Ethics of Evil

Psychoanalytic Investigations

Jon Mills, Ronald C. Naso, Jon Mills, Ronald C. Naso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781782203957
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913341
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

In today's world where every form of transgression enjoys a psychological motive and rational justification, psychoanalysis stands alone in its ability to uncover the hidden motives that inform individual and social collective behaviour. Both in theory and practice, it bears witness to the impact of anonymity on the potential for perpetration, especially when others are experienced as faceless, disposable objects whose otherness is, at bottom, but a projection, displacement, and denial of our own interiority-in short, the evil within. In keeping with this perspective, Ethics of Evil rejects facile rationalizations of violence; it also rejects the idea that evil, as a concept, is inscrutable or animated by demonic forces. Instead, it evaluates the moral framework in which evil is situated, providing a descriptive understanding of it as a plurality and a depth psychological perspective on the threat it poses for our well-being and ways of life. In so doing, it also fashions and articulates an ethical stance that recognizes the intrinsic link between human freedom and the potential for evil.

Part I
How Ought We to Live?

CHAPTER ONE
On the brink of extinction

Jon Mills

When Einstein (1932) approached Freud on behalf of the League of Nations and asked the question: “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the curse of war?” (Freud, 1933b, p. 199), Freud responded with reservation, suggesting that perhaps it may only be mitigated. This is the general tenor of his anthropological treatment of humanity: until base instinct (Trieb) is sufficiently harnessed and transformed in the service of reason, our world communities will continue to be plagued by the dark marauders of our own insidious nature. Why war?—because hate and violence are “a piece of unconquerable nature . . . a piece of our own psychical constitution” (Freud, 1930a, p. 86). With this dismal portrait of human relations, we might never come to throw our hatred down.

People are slaughtering one another all over the world in the name of religion, ethnic purity, and nationalism under the guise of freedom, justice, ethical duty, and social reform. Within the past few decades alone, contemporary ethno-political warfare has raged the strife-torn territories of the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, Central America, Russia, and the Ukraine, where civilian populations are the primary targets of terror, marked by sadism and butchery, while women and children comprise a large percentage of the incurred human rights’ atrocities. Those close to the front lines of ethnic and religious conflicts are oppressed by political violence, whether they are refugees who have lost their families in ethnic cleansing campaigns, or civilians who must dodge sniper fire every day to run to the market to fetch a loaf of bread. When the constancy of violence, terror, and war continue to saturate our daily consciousness, we can only anticipate where it will emerge next.

To what degree will our disparate cultures be able to rise above this mode of existence, where violence becomes the right of a community, either chosen or impugned? This is further compounded by the historical fact that brutality was the driving force behind the emergence of law, which still requires the use of violence to be enforced. Can actual force be replaced by the force of ideas, or are we condemned to the perversions of pathos? Given Freud’s (1932) ontological treatise on the structure of the psyche, “there is no use in trying to get rid of men’s aggressive inclinations” (p. 211), they are as natural as breathing; for we can never escape from the fact that our minds are primitive. Homo homini lupus est—“Man is a wolf to man.”¹

The history of the human race is forged on traumatisation, resentment, and the need for revenge, which preoccupies collective human consciousness and fuels pathological enactments. Aggression and violence directed toward others is part of human nature, an insidious derivative of our pathos. For the Greeks, to be human is to suffer, to be susceptible to pain (pathētos), to endure illness, in short, our accruing pathology. Our pathos might even become fused with desire, as in “antipathy,” a passion (patheia) against (anti) another. Mental illness stems from this basic constituency of mind. This is why Freud (1916–1917) observed that we are all “neurotic” (p. 358), that is, ill, whereby the human aspect is saturated with anxiety, suffering, and despair—it is just a matter of degree. We are all deeply affected by our pathos to the point that what truly differentiates individuals and societies from one another is our level of functionality and adaptation to psychic pain. In other words, human pathology is normative throughout all cultures and all times. Being “normal” is merely another word for pathos.²

Psychopathology (πoς) is the essence of man, 3 and it is from this standpoint that all else shall be measured. Desire precedes and supersedes reason, for primitive forces govern the psyche, which are arguably responsible as well for the exalted achievements of reason itself. Irrationality—pathos—is our primordial being, and it is from this ontological ground that all else materialises and makes itself known through various forms of human enactments. Reason always remains a tool, if not a slave, of desire.

