Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. In H. M. Reis, editor: Kant: The Political Writings. H. B. Nisbet translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

 

While cheerfully admitting that the only really perpetual peace is the peace of the grave, Kant nevertheless soldiers on, proposing an institutional structure for achieving perpetual peace among states. To what degree, if any, does his proposal require the doctrine of natural-evolutionary progress enunciated in his writings on history to make it plausible?

Kant propounds six “preliminary articles” to any such international agreement. First, “no conclusion of peace shall be considered valid as such if it was made with a secret reservation of the material for a future war.” Peace is not a mere truce. A genuine peace treaty “nullifies all existing reasons for a future war,” doing so with no “mental reservation.” This distinction may be seen in Islamic thought, which distinguishes the dar-es-Islam, the realm of peace, not only from the dar-es-harb, the realm of war, but from the dar-es-sulh, the realm of truce. “If, in accordance with ‘enlightened’ notions of political expediency”—prominently advocated by Machiavelli and his followers—we “believe that the true glory of a state consists of the constant increase of its power by any means whatsoever, the above judgment will certainly appear academic and pedantic.” Be that as it may, it is indispensable to the perpetuation of peace.

Second, “no independently existing state, whether it be large or small, may be acquired by another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift.” This was common practice in Europe, where monarchs and aristocrats acquired or shed territories without the consent of those they ruled. Kant demurs. A state is “not a possession,” a patrimony, but “a society of men, which no one other than itself can command or dispose of.” In other words, it is not a commodity but “a moral personality,” established by an “original contract” among its members; without that contract, “the rights of a people are unthinkable,” in real-world practice if not in theory. The same goes for the use of mercenaries, “troops of one state” hired by another “to fight an enemy who is not common to both.” Such mercenaries are being “used and misused as objects to be manipulated at will,” not as persons. Machiavelli deprecated the use of mercenaries as injurious to civic virtù. Kant deprecates their use for the injury it does to virtue, to life conducted in accordance with the categorical imperative.

Third, “standing armies (miles perpetuus) will gradually abolished altogether.” The existence of standing armies “spur on the states to outdo one another in arming unlimited numbers of soldiers. “Such armies must be paid; although they are not mercenaries hired by a foreign state, they are mercenaries hired by their own state to be used as “mere machines and instruments in the hands of someone else (the state),” in obvious violation of Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ always to treat men as ends, not as means. Kant does not deny the need for militias, whereby “citizens undertake voluntary military training from time to time in order to secure themselves and their fatherland against attacks from outsiders.” But mercenaries fight for money, and money changes everything, since “the power of money” is “probably the most reliable instrument of war.” 

Regarding money, “no national debt shall be contracted in connection with the eternal affairs of the state.” Not only is debt itself bad for debtor and creditor alike, but “a credit system, if used by the powers as an instrument of aggression against one another, shows the power of money in its most dangerous form,” making it easy to wage war. “Coupled with the warlike inclination of those in power (which seems to be an integral feature of human nature),” war debt presents “a great obstacle in the way of perpetual peace.” Indeed, “other states are thus justified in allying themselves against such a state and its pretensions.” Writing in 1795, Kant has Great Britain specifically in mind. With its well-organized banking system, its centerpiece being financial credit, Great Britain poses a threat to the peace of continental Europe.

Fifth, “no state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state,” “for what could justify such interference?” “A bad example is no injury.” This article integrates the principle of the Peace of Westphalia, by then a century and a half old, into Kant’s proposal. He stipulates an exception to this principle: an alliance with one faction in a foreign state after a civil war that has resulted in the dissolution of that state into two or more sovereign states. Such an alliance during the civil war itself is forbidden, however. This article follows from the principle that states should be independent, ‘autonomous’—giving laws to themselves and to themselves only. This again comports with Kant’s categorical imperative, amounting to a political application of that moral law.

Finally, “no state at war with another shall permit such acts of hostility as would make mutual confidence impossible during a future time of peace.” Examples include assassination, breach of agreements, and “the instigation of treason within the enemy state.” War is war, but without some modicum of trust between the warring parties their war will become “a war of extermination.” Such a war would indeed result in the peace of the grave, a “perpetual peace only on the vast graveyard of the human race.” As a ” regrettable expedient for asserting one’s rights within a state of nature, where no court of justice is available to judge with legal authority” the merits of the grievances on either side, a declaration of war cannot be a matter of punishment, since “no relationship of superior to inferior,” of judge to accused, pertains among them. Acts of hostility that might well be “carried over into peacetime” contradict peace itself, make any treaty into a truce.

Kant distinguishes the preliminary articles that must be followed immediately from those that can be acknowledged as eventual. The article prohibiting interference in a foreign regime and the two articles that maintain the distinction between peace and truce must be observed strictly and immediately. The article denying the right to exchange territories ‘above the heads’ of the people can be fulfilled more gradually, as can the prohibition of standing armies and war debts. Although these “are not exceptions to the rule of justice,” they do “allow some subjective latitude according to the circumstances in which they are applied.” Categorical imperative or not, Kant does admit the need for prudence in politics.

Kant concurs with Hobbes’s claim that “a state of peace of men living together is not the same as the state of nature, which is rather a state of war.” As with men in the state of nature coming together to form a social contract with one another, which eliminates the state of war insofar as they conform to that contract in the future, so with states in the state of nature that now exists among them. A “state of peace must be formally instituted” amongst them, too. In both cases, “a mere state of nature robs me of any such security” that I seek for my person or property, “injur[ing] me by virtue of this very state in which [another person] coexists with me.” This being so, “I can require him either to enter into a common lawful state with me or to move away from my vicinity” as a moral duty respecting my natural rights. Legal constitutions come in three types: civil constitutions, “based on the civil right of individuals within a nation”; international constitutions, “based on the international right of states in their relationships with one another”—the ius gentium of writers on the law of nations; and “a constitution based on cosmopolitan right, in so far as individuals and states, coexisting in an external relationship of mutual influences, may be regarded as citizens of a universal state of mankind.” This latter constitution, which Kant calls the ius cosmopoliticum, would entail a ‘global’ system of institutions and laws—that is, a real system, not simply the agglomeration of international treaties and practices which compose the ius gentium.  The cosmopolitan constitution would more nearly resemble the social-contract regimes established in civil societies. 

Such a constitution will require three “definitive” (as distinguished from “preliminary”) articles. The first stipulates that “the civil constitution of every State shall be republican, guaranteeing freedom for all members as men, that is, as human beings, dependence of every member upon one set of laws, as subjects, and legal equality for all, as citizens. “Rightful” or “external” freedom “cannot, as is usually thought, be defined as a warrant to do whatever one wishes unless it means doing injustice to others,” a definition Kant considers tautological—perhaps more precisely, the definition leaves justice and injustice undefined. Rightful freedom rightly understood is “a warrant to obey no external laws except those to which I have been able to give my own consent.” Similarly, rightful legal equality means that “no one can put anyone else under a legal obligation without submitting simultaneously to a law which requires that he can himself be put under the same kind of obligation by the other persons.” Both of these are “innate and inalienable rights, the necessary property of mankind.” As such, they exist regardless of what may be said about divine laws. “I am not under any obligation even to divine laws (which I can recognize by reason alone), except in so far as I have been able to give my own consent to them; for I can form a conception of the divine will only in terms of the law of freedom of my own reason.” That law can only be, for Kant, his categorical imperative. This stricture does not apply to the principle of equality, however since the relationship of man to God is radically unequal: “God is the only being for whom the concept of duty ceases to be valid,” having no superior to which He needs to report. Politically, the republican regime follows from these principles of right. Kant regards republicanism as the only constitution which can flow from an original social contract, the only one that “springs from the pure concept of right.”

Here as everywhere in his writings, Kant redefines natural right, which in the modern philosophers included equality as much as freedom, strictly in terms of reason, which (he claims) issues in the categorical imperative. The problem is that the categorical imperative itself is self-contradictory, not rational, as Hegel was soon to demonstrate. The categorical imperative claims that no moral choice can be valid unless the principle or maxim animating it can be universalizable. ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ for example, is a universalizable maxim. Unfortunately, ‘Thou shalt steal’ is also a universalizable maxim—one instantiated, for example, by cadets at West Point who act under an imperative to steal one another’s caps. Two contradictory maxims are equally universalizable, unless one smuggles in a prior right to property. The same goes for ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and all similar moral laws; their universalizability depends upon the divine law or right, the natural law or right, or a historical law or right—the latter being Hegel’s choice and the choice of ‘historicists’ generally. The categorical imperative is an unstable halfway house between natural and historical right. Perhaps for rhetorical purposes, Kant often maintains the term, ‘natural rights,’ even as he has altered its meaning. 

