by Robert Wicks
Thanks be to nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to own things and even to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural human capacities would remain sleeping, forever undeveloped. Humans want harmony; but nature knows better what is good for the species; it wills discord. Humans want to live comfortably and pleasantly; nature wills that they should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labour and hardship, in order to find way to extract themselves from them.
Kant refers here to ‘nature’, but he might have more directly referred to the divine mastermind of the natural world, for implicit in Kant’s qualified support of war is a traditional response to the problem of evil: in light of God’s assumed existence, evil is justified in reference to the greater good it produces in the wider scheme of things. A ‘character building’ response to evil appears as well in Kant’s above remarks, as he asserts that without hardships, our talents and moral character would stagnate.
Despite history’s violent and sorrowful road, Kant foresees an eventual end to war between nations, and he outlines a set of international regulations to promote and preserve a perpetually peaceful condition. This peaceful state of affairs is not a perfectly moral condition where lying, robbery, and other kinds of crimes that occur between individuals are absent. Perpetual peace is only a great first step that will remove one of the major causes of human suffering. After war between nations has become a thing of the past, society will need to develop morally at more specific and local levels.
Kant maintains that we can conceive of a perpetually peaceful world as built upon a set of independent republics. By ‘republic’, he intends a non-despotic, representative form of government where the legislative and the executive arms are managed by different people. These republics will form a league, and will respect a set of regulations that, for instance, guarantee hospitality to visiting members of foreign nations, abolish standing armies, prohibit the interference by one nation in the internal affairs of others, and prohibit the use of spies and assassins.
It may seem strange that Kant identifies perpetual peace with a league of independent republics. Given the style of philosophizing we have seen on his part, one would expect him immediately to propose a more intensely unified, one-world republic. After all, he formulates virtually all of his main doctrines in accord with the universalistic spirit of the Enlightenment, focusing almost exclusively upon unconditional constancies that apply equally to all human beings, doing his best to integrate them through a conception of reason as ‘system’. His theories of human knowledge, morality and beauty display this universalistic and systematic structure.
It is a matter of debate whether Kant’s political ideal is steadfastly a loose federation of independent republics or whether he also conceived of a one-world republic emerging in the longer run. From a theoretical standpoint, a one-world republic is more appropriate to Kant’s persistent philosophical emphasis upon reason, which when realized, achieves total systematicity. In contrast, a league of independent republics, free to organize themselves on their own, does not obviously constitute a world-system in the strict sense, although one could imagine a global organization modelled upon the system of the human body, where each nation is analogous to a vital organ. How in real life, the nations of the world would compose themselves to operate together in such an integrated, mutually dependent way, with each serving a separate, but essential, social function in the world organization, might be more difficult to achieve than a one-world republic.
Supporting the view that a one-world republic is Kant’s more distant political ideal is his complementary conception of the perfect moral community. In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), he characterizes this community as a God-governed ‘universal republic based on the laws of virtue’ (Book III, Part I, Section III). It is a ‘kingdom of grace’ or ‘city of God’ in the form of a universal Church to which everyone belongs. At the extremes of idealization, then, Kant presents us with two conceptions of a universal republic, one legally defined and one morally defined. Reason itself suggests their eventual integration.
When combined, these two conceptions of republic would bring the two aspects of his Metaphysics of Morals – the external, legal, and socially controlling doctrine of right and the moral, internal and essentially freedom-centred doctrine of virtue – into line with one another, effectively dissolving the coercive quality of the legal institutions. To appreciate this idea, imagine the difference in consciousness between following the Ten Commandments fearfully as a matter of authoritarian dictate, and following them wholeheartedly and freely as a reflection of one’s own moral substance.
Situated in the role of a benevolent dictator, Kant envisions God as the governor of the ideal moral community, since only God has the insight to understand perfectly how to coordinate legality with morality. The divine role here complements how God serves more generally as the coordinator between nature and morality to guarantee the possibility of the highest good, where happiness is justly distributed.
Kant’s theocratic approach to social organization, the real-world approximation of which Kant believes would call upon the religious community to govern – a community inspired and guided by the words in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’ (Book III, Part I, Section IV) – might not sit well with many readers. Its presence in his theory nonetheless displays the tendency towards the ideal of a one-world republic.
These considerations cast in a more pragmatic light Kant’s stated advocacy of a less integrated league of nations. He can be read as prescribing the immediately necessary conditions for world peace, as opposed to describing in a perpetually peaceful world the form of government that most seamlessly exemplifies his rationalistic and systematic ideals. A variety of governmental structures is consistent with Kant’s phrase, ‘world republic of nations’, and the social condition of perpetual peace. One of these is a relatively loose federation of states. Another is a more thoroughly integrated world republic.
