Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  It must be remembered that the noumenal world, including the noumenal self, is unknowable to man in Kant’s view—and that the category of causality is inapplicable to it. The question, therefore, arises: how can man be influenced in any way. by the dictates of the noumenal self, to which he has neither cognitive nor causal relation? In other words, how is it possible for man on earth to take any interest in morality (as construed by Kant)? “But to make this conceivable,” states Kant, “is precisely the problem we cannot solve.” Kant does not regard this as a flaw in his system; rather, it is “a reproach which we must make to human reason generally. . . .”17

  Although he is an avowed innovator in epistemology, Kant observes that in the field of morality he is not teaching “anything new,” but merely developing “the universally received concept of morals....”18 In regard to the fundamentals of his ethics, this is true. Kant is the heir and perpetuator of the centuries of Christianity, which had urged on man a continuous struggle against “temptation” in the name of obedience to duty. (Kant himself was raised in a moral atmosphere of this sort carried to an extreme by a sect of puritanical Protestants. )

  But Kant is not merely the child of his predecessors. There is a sense in which he is an innovator in ethics.

  Kant is the first philosopher of self-sacrifice to advance this ethics as a matter of philosophic principle, explicit, self-conscious, uncompromised—essentially uncontradicted by any remnants of the Greek, pro-self viewpoint.

  Thus, although he believed that the dutiful man would be rewarded with happiness after death (and that this is proper), Kant holds that the man who is motivated by such a consideration is nonmoral (since he is still acting from inclination, albeit a supernaturally oriented one). Nor will Kant permit the dutiful man to be motivated even by the desire to feel a sense of moral self-approval. “An action done merely for the sake of this feeling would be a self-centred action without moral worth,” writes one British Kantian (H.J. Paton). “[I]t is always a denial of morality,” Paton explains, “to bid men pursue it for what they will get out of it. . . .”19

  The main line of pre-Kantian moralists had urged man to perform certain actions in order to reach a goal of some kind. They had urged man to love the object which is the good (however it was conceived) and strive to gain it, even if most transferred the quest to the next life. They had asked man to practice a code of virtues as a means to the attainment of values. Kant dissociates virtue from the pursuit of any goal. He dissociates it from man’s love of or even interest in any object. Which means: he dissociates morality from values, any values, values as such. In “volition from duty,” he writes, “the renunciation of all interest is the specific mark of the categorical imperative....” This, Kant declares, is what distinguishes him from his predecessors, who failed to discover morality: they “never arrived at duty but only at the necessity of action from a certain interest.”20

  For the same reason, they never arrived at a proper concept of moral perfection, either. A perfect (or divine) will, Kant maintains, requires moral principles to guide it, though not the constraint of imperatives and duties because, by its nature, it obeys the moral law without any distracting inclinations. Such a will is free from conflict not because it is moved by a consuming passion for morality, but because it is not moved by passion or love of any kind, not even love for the good. Its perfection is precisely that it is untainted by any interest in anything. “An interest,” writes Kant, “is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.”21

  This is Kant’s concept of moral perfection: perfection as subjection to law in the absence of any love or desire, perfection as not merely disinterested but uninterested subjection to law, perfection as selflessness, selflessness in the most profound and all-encompassing sense. This is the concept that underlies Kant’s approach to man and to the concerns of human life. Moral imperatives and duties, Kant states, exist only for a “will not absolutely good,” i.e., for a “being who is subject to wants and inclinations,” i.e., for a being with the capacity to hold personal values. It is personal values that Kant condemns, not as evil, but as a “subjective imperfection” of man’s lower, phenomenal nature—not as loathsome, but as meriting disdain and even “contempt.” A desire, Kant holds—any desire, no matter what its object—is unworthy of the distinctively moral emotion: respect. I can approve of a given inclination, remarks Kant, but “I can have no respect for any inclination whatsoever, whether my own or that of another. . . .”22

  The opposite of perfection (in Kant’s view)—the opposite of non-interest, non-desire, non-value—is self-love. Christian moralists had always opposed self-love, but no one before Kant ever reached his thoroughness in this regard. The fundamental ethical alternative, according to Kant, can be stated succinctly: it is the law of morality versus the principle of self-love. The first derives from man’s noumenal character, the second from his “natural predisposition.” The first gives rise to categorical imperatives, the second to counsels of prudence. The first, “stripped of all admixture of sensuous things,” has “a worth which thwarts my self-love.” The second “is the source of an incalculably great antagonism to morality,” “the very source of evil.”23

  This does not mean that self-love in and by itself is evil, according to Kant; it is merely amoral. Evil consists in loving self-love; evil consists in giving self-love priority over morality in one’s heart.

  Consequently man (even the best) is evil only in that he reverses the moral order.... He adopts, indeed, the moral law along with the law of self-love; yet when he becomes aware that they cannot remain on a par with each other ... he makes the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of obedience to the moral law; whereas, on the contrary, the latter, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of the former, ought to have been adopted... as the sole incentive.

