Cosmopolitanism would, then, be the natural—philosophical—end of politics. But it should not be conceived merely as the determining concept (or rather Idea) for an interesting but ultimately secondary region of Kant’s thinking (his political thought) because, as we saw with Heidegger, the interest of reason in general determines philosophy in general as essentially cosmopolitan. Nature, politics, reason, philosophy: Everything converges toward this end, which would also be peace. We philosophize for peace, which implies, as we shall see, that we philosophize so as longer to have to philosophize, to have (perpetual) peace, (eternal) rest.1 No doubt all philosophical concepts of philosophy are determined by this archeo-teleological schema.2
This archeo-teleological schema describes, at any rate, how it is with Kant. In the “Discipline of Pure Reason” in the first Critique, the case of philosophy is exactly that of man in the political writings:
Without this [critique of pure reason], reason is as it were in the state of nature, and it cannot make its assertions and claims valid or secure them except through war. The critique, on the contrary, which derives all decisions from the ground-rules of its own constitution [Einsetzung], whose authority no one can doubt, grants us the peace [die Ruhe] of a state of law in which we should not conduct our controversy [unserer Streitigkeit] except by due process. What brings the quarrel in the state of nature to an end is a victory, of which both sides boast, although for the most part there follows only an uncertain peace, arranged by an authority in the middle; but in the state of law it is the verdict, which, since it goes to the origin of the controversies themselves, must secure a perpetual peace [einen ewigen Frieden]. (CPR, A751/B779)
Let me formulate bluntly the problem we now need to address. It would seem that in the realization of cosmopolitanism frontiers should simply disappear, allowing everyone to be a citizen of the world, but it turns out that cosmopolitanism makes no sense in the absence of frontiers. A generalized cosmopolitanism (and its generalization is called for by its very concept) falls back into an empty universalism in which the content of the idea of cosmopolitanism disappears, or rather, because we shall see there are nothing but graveyards here, dies out. The cosmopolitanizing of cosmopolitanism would be its death. Cosmopolitanism must not be cosmopolitan if it is to avoid becoming a simple vanishing internationalism. As we shall see, according to a schema that is now familiar to us, the end of cosmopolitanism is the end of cosmopolitanism.
And yet the progress of Kant’s argumentation seems continuous and coherent, at least to judge by the summary given in the “Doctrine of Right”:
Hence, under the general concept of public Right we are led to think not only of the Right of a state but also of a Right of nations (ius gentium). Since the earth’s surface is not unlimited but closed, the concepts of the Right of a state and of a Right of nations lead inevitably to the Idea of a Right for all nations (ius gentium) or cosmopolitan Right (ius cosmopoliticum). So if the principle of outer freedom limited by law is lacking in any one of these three possible forms of rightful condition, the framework of all the others is unavoidably undermined and must finally collapse. (MM, §43, 89)
As we saw in the “Universal History” text, for the last problem to be solved, that of the constitution of an internal lawful civil State, we must first, or perhaps at the same time, solve the external problem, that of violent relations along the frontiers. Our question will henceforth be that of knowing if the resolution of the external problem (implying, or so we now suspect, that the inside be exposed to something like an absolute outside, figured in Kant by the starry sky)3 does not simply liquidate the internal problem, supposedly the last problem. And if this liquidation does not take place in Kant’s text, if he does manage to maintain the internal problem even in the perspective of cosmopolitanism, then what of the teleological movement that seemed to go beyond the inside? What are we to think of this movement, first as regards the texts on politics and history but also, via the analogies we have read in the Critiques, for example, in Kant’s thought more generally, including everything that determines the relations between the critical and doctrinal moments, including in what determines that highly problematic operation that Kant calls judgment?
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What does that mean here? That we must not get to the end too soon, that the telos must await its proper moment, failing which it will not have been the telos. In that case, our presentation would be conducted in view of an end we would already know, toward which the point would be to lead the reader via an ordered, methodical path, the right hodos, which would give each thing its place and its movement toward the next stage. But (believe it or not) we do not know where we are going, or at least we are going we know not where, a little like a Kantian Seefahrer who would set off in spite of Kant’s best advice. But we are still going there with Kant, who does know where he is going, or at least—that is the guiding thread—behaves as if he knew.
So let’s follow Kant. The “Universal History” text, resolutely “optimistic,” seems to lead us or at least direct us toward the perpetual peace of cosmopolitanism. Nature will have pushed us out so that we might develop all our faculties through the operation of dispersing discord that will have ended up bringing us back together peacefully and globally, if not cosmically, in the abolition of frontiers, at least as places of violence and nature. However, there is an indication that things are not so simple, to the extent that Kant maintains that the last problem for humanity is the internal problem, which supposes that there are still frontiers to define that inside over against an outside and that humanity is distributed into several different States rather than one big World State. Moreover, Kant recognizes, while announcing the end of violence in the great political body to come, that cosmopolitanism should not imply the pure and simple absence of violence, or at least of opposing forces, and that there must even remain a touch of danger “lest human energies should lapse into inactivity” (KPW, 49), lest humankind fall asleep. The danger of cosmopolitanism would then be that of excluding all danger, all violence, all nature. Some danger must remain if we are to avoid the danger of the total loss of all danger, which would, or so one imagines, put humanity back into the ovine slumber of Arcadia, which the whole point was to leave behind. Now this idea that cosmopolitanism might be a dangerous perspective for danger, that absolute peace be the peace of the graveyard, is the idea that dominates the Perpetual Peace text, which, as we shall see shortly, can only establish the perpetuity of peace by recognizing that it must at all costs not be perpetual.