Key idea: Perpetual peace
When Kant speaks of ‘perpetual peace’, he is not envisioning a perfectly peaceful, heavenly, and thoroughly moral social condition. He is speaking simply and more realistically of an earthly situation where nations never go to war. He believes that ending war will dramatically transform society for the better, despite how other moral difficulties will remain to be overcome.
Although Kant’s conception of reason projects us towards the ideal of a world republic in the form of a single world system, the vicious realities of present-day life render into a lofty ideal, even a loosely organized league of independent nations. As things stand, the many differences in languages and cultures upon which people’s personal identities are built, require respect. Hence we can understand Kant’s more realistic proposal of a league of independent republics. Since the very proposition of perpetual peace poses such a challenge to humanity, Kant’s temperate advocacy of a league of nations can be regarded as an effort to realize as expediently as possible, the next great step that human society must undertake.
Spotlight: One-world government
The idea of a one-world government traces back to Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483–1546), who, aware of the colonialist abuse of indigenous peoples in Mexico and South America, believed that the violence might end through a global institution committed to protecting people’s rights – a ‘republic of the entire world’, as he called it. Although De Vitoria and many others have conceived of the one-world government as republican in form, the concept of such a government is consistent with a totalitarian structure, as is evident from Nazi ideology. Such negative potentialities render the notion of a one-world government a foreboding and risky proposition for some, as doubts remain about the likelihood of achieving a genuine balance between social stability and personal freedom.
Kant reinforces his political philosophy with lectures and essays on topics in anthropology
and geography. Within his philosophy, ‘anthropology’ is the empirical study of the human being in its psychological and cultural context. ‘Geography’ is the study of the same with respect to the natural context. Both aim to understand realistically and historically, our capacities for moral development. This empirical angle was important to Kant, as he lectured on anthropology each year for almost 25 years, from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. He aimed to present a more down-to-earth and relatively accessible rendition of the human being based on factual evidence, complementing his more steadfast, universalistic doctrines.
Throughout this condensed study of Kant’s philosophy, we have as a rule, adopted a sympathetic treatment of his positions and arguments, without pressing too heavily upon any of its conspicuous shortcomings. To put some of these undermining aspects into perspective, we can divide Kant’s philosophy into two parts, namely, a more rationalistic and abstract segment and a more empirically oriented segment. The bulk of his philosophy and the segment which has been the most influential in the history of philosophy and human culture is the rationalistic, abstract part, where his project is to disclose universal structures that identically govern all human beings. We have seen these in his theory of knowledge, his moral theory and his aesthetics.
When Kant sets out to understand how well we have been doing historically in realizing our rational nature, a library of contingent empirical factors influences his thinking, many of which express the limited spirit of his times. These render his views on certain political, legal and domestic issues relatively less convincing than what we find in other parts of his philosophy. As a first example, consider how he asserts that ‘if a man and a woman have the will to enter on reciprocal enjoyment in connection with their sexual nature, then they must necessarily marry each other; and this necessity is in accordance with the juridical laws of pure reason’ (Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Right, Section 24, ‘The Natural Basis of Marriage’). Deciding whether or not to marry, however, as we all know, is a more complicated social matter than this rule would have us believe.
Some of Kant’s lectures and short essays on anthropological topics – his lectures on physical geography, for instance – contain similarly questionable propositions, often expressive of the culture in which he lived. His views on racial and ethnic groups are probably among the most falsity-filled. He states that Native Americans are completely resistant to education, that African people can be educated, but only to be slaves, that people from the Indian subcontinent can be educated, but not in the sciences, that those who live in warmer climates tend to be lazy, that people who live in temperate zones tend to be better looking and harder working, and that the white race definitely exhibits the highest perfection of humanity. Given the empirical nature of the assertions, he might have been speaking ‘to date’ (i.e., the late 1700s) with respect to each, but this is uncertain.
These positions do not best constitute a reason to dismiss or ignore Kant’s attempts to clothe his body of universalistic doctrine with some cultural content. They serve better as a warning shot over the bow for the reading of any theory. Like everyone, philosophers are significantly the products of their historical time period, which inevitably seeps into their outlook. Kant uses the analogy of trees that grow straight and upright when they are naturally set together within the forest without interference, suggesting that we can understand a perfectly rational social order as the upshot of similar idealized conditions. In actual forests and in the actual world, however, there is always some kind of interference.
In contrast to timeless truth, it stands analogously that historical conditions are typically laced with ignorance and oppression, working to stunt people’s growth and to contort their outlooks. It might be too forgiving, but we might regard Kant’s racism as an expression of the prevailing social ignorance in which he was immersed. Königsberg’s location as a bustling seaport provided Kant with plenty of travelogues from which he obtained his information. The information, though, issued from a mercantile world filled with despots where aggressive colonization and the enslavement of other human beings was an established way of life. The pity of it all is that whereas the principles of Kant’s moral theory are not racist, much of the information he absorbed about foreign cultures was less enlightened.