Kant argues that republican regimes are likely to be peaceful because few among the sovereign people will call down upon themselves the miseries of war. He knows that ancient democracies were decidedly warlike, but republicanism isn’t democracy. Although republics are democratic with respect to sovereignty, with the many or all ruling, not the one or the few, republics separate executive from legislative power. In despotisms, the executive and legislative powers combine, “reflect[ing] the will of the people only in so far as the ruler treats the will of the people as his own private will.” In democracies, the people are the despots because they both vote for the laws and policies of the state and then carry them out. But “one and the same person cannot at the same time be both the legislator and the executor of his own will.” Therefore, “if the mode of government is to accord with the concept of right, it must be based on the representative system,” without which “despotism and violence will result, no matter what kind of constitution is in force.” That is why the ancient democracies “inevitably ended in despotism.”

In this, Kant departs from Montesquieu, the philosopher who originated the claim that republics do not make war upon each other, although they may very well make war against other regimes, which are often inclined to attack them. Montesquieu made this argument concerning not republics simply but commercial republics, which add the incentive to avoid disruptions in trade to the popular aversion to risking one’s own life. This is in keeping with Kant’s preference for pure motives in morals and consequently in politics. While recognizing that impure motives usually prevail, he will not admit them in principle. Montesquieu, less firmly opposed to a sort of tamed Machiavellianism, does not go so far. [1]

Kant’s second definitive article states that “the right of nations shall be based on the federation of free States.” Given the dangerous state of nature in which all sovereign states now live in relation to one another, a condition of “standing offense to one another by the very fact that they are neighbors,” “each nation, for the sake of its own security, can and ought to demand of the others that they should enter along with it into a constitution, similar to the civil one, within which the rights of each could be secured,” a “federation of peoples.” Kant hastens to write that this “would not be the same thing as an international state.” An international state contradicts the right of nations because “every state involves a relationship between a superior (the legislator) and an inferior (the people obeying the laws), whereas a number of nations forming one state would constitute a single nation.” 

Today, Kant declares, the European states are worse than the barbarians of America who practice cannibalism. Modern European states use the peoples they defeat in war, violating the categorical imperative to treat all human beings as ends, not means, and “thereby augmenting their stock of instruments for conducting even more extensive wars” instead of merely eating their victims. This notwithstanding, European states do give verbal homage to international right, indicating that such right does exist, even if “dormant.” Natural right cannot extend the right of civil peace from individuals to states because states already have “a lawful internal constitution” whereas no such constitution prevails among states, which are not natural entities, in their external relations. Reason, however, “as the highest legislative moral,” as distinguished from natural, “power, absolutely condemns war as a test of rights and sets up peace as an immediate duty.” The federation Kant envisions “would seek to end all wars for good.”

It can do so because it aims not to acquire statelike power, instead aiming “to preserve the freedom of each state in itself, along with that of the other confederated states.” This is the Peace of Westphalia plus a republican regime within each federation member. A worldwide federation of republican states “is practicable and has objective reality” because “if by good fortune one powerful and enlightened nation can form a republic (which is by its nature inclined to seek perpetual peace), this will provide a focal point for federal association among other states.” This “free federation” of states would thus serve as a “substitute for the union of civil society.” In 1795, the United States was lacked the power needed to function this way, but a century later, Woodrow Wilson would be attending. [2]

Kant again rejects the notion of world government as utopian, at least now. He has no objection to one in principle. Indeed, “the only rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare” is to act like “individual men” in the state of nature, “renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws, and thus form an international state which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth.” But “this is not the will of the nations, according to their present conception of international right,” and so the worldwide federation will remain the only practicable solution to the problem of war.

Turning to the third and final definitive principle based upon “cosmopolitan” right,” this right “shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality,” that is, the right of a foreigner “not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory.” “No one originally has any greater right than anyone else to occupy any particular portion of the earth,” a condition of equality that changes only with the institution of civil society. European states now claim the right to invade one another while denying the right of foreign citizens merely to visit; they further claim the right to imperial conquest of “America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape,” places “looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories “because Europeans “counted as nothing” their “native inhabitants.” “This led to oppression of the natives, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils which can afflict the human race, “the work pf powers who make endless ado about their piety.”

Kant foresees a better condition. The very acts of violence seen in imperial conquest shows that “the peoples of the earth” have “entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.” Thus the idea of cosmopolitan right proves “a necessary complement to the unwritten and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.” If so, this would confirm Kant’s claim that nature in its evolution brings human beings to morality without their intending any such thing. ‘Historicized’ nature replaces divine providence.

Thus “perpetual peace is guaranteed by no less an authority than the great artist Nature herself,” its “mechanical process” exhibiting “the purposive plan of producing concord among men, even against their will and indeed by their very discord.” Call it fate, call it providence, this plan, “far-fetched in theory,” nonetheless “possess[es] dogmatic validity and has a very real foundation in practice”—perhaps the Enlightenment equivalent of Socrates’ ‘noble lie,’ but with a sounder foundation in fact. Better to call it nature, out of “modesty.”

Nature has proceeded toward peace by a series of steps: humans are able to live in many regions of the earth; nature drove them into those regions by means of war; nature then compelled them to “enter into more or less legal relationships” to secure property (agriculture being more civilized than hunting); with property secure, trading became possible, establishing peaceful relations, often, between the nations. Thus Kant brings in Montesquieu’s commercial relations, not so much in civil societies as in international politics. More, the war that drives nations apart, initially, teaches them to love honor; risking one’s life transcends “selfish motives,” at least insofar as these are material. Since “wars are often started merely to display this quality…war itself is invested with an inherent dignity.” 

War “help[s] to promote” man’s “moral purpose” in his political, international, and cosmopolitan rights. Politically, war forces nations to organize themselves internally, so that they can become battle-ready. The “universal and rational human will,” “admirable in itself but so impotent in practice,” thereby begins to instantiate itself. This is where Kant delivers his famous remark, “As hard as it may sound, the problem of setting up a state may be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding).” The institutional aspects of republican regimes can be designed by discovering “how the mechanism of nature can be applied to men in such a manner that the antagonism of their hostile attitudes will make them compel one another to submit to coercive laws, thereby producing a condition of peace within which the laws can be enforced.” 

Internationally, Kant continues to prefer a federation of republics to the other candidate for perpetual peace, a universal monarchy which amalgamates the nations “under a single power.” Universal monarchy—he may be thinking of the pretensions of the Holy Roman Empire—overbears consent and laws freely consented to, “as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the seeds of goodness, will, finally lapse into anarchy.” “Nature wills it otherwise,” having separated the nations into linguistic and religious groups initially hostile to one another. “But as culture grows and men gradually move towards greater agreement over their principles, they lead to mutual understanding and peace,” a peace guaranteed precisely by “an equilibrium of forces and a most vigorous rivalry” among the nations.

Cosmopolitan right, finally, sees nature unite with commerce. Commerce “cannot exist side by side with war,” which the bankers upon which commerce depends will seek to prevent it. Although this might lead to the notion of a cabal of international bankers, so familiar to this day, Kant has another thing in mind. There will be a “secret article of a perpetual peace”: “The maxims of the philosophers on the conditions under which public peace is possible shall be consulted by states which are armed for war.” Kant concedes that “it is not to be expected that kings will philosophize or that philosophers will become kings,” as per the well-known suggestion of Plato’s Socrates. “Nor is it to be desired, however, since the possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgment of reason.” “Kings or sovereign peoples (i. e. those governing themselves by egalitarian laws) should not, however, force the class of philosophers to disappear or to remain silent, but should allow them to speak publicly,” so that “light may be thrown on their affairs.” Enlightenment, indeed: Kant differs in this respect from Socrates, who does not so much suppose that politics will corrupt philosophers as take up too much of their time. For Kant, morality consists essentially of rules, rules based upon the master-rule, the categorical imperative. For Socrates, the ‘transcendental’ realm of the Ideas causes philosophers to become disoriented, not corrupted, when they return to ‘the Cave’ of political life. The remedy for this disorientation is not withdrawal from politics because the Ideas are not rules. They are guides, at best to be approximated by the prudential judgment of citizens. A political philosopher does not ‘enlighten’ his fellow citizens so much as he engages them in dialogue, with due caution and a certain irony. In his role as prophetic lawgiver, Kant’s philosophers are “by nature incapable of forming seditious factions or clubs,” and “cannot incur suspicion of disseminating propaganda.” To which one can only reply, ‘Ahem,’ a term not to be confused with ‘Amen.’ Perhaps Kant himself is indulging in a bit of Socratic irony?

