Milbank’s criticisms of Kantian ethics begin from the observation that feeling enters into the ethical mix only as “the paradoxical feeling of ‘the sublime’ which is the feeling of a break with feeling, or the counter-attractive attraction of sacrifice.” This account of moral feeling, Milbank argues, arises from central themes of Kant’s ethical system.
Morality is “the law of the noumenal” and hence “outside the bounds of our understanding.” Yet it needs to be “schematized” in a sensible way, yet not schematization can ever be truly legitimate because of the noumenal source of moral freedom. Typically, it is only “symbolized,” but it reaches a fuller representation, a schematization, “only at the curious point where we register, negatively, a break with the phenomenal when it becomes sublimely infinitized. Such a break, Kant associates with heroism and self-sacrifice.”
Heroism and self-sacrifice are not naturally moral, but may instead express pride. Since “we have no immediate access” to the purity of duty, however, we need to have some indirect access to it. This comes through the non-moral action of sacrifice: We can be “assured of freedom at the point where we feel the attraction of giving up phenomenal well being, or are led to admire such renunciation.” Thus, “the moral law is registered improperly as moral feeling, or the strange attraction of sacrifice.” Even when a sensory inclination leads to a dutiful action, the action is dutiful, truly moral, only if it is motivated by duty alone; hence, the “sensory inclination must be sacrificed.”
This leads, Milbank argues, to a series of aporias. According to Kant, we know the moral law a priori, yet if the moral law registers in our experience only “through the schematization of the natural sublime,” then the a priori of the moral law has to be supplemented. Hence, Kant appeals to the admiration that we all have for heroism “as an inchoate registering of the categorical imperative.”
But how is anyone to know that sacrifice is done from pure motives? How do we know the martyr wasn’t motivated by pride and desire for fame? As Milbank says, “only a feeling of love of self-sacrifice registers the law, and yet even this feeling contaminates the purity of duty and is only valid insofar as this feeling constantly negates itself, sacrificing even the love of sacrifice.” But this sacrifice of sacrifice is also a form of sacrifice, and this makes it impossible to distinguish “a diminution of love of sacrifice, and denial of self, from a subtle increase of love of sacrifice and affirmation of self?”
Thomas More might say “I will sacrifice myself for God.” The Kantian says, “Yes, but that sacrifice wins you eternal praise; perhaps you should renounce your desire for sacrifice as the true sacrifice.” And who’s to say that the Kantian isn’t (immorally) proud of his higher sacrifice of sacrifice itself.
As Kant emphasizes (in Milbank’s words), “the a priori character of radical evil resides in the very undecidable uncertainty regarding human motivation just described.” It appears more clearly a priori than the categorical imperative itself, and “this implies, beyond Kant, that the reality of freedom itself, and its law, must remain uncertain.” Kant rejects the traditional Christian doctrine of a fall in time (since, as Milbank pithily says, “nothing in the causal order can affect the order of freedom”), and this means that “radical evil is co-given along with freedom as an inherent possibility of freedom.” This is perfectly logical: “if what defines freedom is not its willing of an infinite goal which allows the flourishing of the free creature, but rather the willing of freedom as such, then freedom can only be free it if might will against itself.” Truly free will must be free to will its own bondage. Kant perceives what no other Enlightenment philosopher did: “radical evil is implied by enlightenment autonomy and does not qualify it.” Within this framework, “pure freedom is as free in self-denial as in its self-affirmation,” and in fact “self-denial becomes indistinguishable from self-affirmation.”
Kant thus sees “evil as an original possibility constitutive of freedom as such.” This appears to be a restatement of traditional Christian theology of sin, but Milbank insists that this is not the case: Christian tradition (especially Augustine, he claims) “regarded evil as the very invention of counter-possibility – of possibility in the drastic sense of an alternative to the actual.” Kant makes possibility “co-equal with actuality,” while the Augustinian privation affirms the priority of actuality and sees evil as a diminution of it.
Milbank endorses Lacan’s insight into the continuity between Kant and Sade: “the Sadean sadistic will also wills only its own freedom, and is also prepared to sacrifice comfort, security and survival for the sake of its own exercise.”
Kant was not completely unaware of these difficulties. Kant doesn’t really bring religion into the bonds of reason, since practical reason claims knowledge of noumenal freedom and thus transcends the bounds of reason. And, when “moral knowledge is brought back within the schematic bounds of the phenomenal, our claim to know the noumenal as moral is rendered uncertain.” To save practical reason, Kant supplements it with faith. He has to invoke grace “because we can only distinguish the will to freedom from radical evil, if we have faith that our aspiration to a good will is graciously taken by God as equivalent to his infinite and ineluctably holy will.” And to have faith is also to have faith in an eschatological discrimination of good and evil, a final judgment where the good are rewarded and evil punished. And there must be a social dimension to this salvation of practical reason, “a Church which seeks really to overcome and not merely to inhibit the inner desires of egotism.”
Yet, Kant’s grace is not grace and his church not church. Instead of being identified with liberated will (as in Augustine), grace is an “inert given.” The church not a partial realization of the harmony of different persons blended into a body, but a people “only united under the abstract formal resemblance of their wills.”
Kant’s theology of radical evil is not “a secular view of evil,” Milbank says. As we’d expect from Milbank, Kant presents “only an alternative theology.”