics
Freiheitsschrift
Freedom essay
Religion
Religion within the Boundaries of Bare Reason - Abstract:
- This dissertation reconstructs the development of the concept of evil in Kant and Schelling. These philosophers' turn to evil first arises in the context of debates in the early reception of Kant's philosophy, which I name the "freedom controversy". I trace the problems that arose out of Reinhold and Schmid's attempts to defend the critical philosophy, which turn on the question of how immoral action can be explained in the framework of Kant's account of autonomy. I show that Kant's account of "radical evil" is his response to this controversy, and that it marks a major shift not only in the development of his own practical philosophy, but also in the history of the concept of evil. In his earlier work, Kant had given a traditional explanation of evil as resulting from human limitations and finitude, as an overcoming of freedom by natural inclinations. In this text, by contrast, he develops an account of evil as the expression of an original free choice, and thereby breaks with the dominant philosophical tradition of understanding evil in "negative" terms. Schelling follows Kant's lead in developing a "positive" theory of evil. Where Kant had argued that the possibility of evil must be contained within the very definition of free choice, Schelling extends this thought to other central concepts of German Idealism: freedom, spirit, and reason. The highest notions of German Idealism, on Schelling's account, can only be understood in terms of their possible complicity with evil. I argue that Schelling's text not only provides neglected resources for a contemporary theory of evil, but also as a crucial historical turning point which marks the end of the idealist project and the opening onto the post-idealist philosophy that came to predominate in the nineteenth century.