Paul warns in 2 Corinthians that “scripture slays” (2 Cor. 3:6) in that it is not grounded in Spirit. This could be stated as the law, the symbolic order, principle, letter, or language, slays if it is taken as an end in itself. The problem Paul is addressing is the relationship between the written word, whether in the form of letters of recommendation, the Scriptures, or Torah, and the reality of embodied humans. Paul does not need letters written with ink, as he has the Corinthian believers as living letters bearing the living Word in their heart. Words or laws inscribed on stone, even if put there by the finger of God, by angels, or by the highest law giver, cannot possibly compare to the Spirit of the living God written on the heart. The former is a “ministry of death” in that it does not pertain to flesh and blood and spiritual reality. Paul refers to it as a “ministry of condemnation” or a “ministry of death” which is “from death to death” in that it is a fading reality which “veils” its own transitory nature. This ministry of death obscures or veils its own reality but it also veils the truth or the true glory which comes from the Spirit.
The thinker who unwittingly stumbled over Paul’s equation of death, emptiness and deception, with the law, was Immanuel Kant. Kant arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality”[1] which he captures in his categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[2] The beauty of the Kantian maxim, in his own estimate, is that it does not depend upon anything residing outside of the maxim or outside of the rational will of the one following the maxim. Kant equates the will, not with “a presupposed condition” or “any inclination” but he connects this maxim directly and only with the power of the will.[3] The problem Kant stumbles upon, is that if his maxim is completely enclosed in the will, then there is no determinate content to it, and it may give rise, not to the supreme principle of morality, but to what Kant calls radical evil. This radical evil, like its counterpart in the good, is completely enclosed in human will. “So we can call this a natural propensity to evil, and because we must always accept the guilt for it we can call it a radical innate evil in human nature, though one we have brought upon ourselves.”[4]
This radical evil is a necessary possible result of Kant’s anthropology as reason and freedom are not dependent upon anything outside of the self: “Now the human being actually finds in himself a faculty through which he distinguishes himself from all other things, and even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and this is reason.”[5] The faculty of reason provides simultaneous access to absolute freedom and to the choice of evil, for no reason (outside of the will). As Alenka Zupančič explains: “Evil, radical evil, is something that can be defined only in paradoxical terms as the ‘free choice of unfreedom’. In other words, here, too, a genuine negation of freedom proves impossible. The subject is free whether she wants to be or not; she is free in both freedom and unfreedom; she is free in good and in evil; she is free even where she follows nothing but the trajectory of natural necessity.”[6] Reason, the law, the categorical imperative, all arrive at a pure form or pure idea, which does not depend upon anything but itself.
Paul exposes the inherent fault or evil in this orientation to the law, locating it in the drive or desire which stands behind it. As he describes in Romans 7:7, the law gives rise to desire or covetousness: for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET’” (Rom. 7:7). In Paul’s description, the law generates the desire it forbids.
The Freudian explanation or the ‘Freudian blow’ to philosophical ethics, which accords with Paul’s description, is that “what philosophy calls the moral law – and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative – is in fact nothing other than the superego.”[7] The superego is not God, the will, or a rational moral imperative, but is the individual’s attempt to be a law unto themself. Rather than the law being inscribed on the heart, the transgressor of the law, would inscribe themselves into the position of the law, thus obtaining what the law obstructs or forbids. In his drive to freedom (from the law of the father) he enslaves himself to this law (the law of the father or superego taken up into his own identity). The moral imperative, as Freud recognized, is a “moral masochism” in which the individual subjects himself to his own “cathected” father image – which gives rise to the worst forms of evil.
The superego serves in place of the law, and proves itself in relation to the ego. Thus, Freud pictures the superego as the seat or medium of the death drive; the law or the letter kills in giving rise to a dynamic of death. As Zupančič describes, “In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honourable’ inclinations of the subject.”[8] The superego is, in Freudian terms, the attempt to be one’s own father. In Pauline terms, this orientation to the law is a displacement of the true Father.
Interestingly, Kant’s critique of the biblical notion of evil aligns with Paul’s universalizing of the problem of the law. This is not simply a historical problem which humanity inherited from its progenitors, but is the problem which every individual faces. The problem of evil is not a historical but a logical problem, though Genesis seems to present the problem as one residing at the beginning of history. For Kant, evil presents itself as part of his understanding of freedom. “The propensity to birth evil is not only the formal ground of all unlawful action, but is also itself an act (of freedom).”[9] Kant posits an original freedom at the heart of every human, but if the original innocent pair were irresistibly seduced or tricked, then this is not true freedom. For God to punish what they could not and did not have the power to resist means God is unfair.