In refreshing contrast and clarity, and with a virtual step through the looking-glass, Kant was more intrigued by how propositions such as 2 + 2 = 4 are not historically conditioned. Perfectly reliable, predictable and universal in their behaviour, and setting the example for the moral theory he formulated, numbers transcend the varieties of culture and language. It is precisely here, inspired by the unchanging quality of mathematical, geometrical and logical structures, that Kant developed his most valuable contributions to philosophical thought, as he tried to be the common voice of all human beings.
With such rigorous and rigid ideals in mind, and after separating out from his consciousness, the crooked timber of his empirical constitution, he built a philosophical skyscraper out of straight and level materials, hopefully immune to historical change, and monumental for anyone who ventures to understand the nature of space, time, reason, morality and the world beyond. In this timeless achievement, he deserves our celebration.
Dig Deeper
James J. DiCenso, Kant, Religion and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Patrick R. Frierson, Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Golan Moshe Lahat, The Political Implications of Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: Rethinking Progress (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2009)
Allen D. Rosen, Kant’s Theory of Justice (Cornell University Press, 1996)
Study questions
1 What are some of the subjects Kant discusses in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals, entitled the Doctrine of Right?
2 How does Kant’s conception of enlightenment involve the need for courage?
3 Why does Kant believe that war and personal hardship can be beneficial?
4 What is the difference between a world that has achieved ‘perpetual peace’, as Kant understands the term, and a perfectly moral society?
5 According to Kant, through what form of governmental structure can we conceive of a perpetually peaceful world? What does he mean by the term ‘republic’?
6 How does Kant characterize the perfect moral community? How does it have a religious quality?
7 What kinds of dangers are inherent in the conception of a one-world government?
8 What are some of Kant’s anthropologically centred assertions about other races and ethnic groups?
9 What attraction did subjects such as mathematics, geometry and logic have for Kant?
10 In what ways do you think the contemporary historical situation in which you have been raised, has affected the beliefs that you presently have?
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Conclusion: Kant’s influence
Comparable in philosophical stature to Plato and Aristotle, Kant has made an indelible impression upon contemporary thought. In this chapter we will trace the influence of his claim that everything we know is conditioned unavoidably by our very nature as human beings. We will then consider the long-term impact of his claim that, as far as we can ever prove, rationality applies descriptively only to how ultimate reality appears to us, rather than to how it is in itself.
It is a testament to Kant’s stature as a world-historical thinker that his ideas have had a constructive impact upon some of the strongest intellectual currents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is true with respect to some of his individual, more circumscribed, hypotheses and arguments, as well as his philosophical outlook as a whole. For example, as one of the early advocates of the nebular hypothesis o
f star and planetary formation – the thought that stars and planets are the result of gravitationally coalesced clouds of extremely tiny particles – he helped open the doors to contemporary cosmology. As a theist who nonetheless criticized the traditional arguments for God’s existence, his ideas have become a mainstay within contemporary philosophy of religion. In aesthetics, with his formalistic theory of pure beauty, he inspired modernist theories of abstract art that appeared over a century later.
Even before his death in 1804, German Idealist philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were developing Kant’s theory of knowledge and its associated conception of self-consciousness. More so than Kant, and familiar to us from Chapter 8, they appreciated how the structure of self-consciousness – a structure which Kant described rather simply in his transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding as the ‘I think’ that can accompany any of our representations – harbours a fertile and paradoxical fusion of opposing components. Without Kant’s philosophy to initiate their reflections, German Idealism would never have developed the notion of a dialectical fusion of opposites, and without that dialectical principle, the world would have never seen the communal, progressive vision of society that Karl Marx subsequently formulated and which became so influential in later history and politics.
As we know, one of Kant’s central ideas is that all of our knowledge is affected by our very presence. Independently of our human contribution, both imaginative and limiting as it is, we can never know how the world is in itself. There have been many examples of this premier Kantian insight, some of which have appeared in the most unexpected places, such as theoretical physics. Suppose, for instance, that we want to observe something. If so, then it is necessary to shine some energy upon it, such as light waves. This works perfectly well with regular-sized objects, as our eyesight attests, but as the objects we wish to observe become smaller and smaller, there is a point at the subatomic level where the very energy that we shine upon the particles, upsets either their position or momentum. It then becomes impossible to observe any such particle as it is ‘in itself’, because the very act of observation disturbs the particle’s condition. Although it would be optimal to be able to do so, observing an object in a perfectly untouched condition is impossible, because the only way to observe it is somehow to touch it.