To his credit, Kant addresses the need for prudential reasoning in his Appendices, “On the Disagreement Between Morals and Politics in Relation to Perpetual Peace” and “On the Agreement Between Politics and Morality According to the Transcendental Concept of Public Right.” Be wise as serpents, the political man says, to which the moralist adds, be as harmless as doves. Jesus evidently sees no necessary contradiction between these (as Kant would put it) maxims, likely because He regards prudence to be as much a virtue as harmlessness. Kant, too, wants to reconcile them, on somewhat different grounds. Since prudential reasoning “is not sufficiently enlightened to discover the whole series of predetermining causes which would allow it to predict accurately the happy or unhappy consequence of human activities as dictated by the mechanism of nature,” at best it can “tell us what our duty is.” That is, it can lay down the law of conduct for ourselves. To this, “the man of practice” will oppose a theoretical judgment, that “human nature” ensures that “man will never want to do what is necessary in order to attain the goal of eternal peace.” Kant has already supplied his answer, that a sound constitution, backed by force, can rule a race of devils whom the state can overpower. Civil laws give the rule of force “a veneer of morality but in a salutary way, by making it “much easier for the moral capacities of men to develop into an immediate respect for the right” once each person “believes of himself that he would by all means maintain the sanctity of the concept of right and obey it faithfully, if only he could be certain that all the others would do likewise.” A rightly ordered government, a republic, “guarantees this for him,” taking “a great step towards morality,” that is, towards “a state in where the concept of duty is recognized for its own sake, irrespective of any possible gain in return.”

Despite all this, there can be such a person as a “moral politician,” as distinguished from a “political moralist”—one who “fashions his morality to suit his own advantage as a statesman.” The moral politician “make[s] it a principle that, if any faults which could not have been prevented are discovered in the political constitution or in the relation between states, it is a duty, especially for heads of state, to see to it that they are corrected as soon as possible,” that “political institutions are made to conform to natural right, which stands before us as a model in the idea of practical reason”—rule-based, however, as Kant has insisted. Having seen the results of the French Revolution, Kant distances himself from any suggestion that morality entitles us “to destroy any of the existing bonds of political or cosmopolitan union before a better constitution has been prepared to take their place.” He is rather concerned with the ‘Machiavellian’ politicians “who do not know man and his potentialities,” a convenient ignorance that enables them to worship “the god of success,” to deflect blame for failure on others, and to pursue the policy of divide and rule. “Such theories are particularly damaging, because they may themselves produce the very evil they predict” by “put[ting man into the same class as other living machines,” denying human freedom.

Kant in no way abandons the categorical imperative, demanding that “act[ing] in such a way that you can wish your maxim to become a universal law,” regardless of “what the end in view may be” remains an “absolute necessity.” Following his own model of the philosophic enlightener, Kant offers a revised Biblical maxim: “Seek ye first the kingdom of pure practical reason,” not the Kingdom of God, “and its righteousness, and your object (the blessing of perpetual peace) will be added unto you.” While he’s at it, he proposes a novel translation of the maxim, fiat iusticia, pereat mundus” as “let justice reign, even if all the rogues in the world must perish.” There’s a hint of Jacobinism in our Immanuel, after all. It is possible that he believes that the world will not perish if justice is done because the world cannot perish; as we’ve seen, he claims that nature is ‘providential,’ if by accident. He wisely adds that “the true courage of virtue…does not consist, in the present case, in resolutely standing up to the evils and sacrifices which must be encountered, as in facing the evil principle within ourselves and overcoming its wiles.” The self-righteousness of a Robespierre really is best avoided. In the end, he denies that peoples have the right to revolution, the right to overthrow “a so-called tyrant.” That is because irresistible supreme power is necessary in order to be a true head of state and any sudden collapse of state power would lead (France-like) to anarchy followed by worse tyranny, Jacobin guillotines followed by Napoleon.

With regard to international right, Kant supposes that if one member refused his obligations, others would desert him, thus defeating his own purpose. It suffices to remark that Hitler and others have disproved this claim to the extent that they can overbear the other federation members. Nor may weaker states strike pre-emptively and remain faithful to the categorical imperative; “if a state were to let it be known that it affirmed this maxim” of pre-emption, “it would merely bring about more surely and more quickly the very evil it feared,” given a greater power’s capacity to play divide-and-conquer against weaker rivals. That is, the maxim of pre-emption is neither universalizable nor practicable. However, it has proved practicable under certain circumstances, notably the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

More generally, while it is not true that “all maxims which can be made public are therefore also just,” since a great power could announce an evil intention without worry of serious reprisal, it is true that “all maxims which require publicity if they are not to fail in their purpose can be reconciled both with right and with politics.” Such maxims require consent, conformity “to the universal aim of the public,” happiness; further, because only within [public right] is it possible to unite the ends of everyone.” The second consideration assures that the maxim conforms to the categorical imperative.

At the end of his book, Kant acknowledges that for perpetual peace not to be “just an empty idea” there will need to be “an infinite process of gradual approximation” to it. That is, the ‘historicized’ nature he propounds must take its course.

 

Note

1. See Harvey C. Mansfield: Taming the Prince. New York: The Free Press, 1989.
2. See William Galston: Kant and the Problem of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, pp. 26-27.

H. S. Reis, editor: Kant: Political Writings. H. B. Nisbet translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 

Immanuel Kant: “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”

_____. “The Contest of Faculties: A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?'”

_____. “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History.”

 

By ‘historicism’ I do not mean the scholarly practice of ‘putting things in their historical context.’ I mean the philosophic doctrine that defines ‘history’ not as a literary genre, an inquiry into the course of events, but as the course of events itself, a doctrine that further derives the principles of moral and political right from that course of events (rather than from God or nature, for example). The most comprehensive forms of historicism claim that the ‘history,’ so defined, decisively influences human knowledge and beliefs, that these are ‘relative to the time’ in which a given thought or belief arose and have no necessary validity in some other ‘time’ or epoch. Whereas previous moral and political philosophy had distinguished theory from practice partly by taking theory to provide an account of permanent things—ideas, natural laws—and by taking practical wisdom or prudence to address changing circumstances (‘history’ as latterly defined), historicism made theory, too, relative to circumstances.

By this definition, G. W. F. Hegel unquestionably qualifies as a historicist. Hegel refutes the central idea of Kantian moral thought, the ‘categorical imperative,’ then proposes his own moral system, founded upon the dialectical permutations of ‘the Absolute Spirit,’ which unfolds in a variety of forms over the course of time. For Hegel, ‘history’ is this process of unfolding. Kant himself wrote extensively about history, but is he a historicist? His moral philosophy suggests not, as the categorical imperative seems timeless, held by him to be true in any age, even if he is its discoverer. How does Kant understand history?

He titles his first major essay on the subject Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, published in 1784. Here, “history” means what it had meant traditionally—a narrative of, written after an inquiry into, the course of events. He argues that the manifestations of the human will in the phenomenal world are “determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event.” History offers an account of these phenomena, “allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions,” a “steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original capacities,” a “course intended by nature” whereby individuals and nations are “un consciously promoting an end which, even if they knew what it was, would scarcely arouse their interest.” In writing a universal history, a history of the human species, a philosopher (if he is not a misanthrope) will try “to discover a purpose of nature behind this senseless course of human events.” Philosophy remains, as it has always been, an inquiry into nature. Nature remains teleological, as Aristotle (for example) thinks, but for Kant the teleology may consist not only of nature’s manifestation in individual members of a species, a principle of motion and growth seen in each one, but rather as an overall evolution (to deploy a word Kant does not use) of the species itself. Previous ‘universal histories’ (Bossuet’s being a distinguished example) find God’s providence behind the course of events. Not so, for Kant

Kant sets down nine propositions regarding his “idea” for such a history. The first is Aristotelian: “All the natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end.” This is indeed “the teleological theory of nature.” “If we abandon this basic principle, we are faced not with a law-governed nature, but with an aimless, random process, and the dismal reign of chance replaces the guiding principle of reason.” Teleology classifies the end or purpose of a creature as one of its ’causes,’ its ‘reason for being’ in the sense of its aim. Its telos is rational both in the sense that it ‘makes sense,’ given the material, formal, and ‘efficient’ or triggering causes for its existence and also in the sense that it is rationally discernible. Pure randomness cannot be rationally understood. In a world of pure randomness, rational thought itself would be impossible or, if it were the only exception to the cosmic randomness, it could not understand what it was trying to understand; it could find no ‘rhyme or reason’ to the rest of reality.

