The Diabolical Vices
As according to Immanuel Kant, who is closely following J.J. Rousseau, in a nice (albeit longish) passage:
The predisposition to humanity can be brought under the general title of self-love which is physical and yet compares… that is to say, we judge ourselves happy or unhappy only by making comparison with others. …
This is originally a desire merely for equality, to allow no one superiority above oneself, bound up with a constant care lest others strive to obtain superiority; but from this arises gradually the unjustifiable craving to win for it for oneself over others. Upon this twin stem of jealousy and rivalry may be grafted the very great vices of secret and open animosity against all whom we look upon as not belonging to us…
[Such] vices … do not sprout from nature as their root; rather they are inclinations aroused in use by the anxious endeavors of others to attain a hated superiority over us…the vices which are grafted upon this inclination might be termed the vices of culture, the highest form of malignancy, as, for example, in envy, ingratitude, spitefulness, and the like … they can be called the diabolical vices.
The last bit is pretty clearly responding to Hobbes’s view that the suggested competitive motivations are natural. I’m not sure anyone counts as an asshole in Hobbes’s state of nature–at least not if the “war of all against all” indeed gives *everyone* an unlimited right of self-defense to all things. But maybe Hobbes must be wrong because you can clearly be an asshole in war, depending on how you wage it!
Kant does seem to have identified the asshole, especially in what he elsewhere calls “self-conceit.” Still, as I say in the book, I’m not sure he finally distinguishes between mere assholes and much worse characters such as the psychopath (see “Letter to an Asshole,” pp. 197-9, of Assholes)
