If the biblical theologian meddles with his reason in any of these tenets, then, even granting that reason strives most sincerely and earnestly for that same objective, he leaps (like Romulus’s brother) over the wall [so überspringt er . . . die Mauer] of ecclesiastical faith, the only thing that assures his salvation, and strays into the free and open fields of private judgment and philosophy. And there, having run away from the Church’s government, he is exposed to all the dangers of anarchy.
—Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties
Natural science must not jump over its boundaries [muß sie ihre Grenze nicht überspringen] in order to bring within itself as an indigenous principle that to whose concept no experience at all can ever be adequate and upon which we are authorized to venture only after the completion of natural science.
—Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
Displacing slightly the classical form of the question, let’s ask no longer “What is a frontier?” but “What is the nature of a frontier?” In a famous passage, Marx says that exchange must have begun in an external way at the frontier of natural communities.1
What is the relation between exchange, nature, and frontier (these are also the three key terms in Aristotle’s derivation of economics and chrematistics)?2 We would need to ask what a “natural community” might be and whether “natural” communities have so-called natural frontiers. We shall see that, as has become a truism, there are no natural frontiers, that what are called natural frontiers (shores, rivers, mountains) are named thus only by analogy with nonnatural frontiers, once they have been crossed.3 Only after the fact, after nature, does a “natural” frontier become a true frontier, nonnatural, instituted, therefore traversable. And yet, we shall see that in a deeper and more persistent sense, all frontiers can be called natural, in the sense that they are frontiers of nature, lines where nature stops, the point of transition or transgression at which nature turns into one or other of its others (culture, law, technē, politics, etc.). In this sense all frontiers are (on) the frontier of nature. Where there is a frontier, there is (at least one) nature.
So let’s displace our question again. How does a frontier happen to nature? Or, perhaps, how does a frontier return to nature? What is the event of a frontier? Here is a description of a frontier happening (or rather, but this is [in] its nature, precisely, its nature as returning to nature), not quite happening:
Remus, the story goes, was the first to receive a sign—six vultures; and no sooner was this made known to the people than double the number of birds appeared to Romulus. The followers of each promptly saluted their master as king, one side basing its claim upon priority, the other upon number. Angry words ensued, followed all too soon by blows, and in the course of the affray Remus was killed. There is another story, a commoner one, according to which Remus, by way of jeering at his brother, jumped over the half-built walls of the new settlement, whereupon Romulus killed him in a fit of rage, adding the threat, “So perish whoever else shall overleap my battlements.”4
For now, let’s take from this famous passage the idea that the frontier is drawn in the context of a prior violence or discord, or rather that tracing it involves its originary transgression—that the frontier, drawn against natural violence, arrives always too late not to be itself violent. Drawing a frontier always represents an act of violence in a context of violence (but the very concept of context presupposes that of frontier and so cannot explain it) and invites further violence: jealousy, mockery, revenge, threat, warfare.5
Here is another, more recent, description of a frontier happening (or rather, as always, not quite happening):
Wherever two regions are about to form a boundary [. . .], the third region [. . .] establishes a chain of outposts. In order that these outposts do not form bilateral borders with their neighbours, they in turn are surrounded by chains of islands in a structure which is repeated down to infinitely small dimensions [. . .]
What may seem almost impossible as a boundary between three “countries” can be extended without any mathematical difficulty to situations with 4, 5, 6 [. . .] competing domains. The boundary is made up entirely of points where 4, 5, 6 [. . .] countries meet.6
This passage comes from a popularizing book about fractals. Without addressing the specifically mathematical aspects of fractals,7 let’s note in this description the incautious mix of the language of nature and the language of politics: There is talk of “islands” but also of “countries,” of “competing domains” that have “neighbors.” Note also the whiff of a purposiveness (we shall see that there is no frontier and no nature without the question of teleology arising) in the phrase “in order that these outposts do not form.” Where does the competition come from, and what is the force that would prevent bilateralism in the name of a more complex plurality? No doubt we could describe the frontier between the natural and the political in fractal terms, but let’s beware of the more or less hidden metaphysics in such descriptions and of our desire to appeal to a “scientific” description as the final arbiter of all our problems.8 Nonetheless, fractal geometry will often return to give us precious analogies for thinking the structure of the frontier, up to the point when the structure of the frontier will oblige us to examine the structure of analogy itself.