Throughout this chapter, I endeavour to provide a speculative account of the future of humanity based on a discernible pattern of violence and exploitation of the Other that characterises human motivation and deed. I must confess that I can hardly do justice to this topic in the limited scope of this project, as it would take volumes to address. At best, I hope to frame the issue and the inherent problem-atics it poses, and certainly not pretend to offer any feasible solutions, for I am unable to resolve the dilemma. Instead, I am concerned with a narrow scope of questions that investigate whether our pathological propensities as a human race is likely to bring about our extinction, or whether we can transmogrify our destructive impulses through the relational negotiation of collective valuation practices that transcend our more primal constitutions. I hope the reader will forgive me for raising more conundrums rather than furnishing practical answers. Will the fate of civilisation succumb to sordid desire, inspiring our demise, or will human accord triumph in the end? The real issue involves: to what degree will the will toward violence be sublimated into the higher tiers of self-conscious ethical reflection that reason can afford?⁴ We are a world divided by race, religion, ethnicity, economics, politics, and culture, where strong emotional bonds fuel and sustain separation and difference among our communities. I do not wish to express platitudes, illusory ideals, or provide false hope—the evidence, the brute facticity of impoverishment, suffering, cruelty, and murder—points to the most archaic configurations of psychic development that permeate our valuation practices.

Within today’s multi-cultural world community, differences and prejudices continue to divide and polarise human relations into firm oppositions that become fortified within rigid group identifications that inform collectively shared value systems. What I mean by “preju dice” is that human beings are inclined toward the preferential self-expression of valuation based on self-interest and self-valuation. Ethnic, religious, cultural, and national identities are forged through prejudicial valuation practices that in some cases even legitimise hein ous forms of injustice such as genocide, terrorism, human enslavement, and child trafficking. When collective identity is so firmly established in bipolar relation to the Other, is it possible for such valuation practices to abate under the rubric of peace? Prejudice, hate, and violence are no more likely to disappear than the reality of the external world, therefore the question becomes one of amelioration.

The positive significance of the negative

As Hegel completed the final instalments of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Napoleon was outside the city walls of Jena ushering in a new age—history was being transformed once again by the revolutionary currents of the dialectic. The battle of Jena might be said to parallel the very negative character of the dialectic itself, as conflict and violence pave the path toward progression. The self-generative process of the dialectic could provide us with a logical model for addressing the problem of pathos, but, unlike Einstein’s bane of war, the dialectic might also be the boon for its solution, one that nevertheless retains its destructive features as it engages in combat against itself.

Both Hegel and Freud offer a view of the human condition that is characterised by destruction, negation, and conflict, yet it is paradoxical that such negativity also becomes an animating force behind the elevation of ethical self-consciousness. Like Spirit or Mind (Geist), which is the sublation (Aufhebung) of its previous historical moments, psychic maturation is the sublimation (Sublimierung) of primitive mental processes. Although Hegel’s language might seem odd to modern readers, he is really attempting to describe what psychoanalysis refers to as the individual and collective psyche. Hegel and Freud would probably concede that through reason lies the hope that communities and cultures torn apart by discordant value practices can be united through collective ethical commitments. If humanity is to vanquish the pathology of base desire for the optimistic voluntarism enlightened by reason, it becomes important to understand how reason itself is the knight of desire designed to transform our pathologies.

We do not have to embrace Hegel’s entire philosophical system, which is neither necessary nor pragmatic, in order to appreciate how his logic of the dialectic has relevance for psychoanalytic thought.⁵ Through his Logic, Hegel may be instructive in examining the evolutionary development of history achieved through negation and conquest in which further predictive possibilities for the future of humanity could be inferred. Hegel’s Phenomenology personifies the drama of world Spirit (or what we might contemporarily refer to as humanity) as the coming to presence of pure self-consciousness through the process of self-estrangement, identification, and self-recognition through the mediation of the other. World hero eventually achieves Truth, satiates the lack, and arrives at full self-actualisation only after traversing the arduous and protracted terrain of alienation through the vicissitudes of desire. Spirit—civilisation—is, therefore, a constant activity, pure unrest. “It is just this unrest that is the self” (Hegel, 1807, p. 12). Hegel refers here to the unrest of Aufhebung, as dialectical process continuously annulled, preserved, and trans cended. Hegel’s logic of the dialectic involves a threefold process by which the lower relation becomes subsumed within the higher relation, at once being cancelled, surpassed, but retained.⁶ This pure activity of the dialectic is constantly evolving and redefining itself through such simultaneous movements, hence becoming the architecture—the ground—of Geist, our shared common humanity. And the driving force behind world history, behind the very process of the dialectic, is death and destruction.