So how do things stand in this text as to the idea of a World State without frontiers? Nothing is clear here, because Kant is going to present this idea as being 1) desirable but unfortunately unrealizable; 2) a contradiction in terms; and 3) undesirable but perhaps only too likely. We will need to read patiently to understand how these three judgments are articulated and to see if we can reduce the apparently flagrant contradiction between them.
First argument. We are in the second section of the text, which contains “The Definitive Articles of a Perpetual Peace between States” (we shall come back to the first section, which sets out the “Preliminary Articles” in view of the same end). This second section opens on the definition of the state of nature that gave us food for thought earlier and proceeds by positing as the first definitive article that in every State the constitution must be republican. We shall also return to this. The second article, the one we are immediately interested in here, is formulated as follows: “The Right of Nations shall be based on a Federation of Free States” (KPW, 102). It is essentially concerned to explain why such a federation must take precedence not only over the Law of Peoples conceived as a right of war but also over the idea of an International State (one without frontiers, then), which might appear to be the natural telos of everything we have seen up until now. This whole article stands under the sign of contradiction. Let’s first take the end of the article, where the argument seems relatively clear:
The concept of international right [Völkerrechts] becomes meaningless if interpreted as a right to go to war. For this would make it a right to determine what is lawful not by means of universally valid external laws [“limiting the freedom of each”—the translation here skips the phrase “die Freiheit jedes einzelnen einschränkenden,” also qualifying laws] but by means of one-sided maxims backed up by physical force [Gewalt]. It could be taken to mean that it is perfectly just for men who adopt this attitude [the object of the Dutch innkeeper’s joke] to destroy one another, and thus to find perpetual peace in the vast grave [dem weiten Grabe] where all the horrors of violence [Gewalttätigkeit] and those responsible for them would be buried. There is only one rational way in which states coexisting with other states can emerge from the lawless condition of pure warfare. Just like individual men [according to the familiar analogy], they must renounce their savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public coercive laws [offentlichen Zwangsgesetzen], and thus form an international state [einen Völkerstaat] (civitas gentium), which would necessarily continue to grow until it embraced all the peoples of the earth. But [and now an apparent concession to “pragmatic” realism] since this is not the will of the nations, according to their present conception of international right (so that they reject in hypothesi what is true in thesi),4 the positive idea of a world republic [Weltrepublik] cannot be realised. If all is not to be lost, this can at best find a negative substitute [das negative Surrogat] in the shape of an enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war. The latter may check the current of man’s inclination to defy the law and antagonise his fellows, although there will always be a risk of it bursting forth anew. (KPW, 105)
The Weltrepublik, then, the Völkerstaat (everything here encourages us to take these two terms as synonyms, or perhaps to understand that the former specifies the form that the latter should take), is the positive idea that is the result of the natural process we have followed, the full realization of which would ipso facto give us perpetual peace (because then there would be no more frontiers, no more enemies, no more nature, and therefore no more violence, etc.). Only the shortsightedness of the constituted States prevents the realization of this idea, or rather its maintenance as an idea to be realized, and obliges us to fall back on the Surrogat, the negative substitute, which is only the federation, the Bund that makes war less probable but cannot ward off all danger of war and therefore cannot ensure perpetual peace. If, then, as the very statement of the second article makes clear, the Völkerrecht must be based on the federalism rather than the unification of the States, this is because the States themselves, enclosed within their frontiers, cannot liberate themselves from those frontiers and join together at the global level, whether this inability depends on historical contingencies or the very form of their existence.
That is the last paragraph of this second article. Now, its very first paragraph, three pages earlier, had denounced as “contradictory” what is here presented as the positive idea. Still on the basis of the analogy between individuals and States in the state of nature, then, Kant says this:
Peoples who have grouped themselves into nation states [Völker als Staaten] may be judged in the same way as individual men living in a state of nature, independent of external laws; for they are a standing offence to one another by the very fact that they are neighbours. Each nation, for the sake of its own security, can and ought to [kann und soll] demand of the others that they should enter along with it into a constitution, similar to the civil [bürgerliche] one, within which the rights of each could be secured. This would mean establishing a federation of peoples. But a federation of this sort would not be the same thing as an international state [Dies wäre ein Völkerbund, der aber gleichwohl kein Völkerstaat sein müsste]. For the idea of an international state is contradictory [Darin aber wäre ein Widerspruch], since 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 [viele Völker aber in einem Staate nur ein Volk ausmachen würden]. And this contradicts [widerspricht] our initial assumption, as we are here considering the right of nations [das Recht der Völker] in relation to one another in so far as they are a group of separate states which are not to be welded together as a unit. (KPW, 102)
We are dealing with a lot of contradictions here. There is an at least apparent contradiction between the beginning and the end of this part of the text: The end presents as the only true rational solution what the beginning presents as a simple contradiction to be avoided. A contradiction between the end and the contradiction. But it is unclear if this contradiction is supposed to be the result of the very idea of an International State or simply of the relation between this idea and the perhaps limiting frame of International Right. There too, Kant talks of contradiction but seems in that case to be suggesting that this contradiction is not at all final or fatal and concerns merely the self-imposed order of the text, which is here considering International Right as the question of relations between States (which must then remain separate enough to entertain such relations), and which will deal later with cosmopolitan right, which comes just after. In that case the point would be to avoid the passage to the international simply destroying the national, as pointed out by Hegel in the essay on Natural Law (1801): The result of universalizing the maxim to defend one’s State honorably against its enemies would be that soon there would be neither enemies nor State to defend.5 In any case, Kant’s argument to establish that there is a contradiction in the very concept of an International State seems to be the following: For an International State really to be a State, it would need to have the hierarchical structure proper to every State—namely, the distinction between the legislator and the people. So it seems to Kant that, in an International “State,” one member State would have to be in the superior, legislative position with respect to all the others; to that extent it would remain the State that it was and would not, therefore, be absorbed into the new International State supposed to dissolve member State identities. And without this hierarchy, the International “State” would not be a State. It would follow that the International State could not be republican (the Völkerstaat could not be a Weltrepublik as the end of the section implied) but only monarchical, and tendentially despotic, in its form.
