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<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
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<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="New Style"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" FCOLOR="t" CH="Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" FCOLOR="t" CH="Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" FCOLOR="t" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" FCOLOR="t" CH="Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="Litt"/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" FCOLOR="t" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
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<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
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<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
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<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
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<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="Litt"/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of "/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical "/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of "/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical "/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of "/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical "/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
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<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of "/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical "/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of "/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FONT="EB Garamond 12 Regular" FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical "/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="number"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book 3 titre"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT FCOLOR="Black" CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
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<ITEXT FONTSIZE="10" CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
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<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions."/>
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<ITEXT CH="App. 4 "/>
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<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
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<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="fig. 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and, ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), in: Kant: Political Writings, edited by E.S. Reis, translated by H.S. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1970) 1991."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Kant, I., Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), translated and edited by Robert B. Louden, with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn. Cambridge, UK/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Rötzer, F. (Ed.), Das Böse: jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?), Göttingen: Steidl, 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH=" Taubes, J., Occidental Eschatology. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Zwart, H., Technocratie en onbehagen: de plaats van de ethiek in het werk van Michel Foucault (Technocracy and its discontents: the place of ethics in the work of Michel Foucault), Nijmegen: SUN 1995."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="III. Appendix 4 "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Can We Still Be Responsible?"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘The fact that the human can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person’ (Kant 1798: p. 15). This is one of Immanuel Kants central assertions in Anthropology. In the introduction of the same work he states: ‘But the most important object in the world to which he can apply [(his) acquired knowledge and skill] is the human being: because the human being is his own final end. — Therefore to know the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason especially deserves to be called knowledge of the world, even though he constitutes only one part of the creatures on earth’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). Finally, in Anthropology we read, ‘Physiological knowledge of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being, pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant 1798: p. 3). The capacity for self-awareness Kant identifies here, this capacity to relate to himself, the fact that he is both subject and object of his knowledge and actions, forms the basis of his proposed ethical practice. Thanks to this capacity for self-awareness, we can analyse ourselves and study the factors that shape our behaviour, before taking control of our own lives and accepting responsibility for our behaviour. That is how we assert ourselves as moral subjects. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="According to Kant, the human species possesses the capacity for distancing itself from the factors – more or less anchored in nature – that shape man’s behaviour, so that man can bring his actions into line with freely chosen norms and targets. The moral subject, called the ‘person’ by Kant, can, as far as Kant is concerned, be governed by ethical principles. Although the person is shaped by a thousand and one factors, Kant believes there is enough freedom left on which to base a sense of responsibility. This ample freedom forms the foundation for man’s ethics. Next, he formulates an ethical task: the person, whom he sees as an autonomous, rational and accountable subject, must constantly critique his own actions and evaluate them against the Law of Reason."