Second, “In man (as the only rational creature on earth), those natural capacities which are directed toward the use of his reason are such that they could be fully developed only in the species but not in the individual.” Here Kant departs from Aristotle, who might well concede that no one individual, not even a philosopher, has fully developed his rational capacities, but never suggests that the human species has any such capacity. Kant evidently has in mind something along the lines of what Edmund Burke calls tradition. Reason “requires trial, practice and instruction to enable it to progress gradually from one stage of insight to the next.” Although “every individual man would have to live for a vast length of time if he were to learn how to make complete use of all his natural capacity,” and “it will require a long, perhaps incalculable series of generations, each passing on its enlightenment to the next, before the germs implanted by nature in our species can be developed to that degree which corresponds to nature’s original intentions,” this process has occurred and will continue to occur, “or else [man’s] natural capacities would necessarily appear by and large to be purposeless and wasted.” What Aristotle understands to be the practical wisdom of individuals, organized into political communities or ‘cities,’ Kant understands to be a much grander, as it were collective process, albeit just as much a reflection of human nature. Kant offers no proof of this claim, contenting himself with deploring the alternative possibility.

Third, “nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should not partake of any other happiness or perfection than that which he has procured for himself without instinct and by his own reason.” That is, although human beings by nature seek the “happiness or perfection” of their nature, they do so freely, unmechanically; Kant numbers among the ‘philosophers of freedom.’ “Nature gave man reason, and freedom of will is based upon reason.” Moreover, “man was not meant to be guided by instinct or equipped and instructed by innate knowledge; on the contrary, he was meant to produce everything out of himself.” Physically weak, the human being has “neither the bull’s horns, the lion’s claws, nor the dog’s teeth, but only his hands.” His greatest natural power to produce what he wants inheres in “his insight and circumspection and the goodness of his will.” In its physical poverty, human nature produces what it needs for survival and pleasure by its theoretical and practical insight, joined to the moral character of a good will. “It seems as if nature had intended that man, once he had finally worked his way up from the uttermost barbarism to the highest degree of skill, to inner perfection in his manner of thought and thence (as far as is possible on earth) to happiness, should be able to take for himself the entire credit for doing so and have only himself to thank for it.” In this, “it seems that nature has worked more with a view to man’s rational self-esteem than to his mere well-being.” The source of man’s rational pride (sharply contrasting with the Biblical humility before a providential God) derives from this naturally governed course of events. “Mortal as individuals but immortal as a species,” this “class of rational beings…was still meant to develop its capacities fully.” Whereas Burkean traditionalism enfolds practical reasoning based upon experience across generations, Kantian naturalism enfolds both theoretical and practical reasoning, along with the refinement of the human will.

Fourth, “the means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order.” Here, Kant brings in a touch of Hobbes, but for un-Hobbesian moral and political purposes. Human nature is neither mutually antagonistic, as in Hobbes, nor primarily social and political, as in Aristotle, but something in-between, a thing of “unsocial sociability.” Kant refers to humans’ “tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up,” a “propensity” that is “obviously rooted in human nature,” which inclines both toward social life and ‘individualism’ or the individual’s tendency “to isolate himself” and more, “the unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas,” a characteristic that leads to “resistance all around.” “It is this very resistance which awakens all man’s powers and induces him to overcome his tendency to laziness.” The human individual seeks honor, power, property “among his fellows, whom he cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave.” Were this not so, human life would be Arcadian—pastoral, peaceful, self-sufficient yet loving, a long afternoon of undogmatic slumber. It would also be non-rational, never in need of thought. “Nature should thus be thanked for fostering social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for possession or even power,” since “without these desires, all man’s excellent natural capacities would never be roused to develop.” These “natural impulses” are not sinful, as the Book of Genesis teaches, not the work of “the hand of a malicious spirit who had meddled in the creator’s glorious work or spoiled it out of envy,” but the source not merely of Machiavellian virtù but of virtue tout court, virtue as understood by the noble non-Machiavellians, virtue both intellectual and moral. 

Fifth, and centrally, “the greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.” The political problem is the greatest, the central, problem. If “the highest purpose of nature,” the “development of all natural capacities,” can “be fulfilled for mankind only in society” but by “his own efforts” within that society, then the good society must give scope to “a continual antagonism of its members, but also,” and crucially, within “the most precise specification and preservation of the limits of this freedom in order that it can co-exist with the freedom of others.” That means “freedom under external laws” backed “to the greatest possible extent with irresistible force” under “a perfectly just civil constitution.” This “most stringent of all forms of necessity” must be “imposed by men upon themselves.” By this means, men freely guard their freedom by setting the terms of their coercion. “Right” means “straight.” Even as “trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow beautiful and straight,” so “all the culture and art which adorn mankind and the finest social order man creates are fruits of his unsociability.” The ‘enlightenment’ of Man parallels the ‘enlightenment’ of trees; both grow straighter and taller as they seek the light. Human nature compels itself “to discipline itself, and thus, by enforced art, to develop completely the seeds which nature implanted.” Unlike historicists, who associate historical progress with the conquest of nature, Kant associates progress with nature itself.

Sixth, the problem of attaining a just civil society “is both the most difficult and the last to be solved by the human race.” Since man is an animal who “certainly abuses his freedom,” he is “an animal who needs a master,” one “misled by his self-seeking animal inclinations into exempting himself from the law where he can.” Accordingly, he “requires a master, to break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will under which everyone can be free,” as Rousseau had urged in his famous mot. Since man can have no master on earth other than another man, and “this man will also be an animal who needs a master,” “nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of.” Further, only “great experience” can bring man even to conceive of a sound political constitution, which is why this problem is not only the most difficult but also the last to be solved. Human beings may grow straighter and taller, over time, but they will remain far from perfectly straight or very tall.

While the sixth proposition lines up with the trends of modern political philosophy, the seventh represents a departure not only from the ‘moderns’ but from the ‘ancients.’ “The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved.” No previous political thinker of any consequence had made this claim; all had centered politics on the question of the regime, and many had scanted the question of ‘international relations’ almost entirely. Kant’s seventh proposition shows why he concerns himself with “universal” or ‘world’ history. 

“The same unsociability which forced men” into civil societies “gives rise in turn to a situation whereby each commonwealth, in its external relations…is in a position of unrestricted freedom.” The resulting “wars, tense and unremitting military preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace—these are the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but finally, after many devastations, upheavals and complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the  step which reason would have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning a lawless state of savagery and entering a federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgment, but solely from this great federation, from a united power and the law-governed decisions of a united will.” Kant judges this “the inevitable outcome of the distress in which men involve one another,” suggesting that he is a fatalist with regard to the course of events—basing this fatalism, however, not finally upon the concatenation of events themselves but upon the nature of the beings who concatenate. “Finally, partly by an optimal internal arrangement of the civil constitution, and partly by common external agreement and legislation, a state of affairs is created which, like a civil commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.” Two interlocking master-machines composed of laws, one internal to each regime, one shared by each, externally, will keep the peace by moderating the unsociable aspects of human unsocial sociability.

Kant recognizes that some will find this optimistic vision too good to be true. He lists three possibilities for the human species: that states are like atoms, colliding randomly but finally falling into a sustainable formation; that nature develops man’s natural capacities by a regular, rationally discernible process; or that no order will result, and the human species will fall into “a hell of evils.” “These three possibilities boil down to the question of whether it is rational to assume that the order of nature is purposive in its parts but purposeless as a whole.” Kant finds this assumption irrational. International anarchy and its attendant evils “compel our species to discover a law of equilibrium to regulate the essentially healthy hostility which prevails among the states and is produced by their freedom,” a law beyond the unstable ‘balance of power,’ instituting “a system of united power, hence a cosmopolitan system of general political security.” While this international system should not be “completely free from danger, lest human energies should lapse into inactivity,” it does need “a principle of equality governing the actions and counter-actions of these energies, lest they should destroy one another.” In a sense, this amounts to the discovery of a political equivalent to the centerpiece of Kant’s moral philosophy, the categorical imperative, whereby the maxim of one’s action must be universalizable if it is to be acknowledged to be moral.