It is, then, impossible not to talk about nature if we want to talk about frontiers. We proposed two apparently contradictory hypotheses about this: On the one hand, that there are no natural frontiers, and on the other, that all frontiers are natural or else of nature in the sense that every frontier would mark the spot where nature begins or ends. If we manage to hold these two hypotheses together (which we cannot do by simply leaving nature behind), we may be able to understand why nature turns out to be (especially in political philosophy, perhaps) such a critical concept (critical because always precritical, always awaiting decision and division, the krinein of the nomos). As we shall see, nature is what we find at, on, or in the frontier. The frontier comes down to nature, still belongs to it, because nature is what comes back at the frontier, returns to the frontier. The nature of the frontier is nature, and the nature of nature is to return at (on or in) the frontier.
So it is certainly not by chance that Kant talks a great deal about nature in the two texts we shall first be reading (and that will provide us with what those same texts would call a “guiding thread” for reading Kant more generally).9 For these two texts, as we shall see, are devoted to thinking the frontier or—this will be the whole problem—thinking frontiers in the plural. It would not be easy to extract from them a simple doctrine as to so-called natural frontiers. On the one hand, Kant recognizes that there are at the very least divisions or separations that seem to be quite natural—“The community of man is divided by uninhabitable parts of the earth’s surface such as oceans and deserts” (KPW, 106)—but immediately points out the means of crossing such boundaries or frontier-zones: “but even then, the ship or the camel (the ship of the desert) make it possible for them to approach their fellows over these ownerless tracts, and to utilize as a means of social intercourse that right to the earth’s surface which the human race shares in common” (KPW, 106).
This is part of a more general doctrine of natural providence, or at least of a quasi-natural providence, a doctrine carefully subdivided into three aspects and given the supplementary gravitas of Latin terminology.
This use of Latin is not at all insignificant in Kant and, in fact, engages with a whole politics of language in its relation to philosophy:
In the great wealth of our languages, the thinking mind often finds itself at a loss for an expression that exactly suits its concept, and lacking this it is able to make itself rightly intelligible neither to others nor even to itself. Coining new words is a presumption to legislate in language that rarely succeeds, and before we have recourse to this dubious means it is advisable to look around in a dead and learned language to see if an expression occurs in it that is suitable to this concept; and even if the ancient use of this expression has become somewhat unsteady owing to the inattentiveness of its authors, it is better to fix on the meaning that is proper to it (even if it is doubtful whether it always had exactly this sense) than to ruin our enterprise by making ourselves unintelligible.10
Kant returns to this issue, annoyed, in the preface to the second Critique:
I have no fear, with respect to this treatise, of the reproach that I want to introduce a new language, because the kind of cognition itself approaches popularity. This reproach with respect to the first Critique could also not have occurred to anyone who had thought it through and not merely turned over the pages. To invent new words where the language already has no lack of expressions for given concepts is a childish effort to distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts yet by new patches on an old garment.11
Kant’s irritation continues for a while. In a note called by the last sentence of this same paragraph, he claims to fear more than obscurity the misunderstanding of popular or ordinary expressions. He takes the example of his use of “permitted” and “forbidden” and as if by chance the problem of linguistic invention returns to illustrate how this “somewhat unusual” usage (which might have looked like a new construction) is not, however, “altogether foreign” to ordinary usage: “It is forbidden to an orator, as such, to forge new words or constructions; this is to some extent permitted to a poet” (CPrR, 9). And this can be further related to a note to §17 of the third Critique: “Models of taste with regard to the arts of discourse must be composed in a dead and learned language: the former, in order not to have to suffer the alterations that unavoidably affect living languages, which make noble expressions flat, common ones outmoded, and newly created ones of only brief currency; the latter, so that it should have a grammar that is not subject to any willful change of fashion but has its own unalterable rules.”12 These passages do not appear to be taken into account in Jean-Luc Nancy’s brilliant account of Kant,13 where there is, however, the following important reminder: “The language of Kant himself abounds in archaisms, in multiple borrowings, sometimes from dialectal usages, sometimes from the old language of the law courts, and in idiosyncrasies of spelling, morphology and syntax. [. . .] Kant’s problem is also that of a language and a people” (69–70n45/155n20; tr. mod.). Recall that in the passage from the first Critique that we just quoted, Kant refers to “our languages” in the plural, which scatters the problem beyond the uncertain frontiers of Germany. “Kant’s problem” might depend in part on the fact that, on the one hand, the philosopher, at least at his best, is indeed the “legislator of human reason” (itself essentially legislative), whereas on the other hand, as we saw, to present oneself as a legislator in question of language is most often doomed to failure. For this difficult position of the legislator more generally, see my Dudding: des noms de Rousseau (Paris: Galilée, 1991).
