Simon Gros

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The lecture delivers an ambitious thesis: that the actuality of evil—conceived as the rational subordination of the moral law to self-love—discloses, in actu, the very modal structure that also makes the good materially possible, and thus gives warrant to hope for its predominance. Its distinctive contribution lies in rethreading Kant’s three guiding questions through a single hylomorphic schema (matter/form) that spans theoretical and practical domains, while keeping the anthropological fourth question as the constant mediator. By moving from the constitution of nature (what can I know?) to the condition of freedom (what ought I to do?) and then to the grounds of expectation (what may I hope?), the lecture builds a regressive analysis of an otherwise progressive moral teleology: evil’s actuality reveals the operational reality of form over matter—albeit inverted—thereby confirming the structural feasibility of the good.

The argument unfolds from a methodological decision that governs the whole composition: to treat Kant’s four questions as a sequence with reversals built in. The lecturer begins by situating cognition in the familiar Kantian distribution of labor: sensibility supplies a manifold whose raw givenness remains blind, understanding furnishes concepts through which objects become possible, and reason discloses an order that exceeds empirical lawfulness. The emphasis, however, falls less on doctrine than on an analogue that the lecture exploits relentlessly: a hylomorphism of matter and form that governs nature, and a homologue of content and law that governs maxims. The first part builds this analogy with unusual care. Nature is said to be at once a material totality of appearances and a formal system of necessary lawfulness grounded in the categories; knowledge arises where sensible matter is submitted to conceptual form. This is less a rehearsal than a preparatory displacement: the same must that binds cognition also articulates the practical. The consequence is immediate. If conceptual form in theoretical cognition legitimates the objective status of appearances, practical form in willing legitimates the maxims that count as good. The lecture thereby installs a single modal image across theoretical and practical reason, and this image—not a detached doctrine—becomes the vehicle for the later claim about hope.

From this theoretical base, the composition pivots to the second question—what ought I to do?—by insisting upon a distinction internal to the human being: we are at once natural causes bound by empirical laws and intelligible agents capable of action by principles. The transition is executed by recapitulating the faculty-contrast that yields the will as a capacity to act according to the representation of a law. The metamove is to treat the categorical imperative not as an isolated axiom but as the form that maxims must bear in order to be good at all. What mattered at the level of cognition (that matter be subsumed under form) returns in practical guise (that the matter of inclination be subordinated to the universal form of law). The lecture’s idiom of subsumption here is not decorative. It functions as the precise hinge that will later carry the paradoxical thesis about evil: evil is the same structure operating under a reversal.

Only with this hinge in place does the third question—what may I hope?—enter. The lecture’s strategy is to transform a problem of modal assurance into a problem of modal evidence. Knowing the good is insufficient; one must explain how its occurrence is materially possible for finite agents. Hope, on this view, cannot rest on mere logical possibility or on moral wishfulness; it must secure a ground that evidences the operative modality by which matter can indeed be placed under form in action. At this exact point, evil is introduced in its decisive characterization. The lecturer carefully paraphrases the Religion’s account of evil as a maxim-level reversal: the moral law is considered yet subordinated to self-love; the hierarchy of drives is inverted; matter is installed where form should govern; form is demoted to the rank of a mere occasion. Evil is therefore not an animal deficiency, nor a simple absence, nor an empirical accident; it is a rational choice to set rationality aside. The phrase is self-consciously paradoxical and is meant to capture both the intelligible source of the maxim and its perverse architectonics. Because it is a choice structured by the very capacity that also grounds the law, evil is actual only where the hylomorphic schema is already in play. This is the argumentative fulcrum. The actuality of evil confirms the actuality of the practical modality itself. If the form/matter ordering can be enacted at all—even perversely—then the structure is not a fiction. The good will require the same structure, deployed otherwise.

The polemical force of the thesis appears when the lecture refuses to construe evil as extrinsic to reason or as a mere deficit attributable to sensibility. On the contrary, evil presupposes the intelligible standing of the agent; it is an achievement of rationalization at the level of the form of willing, in which the agent knowingly installs a conditionality that makes observance of the law depend upon inclination. In the lecture’s vocabulary, evil plays with matter and form. What renders the play terrible is that it occurs precisely at the site of the will. This is why the proposed ground of hope does not appeal to an external guarantee or to empirical trends; it cites a structural fact: a perverse instantiation is still an instantiation. Where an inversion is possible, a reversion is not an impossibility in principle. The modal image does the work that no empirical forecast could do.