To find a mediation between these apparently contradictory propositions, we need to look, as if by chance, in the central part of this same subsection, just about half way between the two passages we have just read. Once more Kant comes back to the analogy between individuals and States in the state of nature and finally draws the consequences of an asymmetry we pointed out earlier. After the paragraph that we have just quoted, the argument proceeds as follows: Just as we despise the lawless condition of savages, one might have thought that the States (the members of which are no longer in the state of nature and should therefore despise it) would be in a hurry to leave that state behind in turn, but in fact they find their glory in that secondary state of nature that is inter-State warfare. So we might be surprised to see the States invoking a supposed right of war (whereas there can be no such right so long as the States do not submit to any external law). The fact that they continue to use the word right precisely where there is no right proves, however, that there is, in spite of everything, a moral disposition in mankind, a disposition that could one day show itself more clearly. Now, war itself, while giving rise to this wrong but meaningful use of the word right, can never produce a rightful decision. And now the analogy between individuals and States is, if not broken, at least seriously complicated:
Such a state of affairs cannot be pronounced completely unjust, since it allows each party to act as judge in its own cause. Yet while natural right allows us to say of men living in a lawless condition that they ought to abandon it, the right of nations does not allow us to say the same of states. For as states, they already have a lawful internal constitution, and have thus outgrown the coercive right of others to subject them to a wider legal constitution in accordance with their conception of right. (KPW, 104)
So there is indeed a problem here, one that risks interrupting the smooth movement of the teleology that we have followed so far. This is precisely the moment when nature has returned at the frontier. But it turns out after all that the state of nature that reappears here is not directly comparable to that supposed to affect individuals before the formation of lawful associations. This supposedly secondary nature, the double of the primary, true, nature (even though it is the only state of nature one can ever see, for we have always already left the other one), is precisely not such that one must leave it without more ado, because we are no longer here in a lawless state but in a State whose constitutive parts are defined by being already in right (even if only imperfectly, in that not all States are republics, far from it) and therefore within their rights. It is difficult to see why things would go any further. Why would natural teleology not stop here, at the moment of the frontier and the necessarily violent and unjust plurality of States? And if it were to be interrupted here, before its end, might we not suspect that the teleology had never really worked from the beginning, which would ruin by the same token the very notion of natural teleology, of providence, and, step by step, of rationality itself? If teleology was always going to be interrupted, it was therefore not teleological, or at least was following an a-teleological teleology, and we would have to give up the guiding thread chosen at the beginning of the “Universal History” text to avoid the philosopher’s dismay and perhaps even have to take refuge in the “Epicurean” hypothesis that we saw Kant dismiss ironically.
The individual in the state of nature ought to leave it, because it is a state without duty, and duty prescribes itself as its own object. One ought to do what one ought to do, and so one ought to leave the lawless state. One owes the law to oneself (on se doit le droit). Having arrived at this moment of a plurality of States, the moment of the frontier, we can see clearly the principle of the “contradictions” of the Perpetual Peace text: For here we ought to leave the state of nature (but we have already left it!), and we ought to enter into a lawful state (but we already have!), and it is hard to see how Kant is going to establish the duty to go further.
This is a formidable problem for Kant: mankind ought obviously to leave the state of nature (and has, in fact, done so) but now is back in it without it being obvious where the supplementary duty to leave it again is supposed to come from. The internal law of the State (which for the individual citizens is an external law because it is public) is both sure of itself (in its rights) on its own terrain and yet completely without resource when it exposes itself as it must to the outside. Outside, law is lacking, precisely because inside one is within the law. Providence, which made use of discord to push mankind to the full development of all his rational faculties, risks finding itself blocked here.
This problem is none other than that of radical evil itself. In the Perpetual Peace text, Kant invokes it without naming it as such when he speaks of the “depravity [Bösartigkeit] of human nature,” which is “displayed without disguise in the unrestricted relations which obtain between the various nations,” but which “is largely concealed [sich sehr verschleiert, much veils itself] by governmental constraints in law-governed civil society” (KPW, 103), and when he invokes the moral disposition indicated by the use (that more cynically one might call merely cynical) of the word right to justify war.6 But in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, the relation is direct, to the point that we might be tempted to say that radical evil just is the frontier. In this text, Kant says he can do without a formal proof “that there must be such a corrupt propensity rooted in the human being” (Religion, 56) given the abundance of examples drawn from human behavior, all of which turn out to be located along the line of the story Kant has been telling in his political texts. First example: the state of nature, which far from being the Arcadian state invoked by “many philosophers,” is, in fact, a state of gratuitous cruelty. And if one hopes to show that human goodness is better revealed in civilization, one will be disappointed, because there we would have to hear a “long melancholy litany of charges against humankind” (56).7 And yet, says Kant, if that is not enough (the next example will, then, be more telling than the first two),
we need but consider a state wondrously compounded from both the others [i.e., of nature and civilization], namely that of a people in its external relations, where civilized peoples stand vis-a-vis one another in the relation of raw nature (the state of constant war) and have also firmly taken it into their heads not to get out of it, and we shall become aware of fundamental principles in the great societies we call states directly in contradiction to official policy yet never abandoned, principles which no philosopher has yet been able to bring into agreement with morality or else (what is terrible) suggest [how to replace them with] better ones, reconcilable with human nature: So philosophical chiliasm, which hopes for a state of perpetual peace based on a federation of nations united in a world-republic [ein Volkerbund als Weltrepublik: what Kant himself hoped for in the “Universal History” text but already thinks is contradictory in Perpetual Peace, published in 1795, two years after the Religion text], is universally derided as sheer fantasy [Schwärmerei]. (Religion, 57)
Let us beware of moving too quickly to strictly moral questions, although Kant, in order to be able to continue his argument in the Perpetual Peace text, is reduced to invoking them. (Radical evil will, in any case, return to haunt us, in that it is only another name for nature, the frontier, and we may even come around to thinking that it is another name for reason itself: Reason is wicked.)
