Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Roots of Moral Evil. Steubenville: Hildebrand Press, 2024; 224 pages. ISBN: 9781939773210.
Reviewed by Timothy B. Jaeger, Stony Brook University
Of the many diverse and intricate ideas developed in Dietrich von Hildebrand’s magnum opus, Ethics, one of the most mysterious and intriguing is his development of a theory of moral evil. Appearing near the end of that monumental work and consisting of six relatively short chapters, weaving together his realist phenomenology with Catholic theology and insights from the Ancient Greeks and the Church Fathers, these musings seemed to be everything Hildebrand had to say about moral evil. However, Martin Cajthaml has done a great service to the world of Hildebrand scholarship and phenomenology by uncovering, collecting, and translating Hildebrand’s unpublished writings on moral evil found in his Nachlass in the Bavarian State Archives. Written contemporaneously with Ethics, these unpublished manuscripts, now entitled The Roots of Moral Evil, greatly expand upon the insights Hildebrand generated in Ethics and allow readers to have a richer account of this important theme in Hildebrand’s moral philosophy. John F. Crosby, himself a former student of Hildebrand’s, states in his foreword, “the result is as if a dialogue of Plato, long thought to be lost, has been found” (xv). It will be up to the reader to weigh the merits of such a claim.
The Roots of Moral Evil retains the same general framework from Ethics, beginning with an analysis of concupiscence. It restates the three types of concupiscent people (the passionate type, the slothly type, and the hypersensitive type) and the general nature of concupiscence. Yet, it further expands the various ways concupiscence can emerge in the person, particularly by illustrating how certain morally neutral things can lead to concupiscent acts. For example, Hildebrand argues that while property and laziness are not of themselves necessarily tied to moral disvalues, they can lead to such disvalues when their intentional objects become corrupted. For property, this occurs when the relation between subject and object turns to one of covetousness. For laziness, it happens when our attitude turns to a desire for ease and the avoidance of strain or effort. Of particular interest here is Hildebrand’s detailed discussion of spiritual laziness, or that laziness arising from spiritual shallowness and a refusal to dig deeper into the more profound, meaningful experiences of our souls. The spiritually lazy person avoids confronting deep and moving experiences, shuns the fundamental stance of religio, and prevents us from having adequate value-responses, in addition to preventing a dutiful obedience to values. As Hildebrand states, “the spiritually lazy man may be conscientious in conforming to moral obligations insofar as his spiritual laziness does not conceal them from him, but the manner of his response as well as the limitation of the scope of his moral obligations clearly reveal the obstacle that this spiritual laziness forms for his moral life” (96). The nature of value is not concealed from the spiritually lazy person, but their inner state of laziness has muted the intensity of their response to it, leading to a form of value-blindness.
Regarding the other sphere of moral disvalue, pride, Hildebrand repeats nearly verbatim from Ethics, particularly concerning the main types of pride: Satanic pride, the pride of self-glorification, vanity, pride of exterior lordship, and haughtiness. However, the two sections of the chapter on pride found in Roots that do the most to expand upon the work done in Ethics are 3.7 and 3.8. The former deals directly with pride’s connection to the hierarchy of values, since the degree of pride is inversely correlated to the height of the value that is its object. For example, pride in one’s appearance is not as evil as pride in one’s intelligence or piety. This is further hampered by the degree of free will in our object of pride. So pride in our appearance, which we have comparatively little freedom over, is not as bad as the pride in our moral or religious values, over which we exercise a great deal of freedom (115). Moreover, the latter details a distinct characteristic of pride: the static/dynamic distinction. Static pride deals with types of pride like vanity. Dynamic pride, characteristic of ambition and, most sinisterly, Satanic pride, is rooted in prideful aspirations, such as a desire for a greater station or the usurpation of all values. Dynamic pride is also fundamentally insatiable in its aims for glory and self-elevation.
The final two sections of The Roots of Moral Evil provide the work’s most original and intriguing insights: first, into the moral phenomenon of hatred and second, into what Hildebrand terms the immanent logic of an act. Hatred, for Hildebrand, is a morally evil attitude towards the world. As such, it is not merely the opposite of love, but rather the climax of moral wickedness, arising out of an act-center that is fundamentally incompatible with love. Hatred can arise out of both the prideful and concupiscent centers of the person in various ways, but, at its core, it comes about in those who have not learned to sanction or disavow their spontaneous attitudes and impulses as a result of their lack of a moral consciousness. As he states, “the morally unconscious man lets the as such normal and legitimate impulsive reaction unfold itself according to its immanent logic and thus is in danger of opening the floodgates of passions – and hating his offender” (170). The inability to properly regulate one’s emotional states and moral life lays the foundation for a hateful attitude. There are, thus, two ways to escape the trap of hatred: either through the abstention of passions through reason via the ancient ideal of the Stoics, or through the Christian attitude rooted in the love of God, which gives to value-responses a whole new character and depth by giving us the moral strength to respond to values properly. What is, thus, most engaging about Hildebrand’s account of hatred is the careful nuance he provides between hating sin/errors and hating the sinner. The former, he notes, is indeed a noble and valuable thing, that “here the fight against error is a pure value-response attitude and a morally obligatory one. The love of God implies as a necessary element the ‘hatred’ of error and specifically at errors concerning values” (179). However, he emphasizes how crucial it is that this hatred of error as such not extend to the persons who bear these errors. Indeed, hating the one who is in error inherently contradicts the love of neighbor that lies at the heart of Christian ethics. However, if we give in to this hatred for the erring person, then we descend into fanaticism, which, at its core, is a product of spiritual laziness and an unwillingness to do the moral and spiritual work of loving the other authentically. A further distortion arises in the hatred of the enemy of God, which stems from the same branch of fanaticism. What makes this type of hatred tempting is that it starts from an objective value-response. A proper attitude to those who have gone astray, especially those we love, then would be the credit of love, or the generous recognition that the errors the beloved espouses are not indicative of their actual moral tenor and personhood.