The move to hope also requires a shift in standpoint that the lecture thematizes with some care. The speaker invokes the anthropological horizon and the epigenetic figure of development that Kant employs in the Mutmaßlicher Anfang. The shift accomplishes two things at once. First, it contests the demand that evil be rendered as a timeless intelligible deed fixed once and for all, outside of time and immune to change; second, it locates hope in a progressive formation of reason’s use rather than in a one-time miracle. To show this, the lecture foregrounds the text’s meditation on sorrow, discontent with providence, and the temptation to despair of any improvement. The refrain is transformed into a directive: become content with providence so that responsibility for the ills—whose origin may lie in the misuse of reason—can be taken up in the only remedy available, self-improvement. The point is not stoic resignation but the delineation of the only locus where modality can be reversed: the agent who already manifests it. Evil exhibits the power of form to tyrannize matter by making matter the condition of form; that same power, reclaimed, could reinstate form as law for matter. The image of germination functions here as conceptual warrant: the very fact that reason can already organize a hierarchy of drives—even catastrophically—shows that a principle of organization has begun to act.

In this sense, the composition sequence of the lecture is essential to its force. The first part constructs the hylomorphic schema in cognition as an evidential base that normalizes talk of form and matter; the second part transposes the schema into the practical in order to align the agent’s maxim with a lawlike form; the third part derives hope from the actuality of the reversal precisely because it testifies to the same structure that, differently ordered, would constitute the good. The final movement introduces the anthropological and historical horizon as the arena where the schema can develop, staging epigenesis as the figure that unifies intelligible determination with temporal formation. The lecture thereby supplies an outer frame: a philosophical response to contemporary violent conflicts that seeks a sentiment adequate to tragedy without collapsing into cynicism. The counsel is not to deny evil’s prevalence but to read its modality as proof that practical form is present and active, even where it has been weaponized against itself.

The discussion that follows the lecture becomes integral to the work’s argument, because the questions forced upon it are continuous with the lecture’s own perils. The first objection presses a classical worry: whether Kant’s conceptual resources in the Critique of Practical Reason allow evil to be positively conceived, rather than only omitted in favor of the good; whether the very structure of a morality of pure reason precludes evil’s possibility in principle. The lecturer acknowledges the weight of the point and concedes that within the pure standpoint evil struggles to find a place. The rejoinder, however, is not a retreat but a shift in terrain that the lecture had already prepared. By opening the anthropological perspective and by reading the Religion and related texts in concert with a pragmatic anthropology, Kant constructs a historical space for maxims to be formed, tested, and reversed. If the pure critique circumscribes the intelligible deed in a way that seems to fix character sub specie aeternitatis, the anthropological discourse treats character as a task within history, where the same form–matter relation can be learned, misapplied, and learned otherwise. This is not an evasion but a clarification of standpoints: purity specifies the condition of moral worth; anthropology specifies the conditions under which finite agents can come to have it at all.

The second line of objection interrogates the distribution of actuality and potentiality. If the lecture sounds as if actuality belongs to evil and potentiality to the good, where then is the potentiality for evil, and how can hope survive the same potentiality if it is equally grounded? The lecturer’s response tightens the developmental reading. Evil, on the proposed account, is an early deployment of the same rational capacity: it presupposes the grasp of law—otherwise there could be no perverse hierarchy—yet it directs the hierarchy toward self-love. In that sense, the potentiality for evil is nothing other than the first recognizable formation of practical rationality under conditions of immaturity. The teleological image is deliberately epigenetic: the capacity for lawlike ordering appears first under pathological conditionality because that is how a finite being initially secures the stability of its maxims. A hope anchored in this picture is neither sentimental nor blind; it does not predict success so much as locate agency where reversal is intelligible.

A third worry distinguishes selfishness from evil and asks whether a third category is needed to honor the idea of a rational choice that suppresses rationality. The lecture’s own definitions point toward an answer that is both principled and austere. Self-love specifies the matter of inclination; evil specifies the form of ordering in which that matter becomes the condition of observing the law. The difference is therefore not categorical in the sense of a third kind of action; it is architectonic in the sense of a structure of priority. Selfishness can be innocent or trivial; evil is the adoption of a maxim-form that installs the conditionality of the law upon matter as matter. Where that conditionality is undertaken knowingly, the rational choice to sideline rationality is present, and evil is not reduced to mere weakness.

A fourth challenge appeals to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. If reason was instrumental to industrialized extermination, does not the lecture’s appeal to the actuality of the same structure as ground for hope fail, or worse, reproduce the very confidence that aided horror? The reply is careful. Hope is not optimism, nor is it a probabilistic assessment. Hope is a stance authorized by the structure of agency, not by projections of success. The lecture’s point is that where rationality can install matter as conditional for form, it can also—in principle—install form as law for matter. The historical record makes it less likely that the reinstallation will occur, but it does not alter the locus of possibility. If anything, the severity of evil purifies the concept of hope by removing any dependence on favorable trends. The lecture thus disengages hope from cheerfulness while refusing to sever it from the very tragedy that seems to doom it.