Providence, duly latinized, then, falls into three aspects: “original” providence (providentia conditrix), which has been active since the beginning of time; ruling providence (providentia gubernatrix), which keeps nature’s course running according to universal purposive laws; and directive providence (providentia directrix), which brings about particular ends that man could not have foreseen (KPW, 108n). This distinction forms part of the demonstration that perpetual peace is guaranteed by Nature herself. Providence, in fact, is just a name for Nature seen from the point of view of its purposive form, a form that becomes intelligible to us not through an act of theoretical knowledge but to the extent that we analogically supplement our lack of such knowledge in this domain by comparing nature to the work of a human artifex.14
This view of natural purposiveness can seem amusing. Isn’t it wonderful [bewunderenswürdig], exclaims Kant, that moss can still grow in Arctic regions, so that reindeer can eat it, so that men in their turn can eat them! Also wonderful, perhaps especially wonderful, the camel, “which seems as if it had been created for traveling over [the sandy salt deserts] in order that they might not be left unutilized” (KPW, 110). And Kant goes on to wonder at the fact that the inhabitants of the Arctic should also have available to them whales and walruses, and to admire still more the fact that nature brings driftwood to those shores where trees cannot grow. We might be tempted to laugh, as we might laugh at Voltaire’s Pangloss admiring the fact that men have two legs so they can wear breeches or at Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and his melon naturally designed to be eaten en famille.
Kant’s nature, and his providence, however, are more complicated than this would suggest. Like Rousseau (whose own notion of the state of nature is often misunderstood), Kant is very clear that such a view of nature (“Isn’t nature wonderful?”) is stupidity itself, as he makes very clear in the text on universal history:
[. . .] an Arcadian, pastoral existence of perfect concord, self-sufficiency and mutual love. But all human talents would remain hidden forever in a dormant state, and men, as good-natured as the sheep they tended, would scarcely render their existence more valuable than that of their animals. The end for which they were created, their rational nature, would be an unfilled void. (KPW, 45)
In fact, the idea or fantasy of a simply sweet and gentle nature is not Kant’s but one he imputes to man himself, insofar as man has always already lost any such nature. Because nature is precisely not what man would wish for: “Man wishes concord, but nature, knowing better what is good for his species, wishes discord” (KPW, 45). Let’s see in this the first indication of an idea that will not cease to pursue us: namely, that man is not entirely natural or that his nature is to double or shadow nature with a second, artificial, nature. And this nature that is not really natural will recall what we were saying about frontiers, which, although not natural, are nonetheless of nature. Kant himself says in a note to the sixth proposition of this same text, “Man’s role is thus a highly artificial one [künstlich]” (KPW, 47n). We will consistently see that this opposition between nature and artifice is insufficient to think what we are dealing with here.
We should, in any case, beware of any simple reading of nature. If we must indeed avoid the Arcadian reading that might have tempted us at first, we must not for all that switch over to a simple reading of nature’s wanting discord. The text of the fourth proposition continues:
Man wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly, but nature intends that he should abandon idleness and inactive self-sufficiency and plunge instead into labour and hardships, so that he may by his own adroitness find means of liberating himself from them in turn. The natural impulses which make this possible, the sources of the very unsociableness and continual resistance which cause so many evils, at the same time encourage man towards new exertions of his powers and thus towards further development of his natural capacities. They would thus seem to indicate the design of a wise creator—not, as it might seem, the hand of a malicious spirit who had meddled in the creator’s glorious work or spoiled it out of envy. (KPW, 45)
A little dialectic goes a long way. Kant seems to fit neatly enough here between, say, Rousseau and Hegel, at least in the standard reading of those authors. But let’s not allow this conciliatory perspective to absorb too rapidly the negativity implied in the idea that “Nature wants discord.” For we might imagine that, according to Kant, man is on the point of stagnating in the deep peace of Arcadia only to have nature wake him up by a more or less catastrophic intervention. It will be remembered that that is the Rousseauist schema of the Essay on the Origin of Languages, where a simple movement of God’s finger tilts the earth’s axis and thus gives rise to climatic—and thereby linguistic and characteriological—differentiation, which sets history going.15 In fact, Kant is not simply reproducing this traditional (Biblical) schema, according to which an essentially peaceful state of nature is subsequently interrupted or overturned by violence. But, as we shall see, there is a heavy price to pay for giving up on this schema: one cannot think an originarily violent nature (as Kant does) without more or less rapidly coming to the conclusion that nature is not entirely natural. We shall see that this is, in fact, an analytic consequence of our double hypothesis about natural frontiers.