Readers unfamiliar with Hegel will probably find his degree of abstraction overly abstruse and tedious, and his grand synthesis of everything has a grandiose tenor in ambition and level of generalisa-tion.⁷ This is partly based on the metaphysics of his day where the most celebrated modern philosophers and German idealists were preoccupied with the relationship and unity of mind, nature, science, religion, ethics, and aesthetics. In the words of Derrida (1982), “Hegel ianism represents the fulfillment of metaphysics, its end and accomplishment” (p. 73). It might be helpful to view Hegel’s project as an attempt to describe the fundamental processes of human thought and activity as the progressive development of cognition and culture. As the human race evolved, so did our capacity for domestic socialisa-tion, civil obedience, ethical reflection, and rational thought. However, Hegel is primarily concerned with expatiating the universal while subordinating the particular; therefore, he is, first and foremost, interested in offering a philosophical system that applies to all people within all historical contingencies.

Hegel’s notion of mind, and that of all of history, encompasses a process in which a subject is opposed to an object and comes to find itself in the object. This entails the mediation of its becoming other to itself, with the reflection out of otherness back to itself. The process of the development of the self and that of civilisation is, therefore, a process of differentiation and integration. For Hegel, Being is charac-terised by an undifferentiated matrix which undergoes differentiation in the dialectical process of Becoming that, in turn, integrates into its being that which was differentiated through its projection, reclaiming it and making it part of its internal structure. The outcome of the integration is once again differentiated then reintegrated; unification is always reunification. Therefore, spirit comes to be what it already is, the process of its own becoming.

Spirit as the striving for pure self-consciousness ascends towards an absolute understanding of itself and comes to a unity constituted by the bifurcation and rigid opposition that it generates from within itself. It is precisely through such opposition that consciousness brings itself into reunification. Thus, spirit, in its evolution, undergoes a violence at its own hands. By entering into opposition with itself, it raises this opposition to a higher unity and, thus, sublates it in a new structure. As each shape or content is confronted with radical opposition, each shape is made to collapse when its non-absolute form is exposed. Indeed, it is always driving the movement on from one shape to the next. Thus, the character of the dialectic is that of negativity and conflict; it is tempestuous, feral, and dynamic. Spirit as such is the source of its own negativity as inversion and destruction pave the way for its progression forward.

There is a necessity to the dialectic that informs the internal structures of the psyche; that is, there is a certain determinism to negation. The operation of such determinate negativity comes about through the collapse of each shape. As negation of a certain content takes place, it derives a certain content from the negation. Therefore, it links shapes into a necessary progression as each form turns into a new one. However, as each form is surpassed, the experience of its alteration is that of death, its end. But, for Hegel, death always leads to rebirth. The dialectic is, therefore, the oscillation between life and death, never separate from one another. For Hegel (1807), spirit is always “tarrying with the negative”—confronting Death, for

to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength; . . . the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.

(p. 19)

As determinate negativity, spirit vanquishes itself as it destroys itself. It kills itself as it gives itself life. This is the “tremendous power of the negative” (p. 19), staring death straight in the face, converting it into the positive. It is precisely through such negativity that there is progression, destroying itself in the service of raising itself—the positive significance of the negative.

If the dialectic becomes a logical model in its application towards a global amelioration of psychopathology, then we must be able to logically demonstrate whether it has the potential to bear any fruit. We may appeal to historical facticities that trace the epigenesis of humankind and perhaps even come to the conclusion that, despite all the carnage and social decay, we have evolved into more a civil and enlightened species, even though human aggressivity and immorality c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION: Moralising evil
• PART I HOW OUGHT WE TO LIVE?
• PART II CLINICAL APPLICATIONS
• PART III APPLIED STUDIES
• INDEX