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence’ (‘Idea for a Universal History …’Kant 1784 (1991): p. 43). When man does everything by his own efforts, we shall see, according to Kant, how in the long term even the seemingly most random processes will become regular and constant. This leads to the reassuring thought that people, precisely when they choose to follow their own as opposed to another’s path, are inadvertently guided by nature. They then unintentionally support something that, if they were aware of it, they would care little for. With this Kant confirms that people can harm one another when they embody their subjective freedom, but at the same time they will be called upon to discipline themselves right across the natural order of contradictions and various forms of selfish self-involvement. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="For Kant good has its origins in evil. For this reason, evil can be accepted and defended, and this constitutes the core of the profane theodicy Kant develops in his text. He assumes there is an unintentional, unplanned component embedded in human action. On that, he believes, we can base the hope that there is a secret mechanism at work in nature that will lead to a balance in human society. Despite the many detours resulting from the civil rights of freedom and equality, there will be a ‘regular process of improvement’, which Kant believed was confirmed by the French Revolution (‘The Contest of Faculties’, 1798 (Kant 1798 (1991): p. 176 ff.). It is thus that Kant reconciles, in the form of ‘conjectures based on reason’ or ‘prophecies of human beings’ destiny’, the manifest randomness of human affairs with a justification by nature. He believes the meaning of his historical proposition lies in the moral effects of the promise that in the future freedom and the victory of good over evil will go hand in hand. The historical framework thus helps him ground human responsibility in the freedom of subjectivity. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant developed this philosophy because he wants to see the state of nature and the law of the jungle make way for reasonable order and the Law of Reason. The latter are the opposite of a nature that Kant no longer regards as a reasonable ordering, as was the case in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the preceding classical era. The state of nature is to Kant what the ‘world’ was to theological thought, that is, a place of violence, wastefulness and the blind subjugation of all things to the laws of necessity. His new reasonable order begins when the ‘person’ comes into being and succeeds in turning away from the state of nature. Kant then deems the ‘person’ free enough to establish an order that is not based on everybody fighting everybody else, but on an ethos of mutual respect. Beyond the will to power and the will to use the other – the universe of utility – Kant envisages the possibility of man concluding a pact with the other and mustering the willingness to accept the resulting limitations. According to Kant’s ethics, the free, historical subject is capable of developing motives for renouncing instant gratification and the exercise of power. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Kant also argues that the Law of Reason must be interpreted not only as a tactical gesture to secure one’s survival, but as a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral law, which imposes itself on us as the ‘voice of consciousness’, whether it is in our own interest or not. It is the historical subject’s reasonableness that compels him to act in accordance with the Law of Reason. Ultimately, the bottom line of Kant’s ethics is that the other should be seen not just as a means to achieving one’s own ends, but also as an end in itself, to be approached with acceptance, acknowledgement and respect (Cf. Zwart 1995: pp. 25, 26 and 32). This combination of historical representation, concept of man and ethics holds a promise that serves to get people to accept their duty to an ‘inner morality’. His idea that this innate quality, the good in man, is governed by a ‘Divine Spark of God’, which given its depth and nature is essentially beyond the reach of evil, betrays Kant’s anarcho-apocalyptic and gnostic inspiration (See Taubes’ comments on Kant’s gnostic inspirations in Taubes 2009: pp. 145-146). "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Critical thinkers in our day and age doubt whether this historical and moral subjectivity has any bearing on our condition at the start of the third millennium. Hub Zwart, Dutch medical ethicist and Foucault expert, is of the opinion that Kant’s thought has no relevance for the discontent experienced in today’s technocracy. In terms of speaking and writing, Kant’s thinking encourages reasoning and setting out one’s position. It effectively prohibits skirting around the arena of rational dialogue, which has become common practice in, for instance, the media and advertising. On the other hand, being typical attributes of moral subjectivity, reasoning and setting out one’s position have become elements of an instrumental-normative, academic way of thinking aimed at steering people’s behaviour. This type of thinking thereby codifies a practice, which, in most cases, is nothing other than a practice of maintaining a fine balance between desire and interdiction, and it is doubtful whether these forms of address are still effective in our postmodern media society. Against this, George Bataille and later Michel Foucault pitted a philosophy that marginalises reasonableness and that can be summed up with the concepts ascesis and fire. The first imperative of this renewed appreciation of Kantian ethics is: "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Think against the prevailing regime of reason! "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="In the introduction of the conference report Das Böse, Jenseits von Absichten und Tätern, oder: Ist der Teufel ins System eingewandert? (Evil, Beyond Intentions and Perpetrators, or: Has the Devil Slipped into the System?, Rötzer 1995), participants of the conference like Wenzel Jacob, Bernd Busch, Dietmar Kamper, Florian Rötzer, Peter Weibel and Christoph Wulf a.o., wonder whether, in our day and age, we can still believe in Kant’s moral subject or whether we are being suffocated by a sense of responsibility that seems to be getting more and more absurd. We need to become more aware of the way modern systems work and develop a systems theory, so they suggest, in which the responsible subject is decentred and marginalised. We ought to create the possibility to think in terms of a system that operates autonomously and of which the subject is only one (passive) element. This system would be so complex and work in such a way that moral man, compelled by his freedom to fulfil his duty, would become more and more of a fiction in it. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="‘Autonomous, self-responsible man – who was the goal of humanism – has long since perished in our integrated, and highly structuralised, organisations.’ (1995: p. 17) Psychotechnology and rational management increasingly banish matters such as responsibility and competence to whatever narrow margins remain. This means that the evil consequences of such systems no longer originate in the malicious intent of a particular subject; such an explanation has, in any event, become completely inadequate. We must assume that the complex, high level of organisation in such systems means that even well-meaning actions can have harmful consequences and that some actions can have consequences that cannot be known at all. Thanks to these systems there could well be such a thing as unintentional evil."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="This unintentional evil could be described as the outcome of the extremely complex structures through which society has organised both nature and people’s lives. Unintentional evil is a figure of thought characterised by the renunciation of all the hope (in a Kantian sense) that our society has invested in the humanisation of nature and the naturalisation of man over the past two hundred years. Such a systematic evil takes centre stage when the first and second natures have, to a large extent, merged. Unintentional evil thrives on a nature that can barely be distinguished from the societies that engineer and control it and that have increasingly incorporated it into their processes for ensuring survival. The occurrence of an unintentional system evil could then be something like the late revenge of a nature that has lost its status of otherness and now imposes its laws and order on society as a whole. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Good creates and evil destroys. Can this thesis be reversed or challenged? Yes, since nowadays we have modern emergent theories that view the traditional elements of evil, such as chance, accident and error, as generative forces. These theories accept that chance, accident and error are the manifestations of the creative power of matter. For that reason complex systems, whose effects and forms can be interpreted with the help of chaotic processes, catastrophes and emergencies, are incompatible with Kant’s ethics and teleology. When we realise the important role that chance – for scientific metaphysics the most important category of evil – now plays in modern biology and physics, then it does not make sense to confine evil to its connection with man’s actions and intentions. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="We cannot prevent evil by doing good. Chance, accident and error cannot be solely interpreted as corruptio, as signs of moral decay or of the decline of something good, as was posited in the eighteenth century; chance is a feature coming from the beyond and fatally crosses all conceptual forms that seek to impose order on chaos and the cosmos. For that reason alone, it has always been seen as a principle of evil. Because of the way chance functions in our network society, in our complex, connective and heavily integrated systems (the organisation of labour, professional networks, computer networks, mobile phones, the media, etc.), the subject has little or no control over the effects of his own actions. This fact renders responsibility meaningless, while at the same time burdening us, incontrovertibly, with a society that has become effectively ungovernable – perhaps precisely because of this excessive integration. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="What interests us about this way of thinking are the theses it generates about the birth of the metropolis and the role of urbanism. Could the ungovernability of the modern metropolis and its wild mutation into today’s monstrosity be the result of the deployment of technologies, or better still, the side effects of technologies, that were meant to ‘save’ the city? The most pronounced ‘fatal’ rescue operation for doing so has probably been the introduction of motorised traffic. "/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<ITEXT CH="Having reflected on system error and chance, the participants of the conference Das Böse (The Evil) plead for a postmodern strategy. They plead for ethical indifference. They plead for a domain beyond good and evil, where one can activate something beyond all intention, beyond all planning, beyond any legitimation. We can indeed generate something new here on earth. And this does not require the rejection of Kant’s ethical dualism, since all of our actions, all of our thinking, designing, writing and realising is ‘irresponsible‘ by definition, because we cannot avoid being ‘submerged’ in the information flows. As postmodern cosmopolitans we are hyper-informed, but those very same flows that inform us are also the flows that make it impossible for us to transcend and obtain an overview of the world. This is why the proposed ethical indifference seeks not to incite us to neo-Nietzschean heroics, but rather to alert us to the tragic realisation that we are doomed to irresponsibility and condemned to the last passivity that pervades all of post-modernity: Whatever we do, our actions are always shadowed by the unintentional; everything is always different than anticipated. Wherever something unforeseen arises, wherever something happens, wherever an emergence occurs, the system itself is at work, the system itself is the actor, and we… we experience it, watch it and… feed it."/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
<para PARENT="book3"/>
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