A fifth question asks whether evil has any special evidential privilege in showing the presence of rational form in the world; would not the beautiful, the sublime, or the good deed itself show the same? The lecturer concedes the point in part and then defends the stronger claim. Certainly the sublime and the beautiful exhibit relations between faculties that bespeak lawfulness; and exemplary actions present form enacted. But the phenomenon that evil presents is unique because it shows form as operative in the very structure of perversion. Evil is the good’s schema inverted. In this inversion, the presence of the schema is no longer an inference from harmonious cooperation or from success in legislation; it appears where cooperation breaks, where legislation is conditionally appropriated. Precisely because the phenomenon is a collapse, it secures a more stringent evidence: the structure is at work when it works against itself.

A sixth intervention reintroduces the specter of a timeless intelligible deed that fixes the agent once and for all, leaving nothing for hope to do except pray for a miracle. The lecture’s strategy here is to insist again on the difference of standpoints and to lean into the regressive method peculiar to Kant’s critiques. We infer freedom from the fact of the law; we infer formation from the presence of guilt; we infer the structure of the will from its pathological appropriations. These are regressions from effects to grounds, and they do not bind the agent to a single atemporal choice if our concern is the human being as a pragmatic subject. The anthropological register shows how character can be educed, stabilized, revised. It does not cancel the intelligible deed; it specifies the arena in which the intelligible can become effective in time. The lecture’s epigenetic figure is meant to carry exactly this burden: development without preformation, teleology without metaphysical determinism.

A seventh exchange draws an explicitly Hegelian parallel. If the claim that evil is the rational choice to sideline rationality belongs naturally to a logic of singularity where one’s own reasons are elevated to universality, does the lecture tacitly trade Kant for a Hegelian grammar? The lecturer’s answer is as concessive as it is guarded. The convergence is real in the narrow sense that an inversion of form and matter can be redescribed as the singular usurpation of the universal. Yet the lecture does not thereby absorb itself into a dialectic of ethical life; it remains Kantian in its anchoring of the distinction at the level of maxim-form and in its refusal to derive reconciliation from social totality. Where Hegel would teach the insufficiency of the ought by locating the good in institutions of recognition, the lecture speaks of institutionalization only analogically: as the way a state would subsume its policies under law. The redescription clarifies rather than displaces the paradigm: the same hylomorphic image holds at the level of structures, but the locus of agency remains categorical rather than historical in the strong sense.

At the center of these exchanges lies a difficulty the lecture does not evade: whether Kant can accommodate a positively described evil within the pure practical standpoint. The lecturer’s diagnosis is that the Religion imports the topic into the orbit of the earlier critiques but never fully resolves the tension. Evil appears as a deed whose origin is intelligible and forever beyond empirical observation; yet the very texts that articulate it then lean on anthropology and history to render it discussable as a human phenomenon. The lecture’s wager is to accept the tension and to make it productive. The conceptual work is done by the hylomorphic image, which can live on both sides: as the pure form of maxim-legislation and as the learning of a hierarchy among drives. At the pure level, evil’s positive description falters; at the anthropological level, its structural features can be anatomized with care. The argument about hope depends on this bivalency. The ground of hope cannot be pure, since evil cannot be actual there; it must be anthropological, where actuality can be predicated, and where the same form–matter relation already shapes our maxims, albeit perversely.

The lecture’s richest pages are those that track, with almost clinical patience, how the icon of form and matter migrates across domains and alters its sense with each migration while retaining an identity sufficient to carry the main claim. At the level of cognition, matter is the manifold, form the concept; subsumption produces objects. At the level of willing, matter is self-love or inclination, form the universal lawfulness of maxims; subsumption yields goodness. At the level of evil, the same structure is reversed; inclination becomes the condition under which the law is observed, and form is reduced to a mere instrument. The insistence that this is the same structure is crucial, because it blocks the temptation to explain evil by appeal to a foreign cause. Evil is endogenous to the site of freedom. It is what freedom can do to itself. For that very reason, the reversal can be reversed again without violence to the structure; no new power is required. What is required is the restoration of priority.

