III. On the Relation of Theory to Practice in International Law—A General-Philanthropic, i.e., Cosmopolitan View ^*

(contra Mendelssohn)

Are we to love the human race as a whole, or is it an object to be viewed with displeasure, an object that has our best wishes (lest we become misanthropic) but never our best expectations, and from which, therefore, we would rather avert our eyes?

The answer to this question depends on our answer to another question. Are there tendencies in human nature which allow us to infer that the species will always progress toward the better, and that the evil of present and past times will be lost in the good of the future? If so, we could love the species at least for its constant approach to the good; if not, we would have to loathe or despise it, no matter what the affectations of a universal love of mankind— which would then be, at most, a well-meaning love, not a love well pleased—may say to the contrary. What is and remains evil, notably the evil and deliberate mutual violation of the most sacred human rights, this we cannot avoid loathing, even when we try our hardest to love it. We hate it—not that we would harm people, but that we would have as little to do with them as possible.

Moses Mendelssohn was of the latter opinion (Jerusalem, Section Two, pp. 44-47), opposing it to his friend Lessing’s hypothesis of mankind undergoing a divine education. To him it is chimera “that the whole of mankind down here should be moving ever forward, perfecting itself in the sequence of times.”

We see, he says, the human race as a whole “performing slight oscillations, and it has never taken a few forward steps without relapsing soon after, twice as fast, into its former condition.” (This is exactly the boulder of Sisyphus; in this way one assumes, with the Hindus, that the earth is a place of penance for old sins now beyond recall.) “Men progress but mankind constantly wavers within the same fixed limits; viewed as a whole it maintains at all periods of time about the same level of morality, the same measure of religion and irreligion, virtue and vice, happiness(?) and misery.”

He introduces this assertion (p. 46) by saying, “You want to guess what Providence intends for mankind? Forge no hypotheses” (earlier he had called them “theory”); “just look around at what is really happening, and if you can, survey the history of all ages and look at what has happened from the beginning. This is the fact; this must have been part of the intention; this must have been approved or at least included in the plans of wisdom.”

I take a different view.

If it is a sight fit for a god to see a virtuous man wrestle with tribulations and temptations and yet stand firm, it is a sight most unfit, I will not say for a god, but for the commonest man of good will to see the human race from period to period take upward steps toward virtue, only to see it soon after relapsing just as deeply into vice and misery. To watch this tragedy for a while may perhaps be touching and instructive, but eventually the curtain has to fall. For in the long run the tragedy becomes a farce, and though the actors, fools that they are, do not tire of it, the spectator will. After one or two acts he has had enough of it; he can correctly assume that the never-ending play is forever the same. If it is only a play, the punishment at the end may make up for his unpleasant sensations. But in real life to pile vice upon countless vice (though interrupted by virtues), just so that some day there will be plenty to punish, would be repugnant, at least by our conception, even to the morality of a wise creator and governor of the world.

I may be allowed to assume, therefore, that our species, progressing steadily in civilization as is its natural end, is also making strides for the better in regard to the moral end of its existence, and that this progress will be interrupted now and then, but never broken off. I do not have to prove this assumption; the burden of proof is on its opponent. I rest my case on this: I have the innate duty (though in respect of moral character required I am not so good as I should and hence could be) so to affect posterity through each member in the sequence of generations in which I live, simply as a human being, that future generations will become continually better (which also must be assumed to be possible), and that this duty may thus rightfully be passed on from one generation to the next. Let any number of doubts be drawn from history to dispute my hopes, doubts which, if conclusive, might move me to abandon a seemingly futile labor; but as long as the futility cannot be made wholly certain, I cannot exchange my duty (as the liquidum) for the rule of prudence not to attempt the unfeasible (as the illiquidum, because it is a mere hypothesis). I may always be and remain unsure whether an improvement in the human race can be hoped for; but this can invalidate neither the maxim nor its necessary presupposition that in a practical respect it be feasible.

Without this hope for better times the human heart would never have been warmed by a serious desire to do something useful for the common good; this hope has always influenced the labors of right-thinking men. Even the excellent Mendelssohn must have reckoned with it when he so zealously strove for the enlightenment and welfare of the nation to which he belonged. For he could not reasonably hope to accomplish them by himself, all alone, unless others after him continued advancing on the same path. Despite the depressing sight, not so much of ills that oppress mankind from natural causes as of those men inflict upon each other, the mind is cheered by the prospect that things may be better in future—a quite unselfish benevolence, since we shall long be in our graves and shall not reap the fruits which we have helped to sow. Empirical arguments against the success of these resolves, which rest on hope, are insufficient here. The argument that what has not succeeded so far will therefore never succeed, does not even justify the abandonment of a pragmatic or technological intention (as that of air travel by aerostatic balloons, for instance), much less than abandonment of a moral intention that becomes a duty unless its accomplishment is demonstrably impossible. Besides, there is a good deal of evidence to show that in our age, compared with all earlier ones, mankind has by and large really made considerable moral progress for the better. (Short-time arrests can prove nothing to the contrary.) And it can also be shown that the screaming about an irresistibly growing depravation of mankind comes from the very fact that, upon reaching a higher level of morality, we can see farther ahead, and that the severity of our judgments about what we are compared with what we ought to be—in other words, our self-criticism— increases the higher we have climbed on the moral ladder in all of what we have come to know of the world’s course.

