Immanuel Kant's Revolution

Immanuel Kant's Revolution

An essay by Bill McKenna   ©2012

First, let me apologize for my two week absence.  My schedule has been disrupted as I’ve found teaching work.  The bad news is that I’ve been forced to radically change my personal habit of being a ‘night owl’ to being a ‘morning person’.  I have been in the habit of writing late at night, so the change has not been kind to my output.  On the other hand, I feel that teaching is a major component of my purpose in life, so I am grateful for the opportunity, even at the entry level, to practice this art.  That’s enough of the personal, so let us resume the peace work.

Today we’re going to tackle Immanuel Kant finally, so settle down for a rather long read, with a rather important conclusion.  This will wrap up my first foray into philosophy; subsequent posts in the near future will return us to the 21^st century, and some practical thought.

Before I talk about Kant, I need to do some table setting.  I want to build a bridge between Augustine and Kant, and Anselm of Canterbury is a convenient bridge.  Anselm concerned himself with theoretical proofs of God.  I find his conclusions somewhat unremarkable, but his process was genius.  His proof was a series of interlocking arguments, the most important of which is the line of reasoning that if we agree on the quality of something that is good (used in the sense of morality in this case, not quality), then there must be a standard of goodness by which we judge, and therefore, it follows, there must be an absolute good.  If the universe contains an absolute good, it is an intentional universe, and if it is intentional, there must be a God who intended it.  Please do not judge Anselm by my quick synopsis.  His proof is far deeper than I need to take you.  If you wish to offer a critique of Anselm, you must study him further.

Anselm’s process is what is important here, as he makes a case for an absolute good.  To do so, he relies on an a posteriori construct, beginning from the point he is proving, and analyzing deductively.  Thus, we know God exists because there is an absolute good.  Later, Kant will critique Anselm on this line of thinking, but it is in his critique of Anselm’s elegant logic that Kant’s a priori arguments flourish.  So, even though we find Anselm and Kant at logical loggerheads (and a six hundred year gap), Kant will effectively use Anselm as a starting point.

Now we can discuss Kant.  Kant was a product of the European enlightenment, and was concerned that the great thinkers of his time, such as Sir Isaac Newton, might posit that all human understanding could eventually be induced by scientific thought and reason.  Nonetheless, Kant was an enlightenment master, and instead of opposing the whole concept of scientific thought, he claimed that where reason would not suffice to answer the great questions, philosophical thought was necessary.  In his Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen  Vernunft), Kant asserted that in cases where the critical method failed to provide an answer it was possible to accept a hypothesis from a practical point of view, relying on an a priori set of knowledge (a reversal of Anselm).  In this argument, Kant asserts that reason itself in built from a priori concepts, such as the innate knowledge of simple arithmetic to build the science of mathematics.  Hence, in matters of morality, one can build a moral philosophy based on the a priori presence of God.  If we cannot accept an a priori construct we cannot reason beyond the refutation of the concept.

Nearly every western metaphysical philosopher since Kant has relied on Kant’s theories as a base.  When I return to philosophical essays in the future, visiting Hegel or the Concord Transcendentalists, you will see the ghost of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s moral philosophy is difficult to work with.  I remember lectures in college on Kant, and thinking, ‘please let me absorb enough of this to pass the exam.’  At the time, I thought it was because Kant was deadly boring, but now with a few years of maturity (now there’s a double euphemism), I realize that Kant is just difficult, and not boring at all.  In the hands of skilled debaters, the dispute of a priori knowledge of God between an atheistic perspective and a theological perspective would leave me, and many of my readers, far back in the intellectual wake.  Happily, I’m not leading you to that debate.

In 1795, based on his moral philosophy constructs, Kant wrote an essay titled “Perpetual Peace:  A Philosophical Sketch”.  He relies on the a priori concept, that some things ought to be done transcending human understanding, and that achieving universal peace is one of the most important.  His elegant reasoning then gives way to a practical plan for universal peace, containing six preliminary articles and three definitive articles¹:

Preliminary articles:

1. "No secret treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is tacitly reserved matter for a future war"
2. "No independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase, or donation"
3. "Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished"
4. "National debts shall not be contracted with a view to the external friction of states"
5. "No state shall by force interfere with the constitution or government of another state"
6. "No state shall, during war, permit such acts of hostility which would make mutual confidence in the subsequent peace impossible: such are the employment of assassins (percussores), poisoners (venefici), breach of capitulation, and incitement to treason (perduellio) in the opposing state"

Definitive articles:

1. "The civil constitution of every state should be republican"
2. "The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states"
3. "The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality"

So, finally, there it is, in possibly actionable format.  If Augustine’s just war was the best accommodation we might have made prior to Kant (yes, I’ll allow for the possibility of other schema), here is a way forward.  Now we can move forward.  We can move beyond philosophy and start to look at a blueprint for peace.  My tongue is not in my cheek, and it is not hyperbole.  This is it.

Naturally, it isn’t all good news.  There’s a lot to do in these nine articles.  There are more than a few scenarios that are hard to fit into the framework.  Lastly, it is only philosophy, and can only help if it is acted upon.

Some of what Kant says, however is very good news.  Moreover, I want to add to that good news. 

Since Kant wrote his essay, humanity has endured terrible warfare.  Kant himself had to endure the Napoleonic Wars in Europe.  The twentieth century was especially bloody.  Yet through it all, we are starting to apply some of Kant’s tents.  The adoption has been slow and incomplete, but where and when employed, they work.  When you get to his three definitive articles, you see that the republican form of government is now the most common form of government.  It has tended to make nations more peaceful, and the democratic peace theory is an offshoot of the first article.  Sadly, the increased popularity of the republican form of government has revealed that many republics are nothing more than covers from authoritarian rule, but evolutionary improvement in suffrage appears to be moving humanity in the right direction.  The second article concerning a law of nations is also encouraging.  For all of its faults, the United Nations has successfully navigated difficult waters to achieve a degree of authority of the collected nations of the world.  You might correctly suppose that that will probably be the subject of future essays.  The final article, universal hospitality, is harder to see, but progress has been made there as well.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, has been perhaps the most important advance in this area.

Of course, we still have dictators, standing armies, covert operations, and all manner of pre-Kantian behavior in our world today.  If we didn’t, perhaps I’d be building model railroads instead of writing about this.  We are, however, moving in the right direction, and our slow march toward perpetual peace is unstoppable.  As a student of history, it is clear to me that humanity is evolving, not just in better civilization and governance, but in a profound individual way.  We are becoming a more highly developed species.

We have a lot of work to do, my fellow friends and peacemakers.  Now that you know where I’m coming from, let’s put our philosophers back in the closet for a while and let them collect dust again.  It’s time to talk about practical matters.

Peace.

¹  articles copied from Wikipedia article"Perpetual Peace"