The interruption of the most obvious destination of natural teleology (the positive idea of a world republic) left a negative surrogate, an association or federation of States. Before the last paragraph of the text, Kant has already presented this surrogate otherwise, in a less negative way, precisely to rule out the “contradictory” idea of a World State. To do so, the same analogy between individuals and States in the state of nature is exploited to the maximum:
It would be understandable for a people to say; “There shall be no war among us; for we will form ourselves into a state, appointing for ourselves a supreme legislative, executive and juridical power to resolve our conflicts by peaceful means [friedlich].” [So this at the level of individuals coming out of the state of nature.] But if this state says: “There shall be no war between myself and other states, although I do not recognise any supreme legislative power which could secure my rights and whose rights I should in turn secure,” it is impossible to understand what justification I can have for placing any confidence in my rights, unless I can rely on some substitute [Surrogat] for the union of civil society, i.e. on a free federation. If the concept of international right is to retain any meaning at all, reason must necessarily couple it with a federation of this kind. (KPW, 104–5)
In the last paragraph of this article, which we quoted first, the surrogate (the federation of States in view of peace) was negative, the negative surrogate for the idea of a universal republic; here the surrogate has apparently nothing negative about it—it is the surrogate of the act whereby individuals form a State. It is a surrogate, and no longer an analogon, as a World State would be, because, on the one hand, as we saw, individuals are leaving a state of nature to enter the law, whereas the States, being already in the law but still in a state of nature, cannot realize such a simple exit, cannot cross the frontier with one simple movement; and, on the other hand, a federation does not resemble a State, given the absence of a supreme power to give force to the law.
So the alliance between States, in view of peace, has its own proper and original form, neither quite that of an individual State nor that of a State of States. It is an alliance of “a particular kind,” “von besonderer Art,” says Kant (KPW, 104), particular in that it does not aim to acquire any political power and that it does imply that the members of the alliance “need to submit to public laws and to a coercive power which enforces them, as do men in a state of nature” (KPW, 104). An alliance that is not made all at once but that would spread little by little until it embraces all States. This idea, surrogate both for the idea of a World Republic and the constitution of an individual State, that implies the interruption of natural teleology before it has reached its term thus becomes, as it were, a substitute telos, but for this idea to be realized (and Kant asserts that one can imagine its real objective realization [“Die Ausführbarkeit (objective Realität) dieser Idee der Föderalität . . . last sich darstellen”]), we must wait . . . for what? For chance, a lucky break, das Glück, “good fortune” (KPW, 104): With luck this luck will return to us in a moment.
The positive idea that seemed to flow naturally from the teleology now appears to be ruled out. The States, within their rights, are not interested in it. And what is more, this idea involves the internal contradiction we have seen: Because of the necessity in every State that there be a hierarchical relation between legislator and subjects, a supposed World State (a State made up of States) would have to allow one of those States to become the legislator over the others, which would prevent the World State from having the republican form demanded for the individual States, and which would mean that, in fact, it could only be a monarchy. This is the worst outcome for Kant, even if it betrays a certain truth about each individual State. As he says in the first Supplement to the text, supposed to show how nature guarantees perpetual peace:
The idea of international right presupposes the separate existence [die Absonderung] of many independent adjoining states. And such a state of affairs is essentially a state of war, unless there is a federal union to prevent hostilities breaking out. But in the light of the idea of reason, this state is still to be preferred to an amalgamation [die Zusammenschmelzung] of the separate nations under a single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy. For the laws progressively lose their impact as the government increases its range, and a soulless despotism, after crushing the germs of goodness, will finally lapse into anarchy. It is nonetheless the desire of every state (or its ruler) to achieve lasting peace by thus dominating the whole world, if at all possible. (KPW, 113)
So we need dispersion, or at least separation, to avoid the danger of unification or fusion, which would again be death. Up until now, it had seemed as though nature made use of discord and violence as a provisional means of dispersion in view of a subsequent unification in perpetual peace, whereas now nature is going to maintain the dispersion in dispersion to avoid the terrible consequences of too unified a unification.8
For there to be the least chance of international right, there must be nations still separated from each other, and so frontiers must subsist, even though we thought they were going to disappear in cosmopolitanism. In the end, which comes before the end, there is cosmopolitanism only in an internationalism that presupposes separate States that are still, however slightly, in a relation of natural violence that is not yet absorbed in cosmopolitanism.