Following the discussion of hatred, the final theme Hildebrand develops is his theory of immanent logic as a root of moral evil. The immanent logic of an act refers to those non-formal laws that govern the execution of an act, distinct from other “formal” laws, such as the laws of physics or mechanical laws. These are the various steps and processes that an action requires for their completion. For example, Hildebrand describes how a research project has certain immanent laws that must be followed, like outlining and looking through sources. We do not simply proceed arbitrarily. Danger arises, however, when we begin to hyperfocus on these specific processes to the detriment of the activities proper moral place. Hildebrand describes the danger as such:
But as soon as this immanent logic absorbs us to such an extent that we no longer situate the end of our activity within the hierarchy of values, that we are no longer concerned with the place that our end holds in this hierarchy, we have fallen prey to the immanent logic of our activity, a state that, in itself, is undoubtedly morally negative and is moreover a source of many moral evils. (196)
Hildebrand presents a phenomenon akin to spiritual laziness, but more sinister in that instead of lazily approaching the value-thing, we actively subvert it and resituate it during the intensity of the moment. The temptation inherent in the immanent logic of an act is that the various means to achieve an end of an act can become, to use the theme of another text by Hildebrand, a moral substitute. As with Scheler, acts, for Hildebrand, ought to conform to a hierarchy of values that stand objectively before us, with those values which are important-in-themselves bearing on us a responsibility to respond to and actualize them. When we are absorbed in the immanent logic of an act, we elevate what should have been a means above the end and see it as important-in-itself. We thus lose sight of the proper ranking of values and are vulnerable to the effects of moral evil. A comparatively benign example Hildebrand provides is having to open a drawer that contains papers we could use for writing a manuscript. We try to open the drawer but find it to be stuck. In our frustration, we continue to try to open the drawer and, by hyper-focusing on opening it, it becomes our primary concern when it should have been subordinate to the task of writing the manuscript. He mentions three primary marks that are indicative of having fallen prey to immanent logic: detaching the activity from its end, the teleology of the activity becoming automated and losing an essential distance from the activity itself, and the subordinate end being elevated to an importance that is inappropriate for it. Furthermore, he names three consequences of falling into immanent logic: First, we become enslaved to it by robbing us of our moral freedom via tunnel vision. Second, we develop an inability to see immoral consequences of acts which we could become instrumental in performing, such as a general in war focusing on winning a battle that will cause many casualties or a statesman who, in a bid to achieve more power and prestige, helps pass policies that end up hurting people. Third, we become blind to the moral significance of means used to achieve such ends, such as using sleazy means to win a lawsuit. While the tunnel vision of immanent logic can be compared to, say, concupiscence, it can still become habitual and distracts from the proper response to values and our relationship with God.
Hildebrand’s account of moral evil offers a plethora of opportunities to expand and develop what he has presented in this text, particularly in the context of his other ethical writings and other accounts of phenomenological ethics. One particularly exciting possibility would be a thoughtful engagement between Hildebrand’s account of moral evil and that of his mentor and friend, Max Scheler. Scheler’s phenomenology of values operates within a defined hierarchy, like Hildebrand’s, but he sees moral good and evil, love and hate, as stemming from one and the same value-phenomenon, whereas Hildebrand sees moral evil as essentially distinct from genuine values. This is most accentuated in how they each treat the phenomenon of agreeableness. For Scheler, the values of the agreeable and disagreeable constitute the lowest values, but they still exist on the same fundamental hierarchy as the values of the person and the holy, the highest values. By contrast, Hildebrand sees the agreeable/disagreeable, or the merely subjectively satisfying, as essentially different from the important in itself, and he argues that it actively competes with the important-in-itself from a separate center of the person.
Hildebrand’s great gift as a phenomenologist and philosopher is his ability to expose the intricate distinctions within, specifically ethical, phenomena to show the nuances present in various archetypal personalities and the value-complexes they embody. Hildebrand, in Roots, is not concerned with the method of phenomenology and phenomenological ethics in the same manner as, say, Husserl was. Hence, while this work is full of ethical insights, it lacks the scaffolding that Husserl had. More in line with someone like Scheler, Roots’ insights are best seen when placed directly up against one’s own lived experience, where the differentiations are put into relief.
With this volume, a significant theme of Hildebrand’s ethical system is finally fleshed out and provides a thorough bedrock for further discussion into phenomenological accounts of moral evil, especially in light of historic and contemporary scholarship. While The Roots of Moral Evil is best read in conjunction with Ethics, it is an excellent standalone volume, giving the reader an approachable introduction to the beautiful world of Hildebrandian value-ethics.