Eighth, “the history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an internally—and for this purpose also externally—perfect political constitution as the only possible state within which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely.” This is an atheistic millenarianism, one of the earliest of a series of such, including the Hegelian and Marxist versions of ‘the end of History.’ “Philosophy too can have its chiliastic expectations,” expectations that “can be hastened, if only indirectly, by a knowledge of the idea they are based on”—again, an anticipation of the ‘historical consciousness’ that takes an indispensable role in the historicist doctrines to come. “It appears that we might by our own rational projects accelerate the coming of this period which will be so welcome to our descendants.”

Kant’s confidence in the priority of external relations among states to their internal regimes evidently derives from the course of European events whereby modern states prevailed over feudal communities. “The mutual relationships between states are already so sophisticated that none of them can neglect its internal culture without losing power and influence in relation to the others.” Initially, this meant that once one European monarch had imposed the centralized, regularized features of modern statism upon his political community, the other monarchs quickly needed to imitate him. The modern state simply raises revenues and armies more efficiently than communities organized by feudal institutions do. Feudalism requires the monarch to win the consent of the aristocrats for any common venture; modern states can enforce the edicts of monarchs (or those of any other regime) far more surely and rapidly. Once the modern state was established, other necessities of “internal culture” became apparent: the civil freedom necessary for the commercial dynamism that inter-state competition demands; the religious freedom that prevents states from the ruination caused by intractable civil wars based upon religious disputes; and education in a common language and literature that promote internal cohesion, along with an education in the modern sciences that master nature for the relief of man’s estate by fostering technological advancement. In a word, modern states need the Enlightenment. 

All of this conduces to more peaceful international dealings. Given modern technology and the overall power of modern states, war “becomes “a very dubious risk to take,” given the uncertainty of its immediate outcome and its effect on the national debt, win or lose. Revenues are further diminished by interruption of international trade. For these reasons, “a feeling is beginning to stir” among all modern states that each one “has an interest in maintaining the whole,” opening the real possibility of “a universal cosmopolitan existence” in the future.

This leads to the ninth and final proposition, that “a philosophical attempt to work out a universal history of the world in accordance with a plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind, must be regarded as possible and even as capable of furthering the purpose of nature itself,” even if “we are too short-sighted to perceive the hidden mechanism of nature’s scheme.” Evidence of this purpose may be seen not in the Bible but first in Greek history, as ‘Classical’ Greece emerged from the Archaic period, the Archaic period from the ‘Iron Age’ of the Trojan War. Once conquered by the Romans, the Greeks set about the shaping and misshaping of the body politic of Rome, which in turn influenced the “Barbarians” who conquered it. In this, “we shall discover a regular process of improvement in the political constitutions of our continent.” Europe in turn “will probably legislate eventually for all other continents,” as in many respects it has done. Such a philosophic history would justify nature, “or rather perhaps…providence.” Nature, revealing itself in the course of events narrated by a philosopher-historian, behaves in a providential manner, urged on, hastened, by the publication of the envisioned “universal history” itself.

Kant had been disappointed by the attempt at a universal history by his former student, Johann Gottfried Herder, who published his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind in 1784. Simply put, Kant found Herder’s philosophy insufficiently philosophic—too religious-transcendental (Herder was a Lutheran clergyman), too literary-poetic, too romantic-emotional-imaginative, too organicist-materialist-vitalistic, too nationalistic. Rightly considered, the Sturm und drang admired by Herder and the young Goethe, Herder’s mentee, belonged strictly in subordination to rationally discernible natural progress, deserving no esteem in and of itself. Philosophy should proceed by rational critique (as indeed Kant does, in his critiques of “pure reason” and of “practical judgment”), not imaginative speculation. “The flow of his eloquence…involve[s] him here and there in contradictions.” [1] Herder is at once too materialist, focusing his attention on human anatomy, the supposed uprightness of the human body as the progenitor of human reason, and too airy. Progress can only be understood philosophically in the consideration of “human actions, in which the human character is revealed.” One should not stray “from the path of nature and rational knowledge.” 

Envisioning such a history, or any “providential” history, “is possible if the prophet himself occasions and produces the events he predicts.” Such is the argument of Kant’s 1798 essay, The Contest of Faculties: A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Constantly Improving?’ For example, “the Jewish prophets” foretold the decline of Israel because “they themselves were the architect of their fate,” having “loaded their constitution with so many ecclesiastical (and thence also civil) burdens that their state became completely unfit to exist in its own right, particularly in its relations with neighboring nations.” Our modern politicians, “so far as their influence extends, behave in exactly the same way,” bringing on such disasters as the French Revolution by their own “unjust coercion” and “treacherous designs.” And so do the priests, who “complain of the irreligion which they themselves created” by their failure “to impress on the hearts of their congregation which would directly lead to an improvement,” instead “see[ing] observances and historical beliefs as the essential duties,” enforcing a “mechanical conformity” to those supposed duties “within a civil constitution”. One needs no “special gift of prophecy” to anticipate the failure to “produce conformity in moral attitudes” with such self-defeating methods. One needs no gift of prophecy, evidently, because in Kant’s estimation the putative kingdoms of God on earth act exactly as other regimes do, even if their claims to rule, to legitimacy, may differ from those regimes.

Prophesy concerning the modern world might consist of “moral terrorism,” the claim that humanity regresses or deteriorates over time, “eudaimonism” or it might consist of “chiliasm,” the claim that humanity continually progresses and improves, or “abderitism,” the claim that humanity has reached “a permanent standstill.” Since “a genuine standstill is impossible in human affairs is impossible” in “moral affairs,” we are left with the alternative of regress or progress. Paradoxically, it is the disastrous French Revolution, an “experiment” that “no right-thinking man would ever decide” to repeat “at such a price,” that has nonetheless had the excellent consequence of having “aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger.” One would not wish to undergo such a cataclysm, but the empathetic spectator can draw inspiration from it because it “suggest[s] that man has the quality or power of being the cause and (since his actions are supposed to be those of a being endowed with freedom) the author of his own improvement.” Absent the providential God of the Bible, discredited by Enlightenment rationalism, Man can become his own providential deliverer, even if in his initial effort, in France, he botched the job.

What the Revolution upheld that remains valid is its “moral cause,” consisting of two elements. The first is “the right of every people to give itself a civil constitution of the kind that it sees fit, without interference from other powers” (what might be called the moral and political vindication of the Peace of Westphalia). Second, having “accepted that the only intrinsically rightful and morally good constitution which a people can have is by its very nature disposed to avoid wars of aggression”—the republican regime which, Montesquieu teaches, conduces to peace with others of its kind—Europeans must therefore move toward the aim, the duty, of “submitting to those conditions by which war, the source of all evils and moral corruption, can be prevented.” The rights of man must be “exalted above all utilitarian values” as Europeans cultivate the “true enthusiasm” that “is always directed exclusively toward s the ideal, particularly towards that which is purely moral,” uncoupled from “selfish interests.” This “concept of right,” accompanied by such sentiments, would generate “zeal”—the passion of religious men—and “greatness of soul”—the aristocratic virtue Aristotle commends—along with “the old military aristocracy’s concept of honor.” And all of these affects would be fundamentally democratized or ‘republicanized’ under the conditions of the modern state, now animated not by the pride of the few but “the universal and disinterested sympathy” of the people. None of this need entail violence, the brutal error of the French revolutionaries. Not revolution but “the evolution of a constitution governed by natural right” is needed. That constitution might be formally republican or even a monarchy animated by the “universal principles of right.” 

Why does Kant find this plausible? Because “a phenomenon of this kind,” the rights-upholding French Revolution—can “never be forgotten, since it has revealed”—prophecy-like—in “human nature,” not divine providence or God’s ‘nature’—an “aptitude and power for improvement of a kind which no politician could have thought up by examining the course of events in the past.” “Only nature and freedom, combined within mankind in accordance with principles of right, have enabled us to forecast,” even if “the precise time at which it will occur must remain indefinite and dependent upon chance.” All that is really needed is “popular enlightenment,” the “public instruction of the people upon their duties and rights towards the state to which they belong,” along with minimally prudent philosophers, ones who avoid being “decried as a menace to the state” by “address[ing] themselves in familiar tones to the people” (who otherwise ignore them) and “in respectful tones to the state,” imploring it “to take the rightful needs of the people to heart.” Such a much more careful advancement of the Enlightenment project should persuade the state not to ban public petitions regarding its grievances on the basis of “the claim for natural rights.” 