The same holds in Kant’s little text on perpetual peace in philosophy, from 1796.9 Man tends naturally to philosophize and, therefore, to polemicize. This polemic goes as far as “open warfare,” but, according to the dialectic we have followed,
this propensity [. . .] or rather impulse, must be seen as one of the benevolent and wise arrangements of nature through which it seeks to avert men from a great misfortune, the putrefaction of the living body. (“Peace in Philosophy,” 84)
But, unlike the passage from the first Critique we quoted earlier, in which critical philosophy put an end to such warfare by bringing repose and perpetual peace, peace as repose, here that same critical philosophy is still supposed to bring about peace, but a peace that looks like what we were just seeing in restricted cosmopolitan politics:
[Critical] philosophy, which is a permanently armed state (against those who would perversely confuse appearances with things in themselves) and indeed an armed state that thereby also incessantly accompanies the activity of reason—this philosophy opens the prospect of an eternal peace among philosophers [. . .]. This peace has, in addition, the advantage of always keeping alert the powers of the subject exposed to the apparent danger of attacks, thereby promoting by means of philosophy the intention of nature to enliven the subject continually and to guard against the sleep of death [Todesschlaf]. (“Peace in Philosophy,” 87)
The only chance for cosmopolitanism, then—and, by analogy, for philosophy itself, qua vital activity that preserves us from the death and corruption that would follow from too peaceful a slumber—is that it not be cosmopolitan. Consequently, the federation formed with a view to perpetual peace can subsist only in a frontier tension that must be maintained if the death of planetary peace is to be avoided. Nature thus survives the perspective of its own end, and its providential wisdom turns out to be reticent with regard to the end that everything led us to think really was the end. Nature must, then, prevent nature from fully arriving at its end, hold itself back, short of its most obvious telos, and choose a substitute quasi-telos, a surrogate that is as positive as it is negative, in which the nature of nature is no longer its own abolition but its maintenance, supposed to favor a peace the name and quality of which have become highly problematic. Thus:
But nature wills it otherwise, and uses two means to separate the nations and prevent them from intermingling—linguistic and religious differences [Verschiedenheit]. (KPW, 113)
Kant inserts a note to the word “religious” to protest that there can be only one religion and, at most, different confessions (Glaubensarten), which are of a merely historic interest, contingencies that are all vehicles of the one true religion.10 This is also the basis of the distinction made in the Religion book between the visible and invisible church. But this amounts to saying that religion fits into the teleological schema of a unification that the whole point here in Perpetual Peace was to stop. It would follow that the only true means nature really has of maintaining human gathering in dispersion is the diversity of languages, which calls for no cautionary statement analogous to the one about religion, whereas we might have expected a remark to the effect that reason is universal and that therefore the diversity of languages is merely a contingent vehicle of it. But Kant says nothing of the sort, and for good reason. Recall a famous but obscure moment in the first Critique, at the beginning of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method”:
It turned out, of course, that although we had in mind a tower that would reach the heavens, the supply of materials sufficed only for a dwelling that was just roomy enough for our business on the plane of experience and high enough to survey it; however, that bold undertaking had to fail from lack of material, not to mention the confusion of languages that unavoidably divided the workers over the plan and dispersed them throughout the world leaving each to build on his own according to his own design. (CPR, A707/B735)11
Kant now makes a concession to what by now is obvious—namely, that this separation must, according to everything he has said, perpetuate war rather than peace:
These may certainly occasion mutual hatred and provide pretexts for wars, but as culture grows and men gradually move towards greater agreement over their principles, they lead to mutual understanding and peace. And unlike that universal despotism which saps all man’s energies and ends in the graveyard [auf dem Kirchhofe] of freedom, this peace is created and guaranteed by an equilibrium of forces and a most vigorous rivalry. (KPW, 113–14)
The peace of the graveyard can always come about, and every State wants it, if we are to believe Kant, to the extent that every State would like to become the only State by annexing all the others. (This is repeated in the immediately following paragraph: “Nature wisely separates the nations, although the will of each individual state, even basing its arguments on international right, would gladly unite them under its own sway by force or by cunning” [KPW, 114].) So to have a peace other than the peace of death (a peace that must nonetheless be perpetual if it is to be peace), we need the violence of warlike separation, which, transformed into a balance or equilibrium of forces of emulation or competition, is supposed to guarantee peace. Peace is perpetual only if it perpetually postpones its own mortal perpetuity in favor of a lively balance that still manifestly contains death-dealing and violent elements. If there is to be peace, and perpetual peace, it will therefore not be entirely peaceful.
We may not know where we are going, but it is certain that we are going too fast. This whole part of the argument happens at the level of international right or right of peoples (Völkerrecht), which is not yet cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical right (Weltbürgerrecht), which, or so we might think, would be the place where we would finally come to the consequences glimpsed in the “Universal History” text. And the third “Definitive Article” of the treaty of perpetual peace does deal with this but already in its titular statement announces a restriction of a right that we had legitimately thought to be without limit (because without frontiers). The statement of this article of the treaty is: “Cosmopolitan Right shall be Limited [eingeschränkt] to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” Why this restriction?
