Kant

I recently had occasion to read Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” after not having really looked at any work of his new to me in about twenty years.

I already knew his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” and that he supposed that, if we imagine that human nature is perfectible, imagining that there is a ready-made engine in nature that drives culture forward, then this will help us actually to become better. In other words, having an aspiration sets up the possibility in the first place that a goal be there to strive for; it’s like encouraging a child to “reach for the stars.” If we’re cynical, we might say it’s more like teaching a child to believe in Santa Claus: it’s a made-up story, their belief in which we know they are going to be disillusioned.

But it’s a certain typical human optimism that leads most people to do this kind of thing anyway, Kant included.

What reading “Perpetual Peace” demonstrated to me is that Kant is well aware of the possibility of the pessimistic style of reading this kind of starry-eyed narrative, and moreover, in a certain sense, he shares it. Perpetual Peace has the same kind of scheme of world affairs leading up to a universal peace as his Universal History, a world that evolves away from war because the badness of it pushes states naturally into federation. He volunteers some measures to be implemented on the international scene in order to supplement this natural state of affairs, and preserve it against a return to disharmony.

But in either case, it’s the telling of a story that is central to the kind of history of which he says in Idea for a Universal History that it might seem more novelistic than factual. Kant knows full well that he is reading into history an end goal that might not actually be there, but even as he knows this, he also seems to forget it, and be convinced of it as fact, as strange as it seems both to know something and forget it at the same time.

To take one example of the contradiction at work here, he writes, on the one hand, “Moral evil has by nature the inherent quality of being self-destructive and self-contradictory in its aims (especially in relations between persons of a like mind), so that it makes way for the moral principle of goodness, even if such progress is slow.” Here we see asserted the doctrine of goodness evolving naturally out of badness.

But he knows that, even as he asserts it, he does so compulsively, rather than on account of any fact of the matter. “If we suppose that mankind never can and will be in a better condition, it seems impossible to justify by any kind of theodicy the mere fact that such a race of corrupt beings could have been created on earth at all. … Such are the desperate conclusions to which we are inevitably driven if we do not assume [something like this doctrine].”

And so it is as a fiction, necessary, as he sees it, that Kant adopts his narrative of history. He openly confesses the lack of any objective basis for claiming that the story of mankind is one of progress, but at the same time asserts that it is necessary that we think of things in this way. And so he can assert, at times, without qualification, that this in fact is the way things are, because it would be meaningless at once to say that we must believe something and yet to disbelieve it.