Dialogues Concerning Radical Evil

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, addressing the paradox of culpability inherent in Augustine's account. He demonstrates 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, leading to a tension between inherited guilt (reatus) and inherited corruption (vitium) that medieval and later theologians struggled to resolve.Hanson shows that while Kant's response retains the centrality of individual liability, it cannot fully account for evil's origin. Kierkegaard takes up this shortcoming while retaining the Augustinian basis for evil's universality in his account of despair (fortvivlelse). 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.