Cosmopolitan right is deduced, once again, from the form of the Earth, which gives to all a “right of communal possession of the earth’s surface. Since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one’s company” (KPW, 106). The Earth, then, or its sphericity, gives rise both to the insoluble tension of international right and to the apparently more positive content of cosmopolitan right. Kant’s clearest statement of the basis of this right comes in the “Doctrine of Right”:
Nature has enclosed them all together within determinate limits (by the spherical shape of the place they live in, a globus terraqueus). And since possession of the land, on which an inhabitant of the earth can live, can be thought only as possession of a part of a determinate whole, and so as possession of that to which each of them originally has a right, it follows that all nations stand originally in a community of land. (MM, §62, 158)
But where we might have thought that this would justify the formation of a World State, Kant specifies that this right is, in fact, a right of relation, a right to enter into relations with the foreigner who remains foreign, a right, then, of the frontier in general:
A community of land, though not of rightful community of possession (communio) and so of use of it, or of property in it; instead they stand in a community of possible physical interaction (commercium), that is, in a thoroughgoing relation of each to all the others of offering to engage in commerce with any other, and each has a right to make this attempt without the other being authorized to behave toward it as an enemy because it has made this attempt. (MM, §62, 158)
This opposition of communio and commercium, as the very ambiguity of the concept of Gemeinschaft (community or society), is already pointed out, “analogically,” in the first Critique, precisely around the third analogy of experience. In the totality of appearances, all objects must have relations of a dynamic community (Gemeinschaft). This is where Kant points out the ambiguity of the concept:
The word “community” is ambiguous in our language, and can mean either communio or commercium. We use it here in the latter sense as a dynamical community, without which even the local community (communion spatii) could never be empirically cognized. [. . .] Without community every perception (of experience in space) is broken off from the others, and the chain of empirical representations, i.e. experience, would have to start entirely over with every new object without the previous one being in the least connected or being able to stand in a temporal relation with it. (CPR, A213–14/B260–61)
Communio is that of subjective coexistence according to the unity of apperception; dynamic commercium is the only way to give that an objective ground and, in the end, ensure the unity of the world as a whole (die Einheit des Weltganzen) (A218/B265). This analogy of experience, which is analogical in that it stands in a relation of analogy to the logical unity of concepts, ana-logical with respect to the logical, finds a language not of logic itself (meaning what? the concept of disjunctive community had already appeared much earlier in the Critique under the heading of logic: A74/B99 and especially B111–13 recognizes that the category of community “is not as obvious” as other cases in the table of judgments, and that nonobvious character opens the ambiguity we are pursuing here)—not a language of logic, then, but, in a further analogy, the language of political relations. Just as we would have nothing of local communio without the global dynamic commercium, we would have no State in the singular were it not for the dynamic coexistent multiplicity of all the States. This is the same priority of dynamic rapport over local identity that allows for the remark from Perpetual Peace, already quoted, about States being formed by the dynamic pressure of surrounding states (KPW, 112). This coexistence of logical, empirical, and political language must itself be understood by analogy with the analogy (of analogy): These three languages here too depend on their dynamic commercium. We might say, bluntly, that analogy is (only) analogical, and this must be so well “before” Kant’s own analogies between theoretical and practical domains. Reason in Kant is fundamentally and inextricably analogical, in a way that cannot be easily resolved by appeal to any particular telos.
Kant did, as it were, foresee this type of reading and tried to forestall it, by describing it (in The Conflict of the Faculties) as abderitism:
Since a true stagnation in matters of morality is not possible, a perpetually changing upward tendency and an equally frequent and profound relapse (an external oscillation, as it were) amounts to nothing more than if the subject had remained in the same place, standing still. [. . .] People [. . .] in order to avoid being bound to a single goal, even if only for the sake of variety they reverse the plan of progress, build in order to demolish. [. . .] Inertia (which is here called stagnation [Stillstand]) would be the result of this. It is a vain affair to have good so alternate with evil that the whole traffic of our species on this globe would have to be considered as a mere farcical comedy, for this can endow our species with no greater value in the eyes of reason than that which other animal species possess, species which carry on this game with fewer costs and without expenditure of thought. (147)
See too the third Critique, where there is an analogy between (political) commercium and natural purposiveness itself: in §65 Kant has just said that the analogy that considers nature as the work of an artist, as “the analogue of art,” says too little (for it would assume an artist separate from the work, whereas nature produces itself) and that it would be better to think of nature as an analogue of life. That is still a problem, because one would risk falling into hylozoism (which attributes life to matter as such) or else to appeal to a soul that would be “an alien principle standing in community with it [Ein fremdartiges in Gemeinschaft stehendes Prinzip].” Strictly speaking, says Kant, “the organization of nature is therefore not analogous with any causality we know.” But this claim calls immediately for a note in which he accepts that an analogy is possible in the other direction, as it were, and it just so happens that this analogy is, again, political:
One can, conversely, illuminate a certain association, though one that is encountered more in the idea than in reality, by means of an analogy with the immediate ends of nature that have been mentioned. Thus, in the case of a recently undertaken fundamental transformation of a great people into a state, the word organization has frequently been quite appropriately used for the institution of the magistracies, etc., and even of the entire body politic. For in such a whole each member should certainly be not merely a means, but at the same time also an end, and, insofar as it contributes to the possibility of the whole, its position and function should also be determined by the idea of the whole. (CJ, 246–47)
Cosmopolitan right, then, provides for a right to cross frontiers that remain in place, that can be crossed in order to visit, for people to “present themselves in the society [Gesellschaft] of others,” indeed, but in a society still and always defined by what divides it and simultaneously allows it to be thought.
Kant’s (hi)story, then involves, on the one hand, an apparently irresistible advance toward the abolition of all frontiers, to the establishment of a World State in which everyone would be a “citizen of the world,” and, on the other, a pulling back from this advance moving toward what would in fact be death, a pause or an interruption of this movement at the inter-national moment, a moment at which frontiers remain, with the tension they entail, the moment at which we must accept the surrogate, the federation, rather than pure cosmopolitanism. This pulling back emerges very clearly toward the end of “Theory and Practice.”
On the one hand, universal violence and the distress it produces must eventually make a people decide to submit to the coercion which reason itself prescribes (i.e. the coercion of public law), and to enter into a civil constitution. And on the other hand, the distress produced by the constant wars in which the states try to subjugate or engulf each other must finally lead them, even against their will, to enter into a cosmopolitan constitution. Or if such a state of universal peace is in turn even more dangerous to freedom, for it may lead to the most fearful despotism [emphasis added] (as has indeed occurred more than once with states which have grown too large), distress must force men to form a state which is not a cosmopolitan commonwealth under a single ruler, but a lawful federation under a commonly accepted international right. (KPW, 90)
We must then, perhaps, fall short of peace in the interests of peace. There will be no peace (peace that must be perpetual to be worthy of the name peace) except in the inter-national dynamic, in which we still find tension and competition, the violence and contingency of nature, the Babelian noncomprehension of the confusion of tongues, inscribed on the surface of the globe in the form of frontiers that can, of course, be transgressed but which subsist through and for all such transgression. Peace, to be perpetual, must perpetually defer its perpetuity. Peace cannot, then, be declared but only ever announced as perpetually to come, in the form of a promise forever promised and thus never fulfilled.
