A Short Biography Immanuel Kant
Who is Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)?
German
philosopher. Kant was born and died at Königsberg, East Prussia. His
philosophical reputation rests on the three Critiques-Pure Reason
(1781), Practical Reason (1788) and Judgment (1790).
In 1785 he
published the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, which first set
forth the celebrated categorical imperative always to have a 'good
will', to treat persons as ends in themselves, never merely as means
to arbitrary ends. Kant's political thought was developed after the
French Revolution in Toward Eternal Peace (1795), the Metaphysical
Elements of Justice (1797), and The Conflict of the Faculties (1798);
its central idea is that politics must 'bend the knee' to morality.
It is plainly
Kant's central political conviction that morality and politics must
be related, since 'true politics cannot take a single step without
first paying homage to morals'. At the same time, however, Kant drew
a very strict distinction between moral motives (acting from good
will or respect for the moral law) and legal motives, and insisted
that moral and legal incentives must never be collapsed into each
other; this is why he argued (in The Conflict of the Faculties) that
even with growing 'enlightenment' and 'republicanism' there still
will not be a greater quantity of moral actions in the world, but
only a large number of legal ones which roughly correspond to what
pure morality would achieve if it could. (At the end of time, a
purely moral 'kingdom of ends' will predictably not be realized on
earth—though it ought to be—but one can reasonably hope for a
better legal order which is closer to morality than are present
arrangements.) Morality and public legal justice must be related in
such a way that morality shapes politics—by forbidding war, by
insisting on 'eternal peace' and the 'rights of man'—without
becoming the motive of politics (since politics cannot hope for 'good
will').
Given this tension
between a morality and a public legal justice which must be related
but which equally must remain distinct, it may be that the notion of
'ends' can help to serve as a bridge: for public law certainly
upholds some moral ends (e.g. no murder), even though that law must
content itself with a legal motive.
Using teleology as
a bridge connecting the moral to the political-legal realm is not a
very radical innovation, since Kant himself used 'ends' in the
Critique of Judgment to unite his whole philosophy. He did this by
arguing that nature can be estimated (though never known) through
purposes and functions which mechanical causality fails to explain,
that persons as free agents both have purposes which they strive to
realize and view themselves as the final end of creation, and that
art exhibits a 'purposiveness without purpose' which makes it (not
directly moral but) the symbol of morality. Surely, then, if ends can
link—or be thought of as linking—nature, human freedom and art,
they can link (much more modestly) two sides of human freedom: namely
the moral and the legal realms.
Now if 'good
will', in the moral realm, could mean never universalizing a maxim of
action which would fail to respect persons as ends in themselves,
then morality and politics—law could be connected through Kantian
teleology. If all persons had a good will, then they would respect
all others as ends—indeed as members of a 'kingdom of ends'; but,
although it ought to, this does not actually happen, thanks to the
pathological fact
that man is radically evil. If, in sum, good will means respect for
persons as ends in themselves, and if public legal justice sees to it
that some moral ends (such as non-murder) get observed, if not
respected, then public legal justice in Kant might be viewed as the
partial realization of what would happen if all wills were good. In
addition Kant frequently suggests that law creates a kind of
environment for good will, by bracketing out occasions of political
sin (such as fear of others' domination) which might tempt (though
never determine) people to act wrongly.
Perhaps Kant's
whole position on politics as the legal realization of moral ends is
best summed up in
Man in the system
of nature . . . is of little significance and, along with the other
animals, considered as products of the earth, has an ordinary value .
. . But man as a person, i.e. as the subject of a morally practical
reason, is exalted above all price. For as such a one (homo noumenon)
he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of other people,
or even to his own ends, but is to be prized as an end in himself.
In The Conflict of
the Faculties Kant translated this very passage—or so it almost
seems—into the language of politics:
In the face of
omnipotence of nature, or rather its supreme first cause which is
inaccessible to us, the human being is, in his turn, but a trifle.
But for the sovereigns of his own species also to consider and treat
him as such, whether by burdening him as an animal, regarding him as
a mere tool of their designs, or exposing him in their conflicts with
one another in order to have him massacred—this is no trifle, but a
subversion of the ultimate purpose of creation itself. (See Political
Writings, p. 185.)
On this
teleological view, sovereigns deny the rights of man (or perhaps more
properly the rights of persons) by treating men as mere means to a
relative purpose (e.g. territorial aggrandizement); in Kant's view
war, which necessarily treats men as mere means to an immoral
purpose, causes the state to attack and subvert morality, when in
fact the state and the legal order ought (as qualified goods) to
provide a stable context of peace and security within which men can
safely exercise the sole unqualified good, a 'good will'.
So the
notion that persons are ends who ought never to be used merely as
means to arbitrary purposes provides 'good will' with an objective
end which is the source of the categorical imperative, and it sets a
limiting condition to what politics can legitimately do. Despite what
HEGEL says, then, Kantianism is not merely a formal doctrine in which
(to quote Hegel's language) 'chill duty is the final undigested lump
left within the stomach'.
Kant is clear,
moreover, that citizens (not mere subjects) in a republic would
dissent from war, out of the legal motive of self-love. Therefore
republicanism (internally) and eternal peace (externally) are
interlocked, absolutely inseparable. This is why Kant says that in 'a
constitution where the subject is not a citizen, and which is
therefore not republican, it is the simplest thing in the world to go
to war'—despite the fact that 'reason as the highest legislative
moral power, absolutely condemns war as a test of rights'.
Therefore
republican citizenship is instrumental to an essential moral end that
good will alone may never realize, thanks to human pathology. For
Kant, the outside is shaped by the inside; it is that which leads him
to say that the first definitive article of eternal peace is that
'the civil constitution of every state shall be republican'.
All of this is
brought out by Kant himself in the splendid last pages of the
Metaphysical Elements of Justice:
Moral-practical
reason within us pronounces the following irresistible veto: There
shall be no war, either between individual human beings in the state
of nature, or between separate states, which, although internally
law-governed, still live in a lawless condition in their external
relationships with one another.
For war is not the way in which
anyone should pursue his rights . . . It can indeed be said that this
task of establishing a universal and lasting peace is not just a part
of the theory of right within the limits of pure reason, but its
entire ultimate purpose (Endzweck) (See Political Writings, p. 174.)
This simply
confirms, and ties together, what has been said above: that it is
morality itself that vetoes war (doubtless because war treats ends as
mere means, persons as mere things); that peace as a moral end can be
legally approached by establishing that constitution (namely
'republicanism in all states, individually and collectively') that
brings self-loving rational citizens to veto war; that to think that
the moral law that forbids war might be misleading is to renounce
reason and to fall back on the 'mechanism of nature'; that right,
which legally realizes some moral ends (even without good will), has
universal and lasting peace as its 'entire ultimate purpose'
(Endzweck) It is doubtful whether there is any other passage,
anywhere in Kant, that so vividly and movingly fills out his notion
of a politics that pays homage to the ends of morals.
It is a passage
whose visionary but sane breadth redeems the drier parts of the
Metaphysical Elements of Justice. And it confirms what should never
have been doubted: that Kant is a political philosopher of the very
first rank whose evolutionary political goals would, if actually
realized, constitute a valuable revolution in history.
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