If we ask, then, by what means we might maintain and possibly accelerate this perpetual progress for the better, we soon see that this immeasurable success will depend not so much on what we do (on what education we give to the young, for instance), or on the method we ought to use to accomplish it. Instead, it will depend upon what human nature will do in and with us to force us onto a track to which we would not easily accommodate ourselves on our own. For we can look only to nature, or rather, because the attainment of this end requires supreme wisdom, the Providence for a success that will affect the whole and thence the parts, while on the contrary, the designs of men start with the parts, if indeed they do not stop there. The whole as such is too large for men; they can extend their ideas to it, but not their influence, chiefly since the design of one man will repel another, so that they would hardly reach agreement on a design of their own free intention.

Just as universal violence and the resulting distress were finally bound to make a people decide that they would submit to the coercion of public laws, which reason itself prescribes for them as remedy, and found a state under a civil constitution, even so the distress of ceaseless warfare, in which states in turn seek to reduce or subjugate each other, must eventually bring the states under a cosmopolitan constitution even against their will. Such general peace may pose an even greater threat to freedom from another quarter by leading to the most terrible despotism, as has repeatedly happened in the case of oversized states. Yet the distress of ceaseless warfare must compel them to adopt a condition which, although not a cosmopolitan community under one head, is still lawful—a federation under jointly agreed international law.

For the advancing civilization of the states, accompanied by a growing inclination to expand by cunning or by force at the other’s expense, means the multiplication of wars. To maintain standing armies, to add to them constantly more men at the same pay, to keep them in training and equip them with ever more numerous tools of war, all this is bound to produce higher and higher costs. The price of all necessities keeps rising, without any hope of a corresponding increase in the supply of the metals of which they are made. And no peace lasts long enough for the peacetime savings to match the cost of the next war, a complaint for which the invention of national debts is an ingenious but ultimately self-destructive nostrum. As a result, impotence must finally accomplish what good will ought to have done but did not: the organization of every state’s internal affairs so that the decisive voice on whether or not to wage war is not that of the head of state—whom the war costs actually nothing—but that of the people, who pay for it. (This necessarily presupposes, of course, the realization of that idea of the original contract.) For the people are hardly likely to plunge themselves into penury—which never touches the head of state— out of sheer lust of expansion or because of supposed purely verbal insults. And so their descendants will not be burdened with debts they have not brought on themselves; they too—due not to any love for them, but only to the self-love of each era—will be able to progress toward an ever better condition, even in a moral sense; because any community unable to harm others by force must rely on justice alone, and may have grounds to hope for help from other communities of the same constitution.

This, however, is just an opinion and mere hypothesis, as uncertain as all judgments claiming to state the sole adequate natural cause for an intended effect that is not wholly in our power. And, as has been shown above, even as such an hypothesis it contains no principle for its enforcement by the subjects of an existing state; rather, it contains an enforcement principle for uncoercible heads of state. In the usual order of things it is not in human nature to relinquish power voluntarily; yet, in pressing circumstances, it is not impossible. So we may consider it a not inadequate expression of the moral hopes and wishes of men (conscious of their weakness) to look to Providence for the circumstances required. They may hope that since it is the purpose of mankind, of the entire species, to achieve its final destiny by the free use of its powers as far as they go, Providence will bring about an outcome to which the purposes of men, considered separately, run directly counter. For this very counteraction of inclinations, the fonts of evil, gives reason free play to subjugate them all and to inaugurate a reign of the good that is self-sustaining, once it exists, in place of the reign of selfdestructive evil.

* * *

Nowhere does human nature appear less lovable than in the relations of whole nations to each other. No state’s independence or possessions are even for a moment safe from the others. The will to subjugate another, or encroach upon what belongs to him, is always present; and warlike preparations for defense, which often make peace more burdensome and more destructive of domestic welfare than war itself, may never be relaxed. For this the only possible remedy is international law based on public statutes backed by power, statutes to which every state would have to submit in analogy to civil or constitutional law for individuals. For an enduring universal peace by means of the so-called balance of power in Europe is a mere chimera, rather like Swift’s house whose architect had built it in such perfect accordance with all the laws of equilibrium that a sparrow lighting on the roof made it promptly collapse.

“But states,” it will be said, “will never submit to such coercive laws; and the proposal of a universal international state, whose authority all individual states should voluntarily accept and whose laws they should obey, may sound ever so nice in the theory of an Abbe de Saint-Pierre or a Rousseau, but it will not work in practice. Has it not always been ridiculed by great statesmen, and more yet by heads of state, as a pedantically childish academic idea?”

I for my part put my trust in the theory that proceeds from the principle of justice, concerning how relations between individuals and states ought to he. The theory commends to the earthly demigods the maxim to proceed so that each of their quarrels become the introduction to such a universal international state and, thus, to assume as a practical possibility that it can be.

At the same time, however, I trust (in subsidium) in the nature of things, which compels one to go where he would rather not (fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt—fate guides the willing and drags the unwilling). In this I also take human nature into account. Since respect for right and duty is still alive in human nature, I cannot, or will not, consider it so steeped in evil that in the end, after many unsuccessful attempts, moral-practical reason should not triumph and show human nature also to be lovable. So, even from a cosmopolitan viewpoint my assertion stands: what is valid in theory, on rational grounds, is valid also in practice.

KÖNIGSBERG.

I. KANT

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^* It is not immediately apparent how a general-philanthropic presupposition relates to a cosmopolitan constitution, and how the latter relates to the foundation of international law as the only condition in which those human tendencies that make our species lovable can be properly developed. The conclusion of this part will make that connection plain.