“We accordingly think of the commonwealth in terms of pure reason,” a commonwealth that “may be called a Platonic ideal,” which, Kant insists, “is not an empty figment of the imagination, but the eternal norm for all civil constitutions whatsoever, and a means of ending all wars.” This is the new ‘Republic,’ the new rule of philosopher-kings, no longer directly (as in Plato’s Socrates’ version) but indirectly, via the modern natural rights teaching, now that Machiavellianism has been moralized. Monarchs, the moralized-Machiavellian princes, “should treat the people in accordance with principles akin in spirit to the laws of freedom which a people of mature rational powers would prescribe for itself, even if the people is not literally asked for its consent.” In this, one sees the nucleus of what would become ‘vanguardism’ in Marxist-Leninist thought, after doctrines of historicist materialism had superseded Kantian ‘idealism.’ Just as the Kantian prophet, the universal historian, accelerates natural progress by the very act of writing history, so the Marxist vanguard would accelerate historical progress with violent deeds and propagandistic words. It is no wonder that Wilson and Lenin detested one another, even if both were cut from the same progressive-historicist cloth.

Kant himself has a ‘realist’ side. He does not anticipate any moral progress in humanity, which will remain unsocially social, its “basic moral capacity” unincreased, but rather a progress in law, improvements that will channel men into “an increasing number of actions governed by duty.” This progress may come from civil society or from ‘enlightened despotism. But, given the necessary evolution of human nature and especially its improved capacity to reason, pushed ahead by stern necessity, it will come.

In his 1786 article, Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, Kant explicitly differentiates his nature-based evolutionary progressivism from the teachings of the Bible. “If the beginning is a product of nature, it may be discoverable by conjectural means,” not invented or imagined by “deduced from experience” on “the analogy of nature.” Beginning, necessarily “with something human reason cannot deduce from prior natural causes,” namely, the existence of fully developed human beings, male and female, in a single family (otherwise war would “break out at once, as would happen if the people in question were close to one another yet strangers”), Kant posits human beings capable of standing, walking, speaking, and thinking. “These are all skills which [Man] had to acquire for himself (for if they were innate, they would also be inherited, which does not tally with experience).” At this stage, Man “must have been guided solely by instinct, that voice of God which all animals obey,” along with the evidence of the senses—an “ability, which is still in evidence today, to sense in advance whether a given food is suitable for consumption or not.” Obviously, Kant follows the account of Genesis but ‘naturalizes’ it.

And he continues. The Biblical Serpent arrives in the form of reason. Reason “soon made its presence felt and sought to extend [Man’s] knowledge of foodstuffs beyond the bounds of instinct” by “comparing his usual diet with anything which a sense other than that to which his instinct was tied”—sight, for example—represented “as similar in character.” Reason uniquely can cooperate with imagination “to invent desires which not only lack any corresponding natural impulse, but which are even at variance with the latter,” desires such as lasciviousness (i.e., consciousness of nakedness) and luxuriousness (i.e., the desire for clothing). Kant straight-facedly intones, “the outcome of that experiment whereby man became conscious of his reason as a faculty which can extend beyond the limits to which all animals are confined was of great importance, and it influenced his way of life decisively”; indeed, he may have followed “the example of an animal to which such food was naturally congenial, although it had an opposite and harmful effect on human beings.” This “first experiment in free choice…probably did not turn out as expected.” While thereby “discover[ing] in himself an ability to choose his own way of life without being tied to any single one like the other animals,” the “momentary gratification which this realization of his superiority may have afforded him was inevitably followed at once by anxiety and fear.” “He stood, as it were, on the edge of an abyss,” but “now that he had tasted this state of freedom, it was impossible for him to return to a state of servitude under the rule of instinct.” 

Reason thus augmented Man’s desire for food. It had the same effect on “the sexual instinct,” since a “sexual stimulus” could now “be prolonged and even increased by means of the imagination.” The fig-leaf betokened a strong “assertion of reason,” inasmuch as “to render an inclination more intense and lasting by withdrawing its object from the senses already displays a consciousness of some rational control over the impulses.” More “the first incentive for man’s development as a moral being came from his sense of decency, his inclination to inspire respect in others by good manners (i.e., by concealing all that might invite contempt) as the proper foundation of all true sociability.”

In Genesis, God expels Adam and Eve from their so-to-speak timeless existence in the Garden of Eden. In Kant’s version, reason enables human beings to anticipate the future, “not just to enjoy the present moment of life but also to visualize what is yet to come,” a motive to plan but also an “inexhaustible source of cares and worries…from which all animals are exempt.” This is the rationalist’s equivalent of God’s curse; to prepare for the future, Man must work, Woman must foresee “the hardships to which nature had subjected her sex, as well as those which the more powerful man would inflict upon her.” Both could now foresee “the fate which must befall all animals but which causes them no concern, namely death.” 

Finally, reason caused man to begin to realize “that he is the true end of nature,” the animal entitled to use the other animals to provide him with food and clothing, “no longer regard[ing] them as fellow creatures, but as means and instruments to be used at will for the attainment of whatever ends he pleased.” Reason also began to show Man that he ought to regard other members of his own species as “having an equal share in the gifts of nature”—a “distant preparation for those restrictions which reason would in future impose on man’s will in relation to his fellows, a preparation which is much more essential for the establishment of society than is inclination or love.” In Kant’s estimation, after all, the categorical imperative is a distinct improvement over the command to love God and neighbor. Kant thus endorses the Serpent’s claim that knowledge of good and evil puts Man in “a position of equality with all rational creatures” as “an end in himself.” You shall be as gods. By dint of reason, man wins “release from the womb of nature,” having been expelled “from the harmless and secure condition of a protected childhood—from a garden, as it were, which provided for him without any effort on his part,” now governed by “restless reason,” which “does not allow him to return to the state of rude simplicity.” The ‘expulsion from Eden’ symbolizes the dawning of human Enlightenment, the transition from a life ruled by instinct to one ruled by reason, progress of the species even if bad for individuals. In his essay on Enlightenment, Kant selects for its motto, “Dare to know!”

Kant has in mind not only Genesis but Rousseau’s counter-Genesis, his ‘State of Nature.’ Nature fixes the time of human maturity at sixteen or seventeen years. But the “civilized state” which reason devises introduces such complexity as only can be mastered by the age of twenty-six, on average. But the natural growth and development of human beings remains the same. “As a result, the effect of social customs on the end of nature—and vice-versa—is inevitably prejudicial.” This is Kant’s version of Rousseau’s complaint that the invention of property and other civilizational customs have corrupted man; for Kant, it isn’t so much a matter of corruption as mismatch. Similarly, art is long, life short: could a genius live two or three centuries, he surely would accomplish much more, but now that it is “evident that nature has fixed the end of human life with a view to ends other than that of the advancement of the sciences,” we must live with this realization. And finally, although “in terms of universal human rights” nature has endowed us equally, the inequality of “natural gifts or good bestowed on them by nature,” an inequality “inseparable from culture,” man must struggle both to rise “above the barbarism of his natural abilities, but to care not to contravene them even as he rises above them.”

Whereas in the Book of Genesis, Cain the agriculturist, the property owner, is the murderous villain, pastoral Abel, the innocent peaceful one, Kant finds in the need to defend property the origin of political society, including mutual exchange, the “rise to culture and the beginnings of art,” along with the need “to establish a civil constitution and the public administration of justice.” Insofar as this enabled “human aptitudes” to develop, “the most beneficial of these being sociability and civil security,” this also mean “the beginning of human inequality, that abundant source of so much evil but also of everything good.” It also meant the beginning of antagonism between property-holding city dwellers and the outlying nomadic herdsmen, “who recognize only God as their master.” Here we see the beginning of Hobbes’s world, two antagonists “continually at war, or at least at constant risk of war.” It is the risk of war that “keeps despotism in check, because a state must now have wealth before it can be powerful, and there can be no wealth-producing activity without freedom.” This is precisely what makes Hobbesian monarchy a form of liberalism.

In this conflict, the cities have the edge, but not owing to any superiority in technology or military organization. No, it is “the seductive arts in which the women of the towns surpassed the unkempt wenches of the wilderness,” which “must have been a powerful temptation to the herdsmen to enter into relations with them and to let themselves be drawn into the glittering misery of the towns,” relieving the danger of war at the expense of “put[ting] an end to freedom” at the hands of “powerful tyrants,” “soulless extravagance,” and “abject slavery.” This “irresistibly deflected” the human race from “the course marked out for it by nature, namely, the progressive cultivation of its capacities for goodness.” 