  It is of no avail that such a man’s actions may be unimpeachable. “The empirical character is then good, but the intelligible [noumenal] character is still evil.”24

  According to Kant, this capitulation to self-love, this “wickedness (the wickedness of the human heart), which secretly undermines the [moral] disposition with soul-destroying principles,” taints every man.

  Out of love for humanity I am willing to admit that most of our actions are in accordance with duty; but, if we look more closely at our thoughts and aspirations, we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always there, and it is this instead of the stern command of duty (which would often require self-denial) which supports our plans.25

  It follows that men—“men in general, even to the best of them”—are evil. We can, says Kant, “call it a radical innate evil in human nature”—an “innate corruption of man which unfits him for all good.” (This is Kant’s version of Original Sin.)

  The genesis of man’s evil, says Kant, is beyond comprehension. It cannot derive from man’s noumenal being, which in itself predisposes man to good, or from the fact of man’s inclinations (man cannot be held responsible for their existence, Kant believes). Evil, Kant holds, is by its nature volitional, and therefore man’s evil must consist in a “perversion of our will”—a perversion that is innate, yet produced by men’s free choices; a perversion “inextirpable by human powers,” “yet none the less brought upon us by ourselves”; in short, something “inscrutable.”26

  “How it is possible,” states Kant, “for a naturally evil man to make himself a good man wholly surpasses our comprehension ; for how can a bad tree bring forth good fruit?”27 Nevertheless, he insists, it is possible. It is man’s obligation to overcome his innate evil and regenerate himself morally—a thing just as mysterious as, but no more mysterious than, the origin of man’s evil.

  Kant’s prescription for man’s moral rebirth reveals still another respect in which his ethics outdoes anything characteristic of his predecessors.

  The path to moral rebirth does not lie in
the obliteration of self-love and its inclinations. Kant is not an Oriental mystic; he does not advocate the cessation of feeling. Man, he holds, is partly a phenomenal being; as such, man must and should experience desire for the things of this world. Man’s wickedness is not that he desires, but that he does not sacrifice his desires when duty demands it. His wickedness is not that he has needs, whose fulfillment “alone can make life worth desiring,” but that he does not frustrate his needs, that he proceeds to make life worth desiring, i.e., to “cater to their satisfaction ... in opposition to the law....” Man’s inclinations do present a certain problem: they “make difficult the execution of the good maxim which opposes them ...”; but “genuine evil consists in this, that a man does not will to withstand those inclinations when they tempt him to transgress. . . .”28

  Since men’s inclinations reflect the natural craving for happiness, i.e., the inescapable law of self-love, men experience such temptation chronically and acutely. Yet in Kant’s opinion this is no bar to men’s spiritual regeneration; on the contrary, it can be a positive help. “[M]an can frame to himself no concept of the degree and strength of a force like that of a moral disposition except by picturing it as encompassed by obstacles, and yet, in the face of the fiercest onslaughts, victorious.” 29

  It is not inner peace that Kant holds out to man, not otherworldly serenity or ethereal tranquillity, but war, a bloody, unremitting war against passionate, indomitable temptation. It is the lot of the moral man to struggle against undutiful feelings inherent in his nature, and the more intensely he feels and the more desperately he struggles, the greater his claim to virtue. It is the lot of the moral man to burn with desire and then, on principle—the principle of duty—to thwart it. The hallmark of the moral man is to suffer.

  Kant makes no attempt to minimize this aspect of his viewpoint. The ideal man, he writes, is “a person who would be willing not merely to discharge all human duties himself ... but even, though tempted by the greatest allurements, to take upon himself every affliction, up to the most ignominious death....” Christianity, Kant observes, pictured the redemption of humanity as occurring once and for all through the suffering of humanity’s representative, Jesus. In Kant’s opinion, this is but a symbolic representation of the truth. The truth is that every moral man must endure suffering, “the suffering which the new [moral] man, in becoming dead to the old, must accept throughout life....” (Last emphasis added.)30

  Should the new man object that his suffering is unjust, given his sincere conversion to virtue, he may read the following: “Man, on the contrary, who is never free from guilt even though he has taken on the very same disposition [as Jesus], can regard as truly merited the sufferings that may overtake him, by whatever road they come....” Should the new man cry that he cannot understand how it is possible for him, without reward of any kind, to persevere in his battle against the onslaughts of personal desire, he may read that “the very incomprehensibility of this” should be an inspiration to him. The incomprehensibility, “which announces a divine origin, acts perforce upon the spirit even to the point of exaltation, and strengthens it for whatever sacrifice a man’s respect for his duty may demand of him.”31 (It must be remembered that the new man endures such an existence in order to obey a moral code, any man’s interest in which, by Kant’s statement, is also incomprehensible.)

