European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE ETHICAL DIMENSION IN EUROPEAN IDENTITY 307Evil in history (in civilization) and the demand for moralizationThe topic of unsociable sociability has its deepest roots in thereligious context. However, now it appears as the detour or the burdenof evil that Kant registers in the realm of freedom, as freedom in themoral sense. Not of freedom in its mere practical sense. That is to say,not of freedom as long as it is exteriorised —let us say— or shown inits generating actions of culture and civilization. It is freedom in the mostreal and ultimate sense, i.e., noumenic freedom, freedom in the moralsense, the one that finds itself —according to Kant— wounded and inpain due to a disposition to evil that is innate to it, of which it cannot beblamed, even though that does not free it from the responsibility in itschoices.Kant made these declarations about evil in 1792, in an article thatwas soon published again as the first part of his work Religion withinthe Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). It explicitly tackles the questionof radical evil, as something inherent to human nature, a principleopposed to the other innate principle of good.It is obvious that the issue is inscribed in a context which isoperating a secularization of Christian dogmatism, in this particularcase of the dogma of original sin. However, the radicalism and noveltyof the statement are still surprising. It is indeed unexpected if the restof the historical-political works are considered. This said, I think thestatement constitutes a good complement to the basic anthropologicalfeatures that Kant sketched. Although we now see how what used tobe a register of limits and schisms has become anthropologicalpessimism. (Of course, we had already heard the not very optimisticstatement that man “is a twisted log from which nothing straight canbe taken” in his work Idea of a Universal History with a CosmopolitanSense.Kant —eluding all explicit theological references— discovered eviltrawling though human selfishness, before arrogance. It could be saidthen that evil is ‘the other name’ of unsociable sociability, althoughperhaps it should be said more precisely that it as inherent to humansas the impulse towards good is. Good/evil in free will, as deeply rootedtendencies root, sustain the unity of character of the rational beingthat we have seen unfold, in order to understand the mundane resultof its actions as sociability-unsociable.The mundanity of human action frames the reflection work, but—by definition— so does the work of man, as a measure of what ishuman; a work that we are profiling —since that is how it is profiled inmodern European conscience— as a synthesis of a technical, economic