According to Kant, humans are not subject to determinations beyond their control, yet they do evil, which demands an explanation. “Kant’s solution to this problem is that one has to recognize the propensity to evil in the very subjective ground of freedom. This ground itself has to be considered as an act of freedom [Aktus der Freiheit]. In this inaugural act, I can choose myself as evil.”[10] There is the possibility, in Kant’s own estimate, that the categorical imperative may be grounded in a perverse will, in which the service of the seeming good is actually pure evil: “It may also be called the perversity [perversitas] of the human heart, for it reverses the ethical order [of priority] among the incentives of a free will; and although conduct which is lawfully good (i.e. legal) may be found with it, yet the cast of mind is thereby corrupted at its root (so far as the moral disposition is concerned), and the man is hence designated as evil.”[11] But by Kant’s own criteria, it is not clear how the individual might sort out radical evil and the good.
Jacques Lacan adds a problematic layer onto this Kantian/Freudian dilemma, with his own categorical imperative: “Don’t compromise, don’t give way on your desire as it is fidelity to one’s desire itself that is elevated to the level of ethical duty.”[12] As Dylan Evan’s notes, “The very centre of Lacan’s thought … is the concept of desire.” Lacan argues that “desire is the essence of man” (Seminar XI, 275), and the goal of therapy is to articulate and recognize the nature of desire (Seminar I,183). Lacan’s three registers (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary) intersect with and emerge from his symbol for desire – objet petit a (Seminar XX, 87) and the conscious and unconscious dialectic occurs in and around the medium of desire (Seminar II, 228).[13] Lacan links desire with the life force and “the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state.”[14] To give way on desire is to give up on life and subjectivity as the structure and dynamic which gives rise to the desire for the self is precisely the dynamic necessary for subjectivity to occur. The impossibility of desire is the necessary structuring principle against which desire (jouissance) forms.
Likewise, in Žižek’s understanding, apart from desire for self or the compulsion to obtain the self there is no self. He uses Paul’s terms for sin to describe the rise of the Subject. The “hermeneutical” procedure of isolating the letter of the law creates a frontier or “coast-like” condition between the real (with the obscene superego) and the symbolic and out of this tension jouissance or forbidden desire arises. The letter and jouissance describe the form and substance of life under the compulsion to repeat – the letter being that which “returns and repeats itself” in the life force of desire.[15] The problem is now double layered, in that the moral law, the will, duty, or reason, taken as an end in and of themselves, are without any recourse to circumstance – the world. In turn, Lacan’s jouissance (or evil desire) is indistinguishable from that desire necessary for life.
We are surrounded by examples of those who perform the most evil deeds, due to their form of the categorical imperative. Paul counts himself blameless in regard to the law as a Pharisee, and for the same reason he persecuted and killed Christians, and thus considers himself the chief of sinners. Adolph Eichmann appeals to the Kantian categorical imperative (doing his duty, obeying the law) while on trial in Jerusalem, as reason enough for killing Jews. The Marquis de Sade appeals to the categorical imperative as a call to universal sadism – each one is duty bound to pleasure himself through his neighbor. He has one of his novelistic characters propose as his maxim to murder anyone who gets in his way: “With regard to the crime of destroying one’s fellow, be persuaded it is purely hallucinatory; man has not been accorded the power to destroy; he has at best the capacity to alter forms . . . what difference does it make to her creative hand if this mass of flesh today is reproduced tomorrow in the guise of a handful of centipedes.” This is the law of universal metamorphosis, and murder is simply part of this universal principle.
Both Kant and Sade need an eternity to pose the possibility that the highest good (the holy will, or the diabolical will), though not now attainable, might be attained in an eternal future. In Sade, this clearly translates into the worst form of evil (eternal sado-masochistic torture chambers), but the point is Kant is aligned with Sade in putting into place the machine of compulsive repetition. Desire, the good will, the categorical imperative must be pursued and it must be pursued endlessly into eternity. “This then necessarily leads to the exclusion of (the possibility of) this object (the highest good or ‘diabolical evil’), an exclusion which, in turn, supports the fantasy of its realization (the immortality of the soul).”[16] The categorical imperative requires a bad infinity (no longer simply desire but drive), giving rise to the depth of the human sickness, the compulsion to repeat. Here we no longer have to do with life, but the pure form of the death drive. Kant cannot imagine that someone would want their own destruction, but Lacan pictures this, not as an extreme, but the human situation; “on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not.”[17]
My point is not to refute either Sade or Kant, but to indicate how the worst forms of evil might be associated with the law. To call this “radical evil” is obviously as mistaken as to imagine that there is a highest moral principle obtainable through the will. Both are mistaken, but the lie of this mistake is the universal deception which Paul equates with the sinful orientation to law.
[1] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8 (Ak 4:392).
[2] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:421).
[3] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:420).
[4] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Jonathan Bennett, 2017 )15. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1793.pdf
[5] Metaphysics of Morals, 68 (Ak 4:452).
[6] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 39.
[7] Ibid, 1.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, 88.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 25. Cited in Zupančič, 89.
[12] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999) 153.
[13] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 36.
[14] Zupančič, 2.
[15] Evans, 100.
[16] Zupančič, 100.
[17] Ibid.