Civilization thus fosters its discontents. War and the fear of war has the double-edged effect of making us miserable while forcing “even heads of state” to show some modicum of that “respect for humanity” required for the degree of social cohesion needed to fight their enemies. Powerful, peaceful China, with no real enemies, accordingly “has been stripped of every vestige of freedom,” descending into “irremediable corruption” and denied “all further cultural progress.” The shortness of human life, resulting from the glittering misery of urban life, is now good for the species, lest humanity’s vices accumulate, needing a cleansing Flood to eradicate them. And we are now tantalized by the vision of a golden age, a return to Eden, utopianism, which would however be bad if achievable, bringing all humanity to Chinafication. 

Kant enumerates lessons learned from his “conjectural history.” We should not blame providence for the evils which oppress us, nor are we entitled to blame our ancestors for an “original crime” which got us into this predicament. Rather, each of us “should hold himself wholly responsible for all the evils which spring from the misuse of his reason,” inasmuch as we would have done no better, had we been the first humans. Reason quarrels with nature, by nature. In so doing, it improves the human condition, if by means of bouleversements. Human history “does not begin with good and then proceed to evil,” as the Bible teaches, “but develops rather from the worse to the better; and each individual is for his own part called upon by nature itself to contribute towards this progress to the best of his ability.”

 

Note

1. Kant: “Review of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Part II.” In H. S. Reis, editor: Kant: Political Writings. 

 

Seth Benardete: The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

An earlier version of this review appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Spring 1997. Volume 24, Number 3.

 

In the Philebus “Socrates finally replaces the good with the beautiful in his summary of the goods.” In this, “Plato does not simply oppose philosophy to poetry and contrast reason with the indulgence of the passions; he has philosophy invade the territory of poetry and claim for itself what seems to be the indisputable domain of poetry.” Philosophy’s superiority to poetry “cannot lie in the neutral impersonality of its discourse” but in its ability “to tell a better story than poetry.” If “better” means, finally, more beautiful, then how does philosophy differ from poetry in kind?

Tragic poets evidently, and perhaps comic poets indirectly, tell stories “center[ing] around foundational crimes, crimes that reveal what must not be violated if either man is to be man or the city is to be possible”—as seen in Oedipus, as he wonders at the riddle of the Sphinx. “In light of what Oedipus has done, Oedipus has to cease to be what he is,” a king, a just judge of criminals. He is the criminal, and so must put an end to his own royalty. Benardete’s Plato answers that philosophy’s beauty is a beauty of the mind and its thoughts, not of the body and its actions, a beauty that reflects a “divide between man as man and man as political animal that poetry denies.” “Socrates caps the poets by telling a story about the impossible, since it is true that such radical abstraction from the body is impossible.” But that only makes it more beautiful, farther above the city, which “did not educate [the philosopher] either in its opinions or in philosophy.” [1] How then does the philosopher differ from the aesthete? He differs in that the most beautiful is also the truest: “there is a range of human experience that is incorrigibly false, and the recognition of this is known to the soul, which is always trying to divine where the true good for itself is,” and “hides from the enchantments of poetry.” Is, then, the beautiful the true good? In that case, Socrates has not exactly replaced the good with the beautiful.

This book consists of two main parts: a translation of the Philebus and Benardete’s commentary. Socrates recalls to Protarchus that Philebus, whose name means lover of youth, has claimed that happiness consists of enjoyment, pleasure, delight. He may be said to be a lover of a certain sort of beauty, but is it the bodily beauty of youth or the beauty or potential beauty of youthful souls? Or both? Socrates, whose name might playfully be said to mean ‘rule of wisdom,’ associates himself thoughtfulness, thinking, remembering. Who, then, is the true lover of youth?

Protarchus is taking over Philebus’ argument. His name means ‘first ruler’ or ‘foremost ruler,’ a name that may express the ambition of a sophist. Socrates says he initiated the dialogue in order to articulate and interpret what is the best of human possessions. His “way,” he says, is to throw his interlocutors into “perplexity.” When it comes to pleasures, Protarchus is a man who wants to have it all. Protarchus wants a life that combines pleasure and thought. Socrates argues that without knowledge one would not know one is being pleasured and that thought therefore outranks pleasure. Protarchus may be too optimistic about the ability to enjoy many intense pleasures, particularly sexual pleasures, while thinking (either at the same time or at many other times); as Yogi Berra said, “You can’t hit and think at the same time.” Pleasure, Socrates remarks, is “a complex thing,” as there are good and bad pleasures. One needs to select among them, which requires thinking prior to enjoying. The pleasure associated with falsehood differs from the pleasure associated with knowledge. But this leaves open the possibility that knowledge merely instrumental to pleasure.

He proceeds by ‘abstracting’ thought from pleasure and pleasure from thought, to see if either in its pure form is preferable. Without knowledge, one wouldn’t even know if one were being pleasured. There are pleasures of the soul as well as pleasures of the body, and the soul is the locus of desires, not the body. “Our soul at times resembles a kind of a book”; memories and sensations ‘write’ “as it were speeches on our souls,” while images are ‘painted’ on them. Souls with bad pictures painted on them love false pleasures, false because bad for the soul. Thus, the greatest pains and pleasures come to the wicked, who are ‘extremists.’ Powerful evils are hateful, weak evils ridiculous; hence “the entire tragedy and comedy of life.” 

An archē is a ruling cause and also a cause that begins what it effects, a genesis. Socrates effectively debunks the name of Protarchus by distinguishing being from genesis in the sense that genesis is for the sake of being. But if genesis aims at a purpose, a tēlos, then Protarchus’ sophistry may well be a false beginning resulting in false wisdom, in unwisdom. Protarchus may not be a hateful tyrant, but he is a ridiculous thinker. Socrates argues that one should choose the “kind of life” that is closest to being, the life “in which there was neither joy nor pain, but thoughtful thinking as pure as possible.”

What would such a life be? Socrates divides the “science of learning” into two parts, a demiurgic part and a part “concerned with education and upbringing.” Demiurgic learning, learning about artisanship, production, aims at understanding the precise and worthwhile elements of the arts, namely, the arts of number, of measurement, and of weighing. All other elements of the arts consist of guesswork and of experiential knowledge. This means that some knowledge is purer or clearer than other kinds of knowledge, even as some pleasures are pure than others. Is there, then, a truest understanding, “that which is by nature always the same way.” 

Protarchus easily grasps this point in the abstract but applies it in an unfortunate way. Asked if there is a truest understanding, an understanding that “is by nature always in the same way,” Protarchus mentions Gorgias’ opinion that rhetoric is the best art. He would like to combine demiurgic learning with right upbringing; that is, being a sophist, he wants saying something to make it so. While admitting that rhetoric is great in the sense of extensive, far-reaching in its effects, Socrates suggests that to be the best art an art must be pure, even if not great. Mind and thought are the most pure and beautiful things; “thought is a participant in the lot and portion of the good to a higher degree than pleasure.” Why? Let a man “speak rightly”: “Let him set down memory, thought, knowledge, and true opinion as belonging to the same species (idea), and then have him consider whether anyone would choose for himself to have or get anything whatsoever without them, let alone pleasure, regardless of whether the pleasure were the most extensive or the most extreme possible, which he neither truly opines that is enjoying nor altogether knows what experience he has undergone; and, in turn has no memory of the experience for any length of time whatsoever.”

Socrates does not say that thought is or brings about the most intense pleasure. While distinguishing thought and pleasure and subordinating the latter, he does not eliminate it. Pleasure is honey; thought is water. Mix them—otherwise, one will be ridiculously ‘pure’ (one might say ‘Kantian’), using the instruments of the divine science in the mundane world. The pleasures must be ‘filtered,’ so that none is admitted that will interfere with thought. But again, any blending requires numbering, measuring, and weighing, which means that mind be prior to pleasure. Measure is beautiful; there, Socrates says, “the power of the good has fled for us into the nature of the beautiful.” In that sense the beautiful “replaces” the good. The good consists of beauty, commensuration, and truth. Mind is more nearly akin to these than pleasure is. The philosopher’s way of life is therefore superior to the pleasure-loving sophist’s way of life.