To secure the plausibility of this restoration, the lecture introduces an image of growth. The epigenetic metaphor undertakes to reconcile two demands that threaten to pull the work apart: that the will has a real ground in freedom that no empirical story can produce; and that an agent like us needs time, habit, education, institutions, and reflection to become able to will as duty requires. The organism supplies the model: an inner principle orders parts toward a mature form; the same principle may miscarry under hostile conditions; the process can stall, regress, or die. The image is not an argument, but it is the right form of evidence for the kind of claim the lecture wants. It allows the lecturer to say both that hope is warranted in the structure—the seed already contains the form—and that despair is understandable under history—the seed does not guarantee the tree. Evil, on this image, is a way a growing thing uses its formative power against itself in its early stages; the same power could later be used in accordance with its form. The anthropological horizon then reappears as the space where pedagogy, law, and institutional design can relieve the pressures that deform development without displacing the agent as the locus of responsibility.

The most delicate element in the whole construction is the status of actuality. If evil’s actuality grounds the possibility of the good, do we risk giving evil an ontological primacy it does not deserve? The lecture answers by precision in modality. Actuality in this context names neither metaphysical priority nor value. It names the fact that a structure that had been claimed in principle is in effect in experience. The modalities of the lectures are deliberately material rather than merely logical; possibility is the openness of a form to realization given the resources at hand; actuality is realization. The inference the lecture permits is narrow: where the structure is actualized in one direction, its principled actualizability is no longer in doubt. Whether it will be actualized in the other direction is a matter for hope, and hope’s warrant lies in the identity of the structure, not in the tendencies of history.

This difference between warrant and tendency also clarifies the role of pessimism and optimism in the lecture’s outer frame. When the speaker returns to the world’s violent conflicts and asks what sentiment ought to be cultivated, the counsel is neither sanguine nor resigned. The recommended sentiment is disciplined hope, anchored in the present actuality of form’s power to organize matter—inverted though it presently may be. The spectacle of coordinated cruelty does not undermine this anchoring; it displays the organizational capacity that hope needs to be rational. The point is severe. One is forbidden to console oneself by imagining that evil shows chaos; evil shows the success of order in the service of inclination. To that degree, evil is harder to refute but easier to use as evidence: the form-power is there.

The lecture’s rhetoric of play between matter and form merits special mention, because it avoids two errors at once. It does not romanticize evil as creativity, and it does not reduce evil to mere absence. Play is meant literally as compositional operation: the agent decides which element will condition which, and in doing so writes the score his action will follow. Because this composition is intelligible, it can be heard, criticized, and—crucially—recomposed. The exemplary line from the anthropology about an evil character who is nevertheless admired for strength of soul appears here as more than a curiosity. What is admired is not wickedness; it is the steadiness with which the agent holds together a structure of maxims. The admiration is a practical analogue of respect for law’s form, and it discloses again the reason why evil’s actuality has evidential value: the structure is present where the very features that the good requires—coherence, steadiness, priority—are enacted. The admiration is misplaced in content, but it is not unintelligible in form.

In the lecture’s final synthesis, the initial compact thesis appears again with new inflections. By overlapping the theoretical and practical via the hylomorphic schema, the work has generated a single image of rational agency that can bear both the explanatory burden of cognition and the normative burden of action. Within that image, evil is not external to reason’s use but is an internal deployment of its structure. Because hope seeks a material ground, it can appeal to evil’s actuality as confirmation that the right kind of power is at work, even if used wrongly. The anthropological register then gives hope its proper seat: among agents who can learn to reorder their maxims and to build institutions that stabilize that reordering. None of these moves requires downplaying tragedy, and none allows quietism. The lecture, anchored in Kant’s texts yet oriented toward the present, asks its hearers to exchange consolations for rigor: to take the very evidence that breeds despair and to read within it the presence of the only structure by which despair can be answered.

A closing clarification helps to fix the method. The lecture proceeds by carefully staged transpositions rather than by deductions. Its claims are warranted by homologies of form, by regressive inferences from phenomena to grounds, and by a disciplined use of anthropological and epigenetic images to stabilize talk of development without sacrificing freedom. The composition sequence—nature’s hylomorphism, freedom’s law, evil’s inversion, hope’s ground, epigenesis’s horizon—marks an ordered passage in which earlier parts become conditions for later parts and are finally displaced by them in function without loss of content. The opening analysis of cognition does not disappear; it becomes the template that reappears in practical terms. The categorical imperative, stated at the center, loses center stage as epigenesis and anthropology assume the role of making its form viable for finite beings. The discussion then displaces each element again by exposing its tensions: the pure standpoint shows evil’s conceptual instability; the anthropological standpoint rescues its description while risking moral dilution; the historical catastrophes threaten hope; the precise concept of hope reasserts its independence from odds. The work’s final posture is therefore constructively convoluted by design. It keeps the tensions in play to prevent the schema from hardening into slogans. If the good is possible because evil is actual, it is only because both disclose the same grammar of form and matter; and if we may hope for the predominance of the good, it is only because we are already the kinds of beings who can write maxims under law—even when we have used that pen to sign away the law’s priority.