  “‘Sacrifice’”—I am quoting the antipode of Kant, Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged—

  is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.... It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.32

  In this exact sense of the term, it is sacrifice—sacrifice as against apathy or indifference, sacrifice continual and searing—which is the essence of Kant’s moral counsel to living men.

  If men lived the sort of life Kant demands, who or what would gain from it? Nothing and no one. The concept of “gain” has been expunged from morality. For Kant, it is the dutiful sacrifice as such that constitutes a man’s claim to virtue; the welfare of any recipient is morally incidental. Virtue, for Kant, is not the service of an interest—neither of the self nor of God nor of others. (A man can claim moral credit for service to others in this view, not because they benefit, but only insofar as he loses.)

  Here is the essence and climax of the ethics of self-sacrifice, finally, after two thousand years, come to full, philosophic expression in the Western world: your interests—of whatever kind, including the interest in being moral—are a mark of moral imperfection because they are interests. Your desires, regardless of their content, deserve no respect because they are desires. Do your duty, which is yours because you have desires, and which is sublime because, unadulterated by the stigma of any gain, it shines forth unsullied, in loss, pain, conflict, torture. Sacrifice the thing you want, without beneficiaries, supernatural or social; sacrifice your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self, because they are your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self: sacrifice them to morality, i.e., to the noumenal dimension, i.e., to nothing knowable or conceivable to man, i.e., as far as man living on this earth is concerned, to nothing.

  The moral commandment is: thou shalt sacrifice, sacrifice everything, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, as an end in it. self.

  Here, to use the rightist Jung’s phrase, is a morality which advocates the “self-abandonment of the Ego,” in a manner that surpasses anything in the previous history of the West.

  The consistency of Kant’s ethics reflects the consistency of his epistemology. The Greeks had affirmed both the power of man’s intellect and the value of his happiness. The Christians had denied reason the role of arbiter of truth, but had granted it some validity as an aid in the pursuit of knowledge, and they had, correspondingly, granted some validity to men’s pursuit of personal desires. Kant goes all the way in both fields: if a man’s senses or reason is involved in the cognition of an object, the object he grasps is, by that fact, nonreal; if a man’s desires are involved in the motivation of an action, the action is, to that extent, nonmoral. Thus man’s mind and his self are struck down together—and knocked out of the field of philosophy.

  Kant did not preach Nazism. But, on a fundamental level and for the first time, he flung at Western man its precondition: “Du bist nichts” (“You are nothing”).

  “Dein Volk ist alles” (“Your people is everything”) soon followed. Most nineteenth-century philosophers accepted every essential of Kant’s philosophy and morality, except the idea of an unknowable dimension. They proceeded to name a surrogate for the noumenal self, an ego-swallowmg, duty-imposing, sacrifice-demanding power to replace it. Following the trend of the Christian development since the Renaissance, the power they named was: the neighbor (or society, or mankind).

  The result was a new moral creed, which swept the romanticist circles of Europe from the time of the first post-Kantians, and which continues to rule Western intellectuals to the present day. The man who named the creed is the philosopher Auguste Comte. The name he coined is altruism.

  The medieval adoration of God, says Comte, must now be transmuted into the adoration of a new divinity, the “goddess” Humanity. Sacrifice for the sake of the Lord is outdated; it must give way fully to sacrifice for the sake of others. And this time, Comte says, man must really be selHess; he must renounce not only the element of egoism approved by the Enlightenment, but also the “exorbitant selfishness” that characterized the medieval pursuit of salvation.33 The new creed, in short, is Christianity secularized—and, thanks to Kant, with the Greek element removed.


  “Altruism” is the view that man must place others above self as the fundamental rule of life, and that his greatest virtue is self-sacrifice in their behalf. (Altruists do not necessarily agree on which others, whether mankind as a whole or only part of it.) “Altruism” does not mean kindness, benevolence, sympathy, or the like, all of which are possible to egoists; the term means “otherism”; it means that the welfare of others must become the highest value and ruling purpose of every man’s existence.

  In Germany, the center of Kant’s power, this idea reached its most passionate expression. In place of the earlier timid or grudging approval of self-interest, the following is what the country’s philosophers, for a full century, hammered into every German ear, mind, school, and conscience.

  He who “desires any life or being, or any joy of life, except in the Race and for the Race, with whatever vesture of good deeds he may seek to hide his deformity, is nevertheless, at bottom, only a mean, base, and therefore unhappy man.” (Fichte)

  “The noble type of consciousness... assumes a negative attitude toward its own special purposes, its particular content and individual existence, and lets them disappear. This type of mind is the heroism of Service.... [Its self-sacrifice is that] it gives itself up as completely as in the case of death....” (Hegel)

  A man must not desire “any reward for his works,” whether it be “direct or indirect, near or remote,” even if what he desires is “to work out [his] own perfection” —because morality excludes “self-interest in the widest sense of the term.... The absence of all egoistic motivation is, therefore, the criterion of an action of moral worth.” (Schopenhauer)