Benardete comments that measure requires the ideas of the limited and the unlimited. The dialogue itself embodies these ideas. It begins, like many a narrative poem, in medias res and so has a ‘missing’ beginning. “We are forced to wonder…whether the unbounded Philebus does not represent something essential about philosophy, that it is an activity that cannot have a beginning or an end of a strictly determined kind, even though the philosopher always begins somewhere in the neighborhood of the true beginning of philosophy and end almost every question short of the answer he has set out to find. The philosopher’s own death or senility also cuts short his quest without affecting the unending life of philosophy itself.” Philosophy has two beginnings, the first cosmological—the quarrel of philosophers with poets concerning the status of myths—the other human, when Socrates turned away from the teleological physics that previous philosophers had offered as a replacement for myths. The uniqueness of the Philebus consists in its presentation of Socrates after his ‘turn’ not mentioning the city and almost not mentioning the law. “All of morality is out of bounds in the Philebus, and, whatever the human good turns out to be, it is not informed by any social virtues.” It might be supposed that philosophers will agree with Protarchus, since “pleasure as the good…seems to be the first deduction that speculative philosophy would make when it turned from heaven to the human things.” And indeed “all of morality is out of bounds in the Philebus, a dialogue in which the polis is “never mentioned.” “Socrates, then, has been put by Plato in the difficult position of arguing against pleasure without any of the weapons with which his discovery of political philosophy might have furnished him.” His Socrates responds by noticing a weakness in the ever-changing, shape-shifting, apparently characterless character of the sophist: he needs pleasure to be the answer to the question of what the human good is. He needs finality, even as he attempts to escape the attempted finality of the city.

The city’s laws treat human perplexity by answering questions with finality. “The dissatisfaction that Protarchus feels at the end of the Philebus must reflect the unfinishable character of any true philosophical question, but it cannot represent the true state of the issue of the human good, for that issue must be settled once and for all if the philosopher is not to be in doubt about the good of philosophy as the human good. The argument of the Philebus must come to a nonarbitrary end…while it opens up everything else.” As Socrates remarks, human pleasure is double: tragic or comic. But tragedy or comedy, alone or in combination, cannot grasp the truth. “Philosophy must be by itself the truth of comedy and tragedy and the good of human life,” else philosophy collapses back into poetry. Philosophy, then, is a way of life, as “Socrates stands not just for thinking in all its purity but for the effort to think as well.” The moral-political life represents a ‘third way,’ independent of either philosophy or the life of pleasure. 

Although his name means first beginning, Protarchus fails to achieve such perfectly free self-determination, as certain limits are inevitable in any life. Consider, for example, the meaning of his name. Despite it, he likely didn’t give it itself to himself, as “no man gives to himself his first name.” (For example, a journeyman professional wrestler named George Wagner had to rename himself, start calling himself ‘Gorgias George,’ before he could achieve fame and fortune as ‘The Toast of the Coast.’) Even “self-determination of this most elementary kind is not his.” The desire to maximize pleasure and thought simultaneously is utopian, as hedonism’s limit is the thoughtlessness that precludes knowing you’re having a good time. “Any hedonistic calculus must…devise a scale on which pleasure can be set.” But “the licentious cannot enjoy their own states since by definition they are not in a state they can identify, for otherwise they would be under control.” They preclude themselves from any rightful measure.

The demarcation set upon the moral-political man is Mardi Gras, the feast of fools, the purgative elevation of lords of misrule. As for the philosopher, “To be silly is a privilege of the wise on holiday.” Not only is hedonism “a funny form of idealism”, which conceives pleasure as a kind of universal with many particulars that ‘participate’ in it, but each of the other ways of life has its own funny form of idealism: the too-political man, whose desire for self-sufficiency forever contradicts his real dependence on others; the (in a sense) too-philosophic man, Socrates, whose life delineates the limits of philosophic inquiry and who needs Plato’s ‘poetic’ rescue.

In Protarchus, the attempt to mix pleasure and thought yields a political sort of soul, but one of the potentially the most dangerous type. As a matter of fact,”Protarchus is more eager to win, or at least not to lose, than he is interested in pleasure.” (Perhaps his praise of the hedonistic way of life is an attempt to soften the souls of would-be rivals for rule, of making them compliant subjects.)  A rhetorician unbound by the laws, an apolitical-political man, tends toward tyranny. Unlike youth-loving Philebus, he secretly craves to be honored more than he seeks to be pleasured. Socrates cannot deal with him as he deals with the respectable but wavering Crito, or as the Athenian Stranger deals with his sober interlocutors. Socrates must convince Protarchus that there are many pleasures, and that thought is needed to sort them out and rank them. Socratic knowledge of ignorance thrives when its opponents concede that pleasure is heterogeneous because then one must choose on the basis of truth, which Socratic inquiry is uniquely suited to undertake. Protarchus needs to want a science of pleasure. Yet “he does not want to believe that the perfection (telos) of life consists in perplexity. A life of eidetic analysis is not a life for him.” But desire belongs first of all to the soul, not to the body, and “soul from the start is a structure of question,” proto-philosophic not proto-hedonistic.

Recalling the stern and pious laws of the pious, Benardete observes that the philosopher launches his “second sailing,” his philosophic quest, after seeing that the first sailing, on the winds of divine inspiration, gets one nowhere nearer the truth, and that a new effort—not exactly sailing but rowing, using one’s own powers—is necessary. “Socrates stands not just for thinking in all its purity but for the effort to think well”; as such, he guards himself against sophistic blandishments and, in his dialogues with fellow citizens, prepares (a very few of) them for sterner stuff, as well.  Protarchus is well beyond the first sailing, beyond public opinion, at least in his own mind (although if he practiced the rhetoric he preaches he would find himself dependent upon the opinions of the many, the opposite of free). He is not yet at the second sailing, in that he does not know his own true powers or his own true weaknesses. He wants moral certainty without the morality; he does not want to know what he does not know. Socratic “freedom from the gods and other men” wants very much to know its own ignorance and thereby arrives at a certainty concerning the human good denied to quest-for-certitude, moral-political men and mindless hedonists.  “However different pleasure and thought might be, Socrates presents both as a state and condition of the soul with the causal power to render human life happy.” But the pleasure he is talking about isn’t the bodily pleasure Philebus wants and Protagoras professes to want and to teach the likes of Philebus how to reach. For his part, Socrates inclines to teach that “whatever is impossible is not good,” that whatever eidetic analysis brings forth, a “cosmological constant” will defeat “whatever combination of elements eidetic analysis came up with that went beyond the real.” After all, “if the good and the real do not coincide, then one might as well choose to dream one’s life or give up reason,” become a misologist. “If, however, the good sticks to the real, the first good is knowledge, and moral virtue is largely irrelevant, particularly if moral virtue includes piety, which can be only an opinion about the gods and their providence.” This is where self-knowledge comes in, as “self-knowledge, Socrates implies, is an exact knowledge of one’s own goods.”

That the life of reason is not without its problems—the problem of the one and the many being perhaps the foremost among them—does not of course escape Socrates’ notice. In terms of the life of philosophy, this is the problem of how to choose rationally the life of reason, of how to know in advance that the reasoning life is best. It is settled practically by providence or necessity, which actually may be unprovidential or random, even if very fortunate. As Benardete puts it, Socrates “can choose the life of philosophy, but he cannot choose Socrates’ life of philosophy, which shapes up as he goes along and becomes good.” 

Some souls simply do not incline to satisfied belief. “To introduce gods into human life is to make too much of human life. It is to give oneself airs.” And so “Socrates rejects with a laugh the entire basis of Antigone’s nobility.” Obviously, the philosopher does more than laugh, else there would be no distinction between a philosopher and the village atheist. “Self-knowledge, Socrates implies, is an exact account of one’s own goods”; lack of self-knowledge is more comic than tragic. The human soul by nature does not rest content—if it could, the purposeless pleasures of hedonism would suffice—nor can it never rest or “simply postulate a goal outside itself” that gives the soul no taste of its own goodness. To recognize this is to abandon “the psychology of pleasure and pain” and (what finally mirrors that psychology?) the hopes of reward for the just and pious. The truth the philosopher uncovers is “the truth of our perplexities and their necessary structure,” which is not a pleasurable truth, although it is good for the soul to recognize it. Few souls bring themselves to live happily according to this disenchanted truth.

 

Note

1. In the Republic, Plato tells “a story that solves the political problem once and for all by showing that it is impossible”—that is, that there is no human nature that is born to rule” except for philosophic souls, who don’t want to rule. “Philosophy alone can give a true account of the Cave because it starts from that element in the Cave that is connected, however tenuously, with the light.” That is, Socratic or political philosophy starts from the opinions of citizens, in principle open to reconsideration in light of reason, thought governed by the principle of noncontradiction. Philosophers stumble if they begin by gazing at the heavens in an attempt to understand nature directly.