music, freedom, and metaphysics 173moral philosophy. The will in Kant is not subject to a causality external
to itself, and so, unlike the appearing world of nature, does not exist
in time. Kant’s attention to the question of evil relates to his separation
of temporal appearances from the timeless intelligible realm of things
in themselves and of human freedom. The separation aims to establish
the ‘fact’ of freedom in the face of the awareness that nature is wholly
bound by causal laws. In these terms evil cannot be part of nature, in
the form, for example, of perverse, ‘animal’ instincts. It must instead
be essentially connected to human will, as a spontaneity which exists
outside the chain of natural causes:
Therefore if we say: man is by nature good, or, he is by nature evil, then
this just means that he contains a primary ground (which is inaccessible to
us) for the acceptance of good maxims, or the acceptance of evil maxims
(maxims which are contrary to the law); and he does so universally as a
man, thus such that he thereby at the same time expresses the character
of his species by that acceptance.
(Kant 1977 : 667 )Were the ground of evil to be found in socialisation, which can be
regarded as essentially causal, and so is necessarily temporal, then it
would not be based on freedom, and could have no substantial moral
import. The startling consequence is that the ground of good and evil
is given at birth as part of what it is to be human. Freedom is now inher-
ently connected to the possibility of evil in a way that we cannot explain,
because what is to be explained lies outside the realm of appearances
connected by laws.
The ground of action is therefore either merely arbitrary, such that
the performing of good or evil actions is ultimately incomprehensible,
or the ground is constitutive of our very being and we are responsible
for our evil deeds. In the light of Kant’s remark about the inaccessi-
bility of the nature of will, this conception might appear to be merely
obscure, and to underplay or ignore the social and other factors that
cause people to perform evil deeds. Accounts of evil have tended to be
the preserve of the political Right, for whom they function as an excuse
not to look at the social factors which lead to bad behaviour. How-
ever, Schelling’s account of the connection between freedom and evil
in his account of will in his 1809 essay,Philosophical Investigations on the
Essence of Human Freedom, and the subsequent unpublished texts called
The Ages of the World, written in the early 1810 s, suggest how Kant’s