It will be objected that the fact that perpetual peace cannot be realized takes nothing away from the force of Kant’s argument, which is quite ready to accept this impossibility by invoking the distinction between concept of the understanding and Idea of reason. And, indeed, this is what is explicitly stated in the “Doctrine of Right,” which summarizes quite calmly what I have been laying out in such agitated fashion:
Since a state of nature among nations, like a state of nature among individual men, is a condition that one ought to leave in order to enter a lawful condition, before this happens any rights of nations, and anything external that is mine or yours that states can acquire or retain by war, are merely provisional. Only in a universal association of states (analogous to that by which a people becomes a state) can rights come to hold conclusively and a true condition of peace come about. But if such a state made up of nations were to extend too far over vast regions, governing it and so too protecting each of its members would finally have to become impossible, while several such corporations would again bring on a state of war. So perpetual peace, the ultimate goal of the whole Right of Nations, is indeed an unachievable Idea. Still, the political principles directed toward perpetual peace, of entering into such alliances of states, which serve for continual approximation to it, are not unachievable. Instead, since continual approximation to it is a task based on duty and therefore on the Right of men and of states, this can certainly be achieved. (MM, §61, 156)
As always, the Idea of reason goes beyond all possible experience, toward a maximum that cannot be presented to intuition for conceptual validation. The object of the Idea is thus beyond phenomenal reality but orients that reality by giving it a sense. Where the “Universal History” text seemed to believe in the future reality (however distant) of perpetual peace, and where the Perpetual Peace text still seemed to think that nature would really bring it about one day, here is a more sober and “realistic” assessment: the World State is unrealizable, but it still remains the Idea that guides political judgment and to which the federation of States should approximate as far as possible. Perpetual peace is unrealizable, but we can and ought to approach it infinitely according to the asymptotic curve that is part of Kant’s thinking of the Idea.
This (entirely Kantian) response to our analyses is, however, radically insufficient. We have seen that the end (here qualified as unrealizable but nonetheless excellent and desirable) is quite simply death. We cannot therefore want to approach it as closely as possible, because nothing guarantees that a place near that of the World State (necessarily despotic and as close as can be to collapse into the most violent state of nature) is better than a situation very far from it, whether that situation be a federation or not. What our analyses suggest, however, is that the movement toward the Idea can no longer be calibrated or controlled: Because the end is the end, because death is at the end, we can no longer say with any confidence where the good is to be found along the path that starts from the state of nature and leads, beyond all possible experience, to perpetual peace. Even supposing we can always situate ourselves along a line leading from the one to the other, that we can still orient ourselves in thinking (concesso non dato), we are still in confusion, we do not really know in which direction we are moving, we can no longer see any endpoint very clearly, nor therefore a possible approach to that endpoint. We no longer really know what “peace” means, to the extent that perpetual peace looks just like death, and that surrogate peace involves war, violence, and danger as essential elements in its definition. So we no longer really know where we are or where we are headed. Here we are, on the frontier, in the frontier, looking at the stars no doubt, unless it is their misleading reflection in the muddy water. As the idea of peace is an Idea of Reason, this situation of being in the middle where we can no longer orient ourselves with certainty nor even with any confidence is the very situation of reason seeking its end: for reason itself is only one of its own Ideas.12
What if this structure of pulling back, in which the end (that risks really being the end, death) is displaced and comes before the end, not at any fixed point in the process but at some moment at which the end has to (müssen and sollen) happen, but must above all not be realized—what if this structure (nature, the frontier) were not only that of Kant’s natural teleology in general but in fact that of judgment as such? Of judgment as such, namely, in the form of what Kant calls reflective judgment? If we must stop at the frontier, how do things stand, not only with regard to Kant’s political thinking, not only with its relations with morality and theory (we are coming to that), but to the system or edifice of Kant’s system in general, the relations between the theoretical and practical domains, as these relations are described in the introduction to the third Critique, the relations between critique and doctrine, critique and metaphysics? If we manage to establish these analogical links (but as we shall see, what we are tracking here precedes and exceeds, exasperates any analogism), would it not follow not only that we might prefer in Kant the critical moment to the doctrinal moment (and indeed everyone does prefer that) but that, as the doctrinal moment only ever arrives as the death of the critical moment, it never truly arrives, which would leave us forever in the good critical tension? But then we would no longer really understand what critique means, as the concept of critique in Kant draws its content from its teleological determination with regard to doctrine. No critique without doctrine. Without doctrine, no critical step.
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1973), §133: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace,” where peace translates Ruhe, rest.
2. This is not to suggest that nonphilosophical (e.g., sociological) concepts of philosophy would escape from this schema. Which is why, while trying to complicate the frontier that passes between a supposed literal sense of the word frontier (political frontiers) and a supposedly metaphorical sense (conceptual frontiers), I am not simply proclaiming that “everything is political.” It is true that I hope to suggest that, by its use of the word and concept “frontier,” philosophy is inseparable from its politics, that there is an irreducible politics of philosophy, but I do not think that the concept of “politics” is adequate to describe what is happening here, for “politics” is a philosophical concept. By showing that “frontier” cannot fail to imply what I (perhaps unwisely) call an “absolute exteriority,” I am trying to open the philosophico-political frontier we are exploring to something else again. This “something else” bears some relation, to be analyzed, to what Heidegger calls “thinking” but cannot be identified with it. To show that, it would be necessary 1) to show that Heidegger’s thinking of historicality does not entirely escape the teleological schema we have reconstructed, even if it does try to delimit it (as, for example, in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in which Heidegger distinguishes forcefully between the “last possibility” of philosophy, namely, “the dissolution of philosophy in the technologized sciences,” and “a first possibility for thinking [. . .] from which the thinking of philosophy would have to start out, but which as philosophy it could nevertheless not experience and adopt”) and 2) to establish the real, if complex, links between a “concept” such as Gelassenheit—along with everything that refers it to a thinking of the earth and the rootedness of the homeland, or what is proposed under the sign of “country” and repose—with Kant’s idea of Perpetual Peace. The nexus of these relations would no doubt still be the figure of man.
3. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and the more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” (CPrR, 133).
4. Explained in “Theory and Practice”: “Whatever sounds good in theory has no practical validity. (This doctrine is often expressed as: ‘this or that proposition is valid in thesi, but not in hypothesi.’)” (KPW, 62); recall the troublesome effects of “hypothesis” in the previous chapter.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law, tr. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 80: “The maxim of honorably defending one’s country against its enemies, like an infinite number of other maxims, is self-canceling as soon as it is thought as a principle of universal legislation; for when so universalized, for example, the specification of country, enemies and defense is cancelled.” It might be argued that this Hegelian critique of the operation of the categorical imperative is the matrix of all bad readings of Kant’s moral thought, in that it assumes that the telos of that thought is to formulate laws. Against it (but also somewhat against Kant himself), we might claim that what Kant calls the moral law can only ever give rise to moral decisions that are each time singular: The moral law helps me not so much to formulate moral laws as to decide, each time here and now, if this action I am contemplating is moral or not.
6. See too, again in a relation of Bösartigkeit and veiling: “It might be doubted whether any inherent wickedness rooted in human nature influences men who live together within a single state, for one might instead (with some plausibility) adduce the deficiencies of their as yet underdeveloped culture (i.e. their barbarism) as the excuse of the unlawful elements in their thinking. But in the external relationships between states, this wickedness is quite undisguisedly and irrefutably [ganz unverdeckt und unwidersprechlich] apparent. Within each individual state, it is concealed [verschleiert, veiled] by the coercion embodied in the civil laws, for the citizens’ inclination to do violence to one another is counteracted by a more powerful force—that of the government. This not only gives the whole a veneer of morality . . .”. (KPW, 96)
7. This litany of evils is quite impressive: “Of secret falsity even in the most intimate friendship, so that a restraint on trust in the mutual confidence of even the best friends is reckoned a universal maxim of prudence in social dealings; of a propensity to hate him to whom we are indebted, to which a benefactor must always heed; of a hearty goodwill that nonetheless admits the remark that ‘in the misfortunes of our best friends there is something that does not altogether displease us’ [La Rochefoucauld]; and of many other vices yet hidden under the appearance of virtue, let alone those of which no secret is made, for to us someone already counts as good when his evil is common to a class—and we shall have enough of the vices of culture and civilization (the most offensive of all) to make us rather turn our eyes away from the doings of human beings, lest we be dragged ourselves into another vice, that of misanthropy” (Religion, 56–57).
8. Following the analogism between the political and the physico-theoretical that is at work in all these discussions, we might want to read this tension of relatively gathered dispersion in the light of what Kant says about matter, from at least the Theory of the Heavens text through to the Opus Postumum. For example, in the latter: “All matter must have repulsive forces, since otherwise it would fill no space; but attractive force must also be attributed to it, since otherwise it would disperse itself into the infinity of space—in both cases space would be empty. Consequently, one can think of such alternating impacts and counterimpacts [as existing] from the beginning of the world, as a trembling (oscillating, vibrating) motion of the matter which fills the entire universe, includes within itself all bodies, and is both elastic and at the same time attractive in itself. These pulsations constitute a living force, and never allow dead force by pressure and counterpressure (i.e. absolute rest inside this matter) to occur” (Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, tr. Eckard Förster and Michael Rosen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 25). But also “were repulsion the sole moving force of matter, every matter would dissipate itself into infinity; consequently, space would be empty. But were it attraction alone, all [matter] would coalesce into a single point and space would also be empty. So each quantum of matter can originally fill a space only through the conflict of attraction and repulsion of substances—an action and reaction which is already contained in the concept of a spatial matter, but whose possibility can be made comprehensible by no explanation whatsoever” (ibid., 27).
9. Immanuel Kant, “Announcement of the Near Conclusion of a Treaty of Eternal Peace in Philosophy,” tr. Peter Fenves, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves, 83–100 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
10. See too The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Mary Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 61 (hereinafter CF). However uncomfortable the formula here, the teleological determination remains the same: “The euthanasia of Judaism is pure moral religion, freed from all the ancient statutory teachings, some of which were bound to be retained in Christianity (as a messianic faith). But this division of sects, too, must disappear in time, leading, at least in spirit, to what we call the conclusion of the great drama of religious change on earth (the restoration of all things), when there will be only one shepherd and only one flock.” See too the more nuanced and complicated argument in the remark “On Religious Sects” (85–109), especially as regards the Jews (95).
11. On these figures of building, see Daniel Payot, Le philosophe et l’architecte: sur quelques déterminations philosophiques de l’idée d’architecture (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982), and Bernard Edelman, La maison de Kant: conte moral (Paris: Payot, 1984). On the way that language makes a linear frontier impossible, see also Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos—ou le conflit des facultés,” in Du Droit à la Philosophie, 397–438 (Paris: Galilée, 1990), tr. Jan Plug as “Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 83–112.
12. We would have to say that the understanding is also an Idea of Reason and that therefore the frontier between concept and Idea is as fragile as can be. It would not simply follow that reason is straightforwardly unreasonable but that reason’s reason is not that of rationalism.