Kant has just said that nature, in its wisdom, “wants” discord. As opposed to Rousseau, for whom nature was peaceful but nonetheless gave rise to a subsequently unavoidable violence, Kant conceives of a nature that is already violent but whose fundamental violence will be compensated for by a teleological movement toward perpetual peace. But it would be a mistake to see in Kant a disagreement with Rousseau situated on the same logical level, as it were. Rousseau thought that the natural state of man was one of dispersion and that in such a dispersion there would reign the peace of indifference; whence his violent disagreement with Hobbes’s doctrine of nature as war of all against all. Kant can avoid all such anthropological speculations (even if he does not always do so). For him, the state of nature can de facto be either a state of peace or a state of war; but as nothing prevents it from becoming violent if it is not already violent, then it is de jure violent, even if a profound peace reigns in fact. (Let’s note in passing this precious hint about the asymmetrical character of oppositions such as that of peace and war or peace and violence: potential violence is already violence, whence the idea that the only peace worthy of the name would be perpetual peace.)16
This transcendental argument is advanced, as one might expect, in the text on perpetual peace: “A state of peace among men living together is not the same as the state of nature (status naturalis), which is rather a state of war. For even if it does not involve active hostilities, it involves a constant threat of their breaking out” (KPW, 98; adding the Latin omitted in the translation). A footnote explains:
Man [. . .] in a mere state of nature [im bloßen Naturstande; in a pure or naked state of nature] robs me of any such security [Kant is contrasting the state of nature with a “legal civil state,” of which more anon] and injures me [lädiert mich; this is a latinate, juridical term for “injury”] by virtue of this very state in which he co-exists with me. He may not have injured me actively (facto) [tätig is Kant’s word, not far from tätlich, violent], but he does injure me by the very lawlessness of his state (statu iniusto), for he is a permanent threat to me, and I can require him either to enter into a common lawful state along with me or to move away from my vicinity. (KPW, 98n)17
“I can oblige him . . . ,” “ich kann ihn nötigen . . . .” A lot here hangs on Kant’s kann. It cannot easily mean that I have the capacity to make him do something, which would presuppose that I am stronger than my neighbor and that I would simply exercise that superior force against him. For if I exercised that force against him according to the first prong of the dilemma posed by Kant, in order to oblige him to enter into a lawful state with me, to carry him in spite of himself over the frontier that still separates us from legality (and therefore from the possibility of peace), the force I would use to do this would no longer really be quite natural, in that it would already be directed toward right or law. So my naturally superior force would no longer be wholly natural but already at least somewhat a force of right, if not of law, to the extent that this force would be exercised against my neighbor justly. I would already have left the state of nature without my neighbor, and I could no longer count on mere natural force to oblige him to leave it with me. So the ich kann must mean, rather, that I have the right to make my neighbor leave the state of nature. But this interpretation is difficult too, in that we are ex hypothesi supposed to be in a state of nature where there is no right but merely force, which is why my neighbor injures me and always might be stronger than I. In the lawless violence of the state of nature, there is apparently a right to right, which means that, in the state of nature, I am indeed in a state of always at least possible violence but already enough in a state of right to be able to leave it behind, either with my neighbor or against him. But if my neighbor hears the obligation by which he is supposedly bound and decides to leave the state of nature with me, then he must already have been in enough of a state of right to hear the call of this obligation and is to that extent not simply in the state of nature either—and in that case it would rather be me who had injured him by imagining that he was injuring me by remaining in the state of nature whereas he was on the way out of it before me. Even if, hearing the obligation to leave the state of nature, he decides to ignore it and stay in that state, simply moving away from my vicinity, he has nonetheless been receptive enough to the call to refuse to submit to the obligation it bespeaks and to that extent is already no longer in the state of nature in which he is supposedly choosing to remain. In order to understand how this confusing situation is possible, and how I can cross the frontier that separates natural violence from the state of right (assuming that there is such a frontier and that one can cross it) we shall need to take a long detour before returning to the ich kann.18
“Nature,” then, or at least “state of nature,” is the name in Kant for a situation where law is absent and therefore violence (at least potentially) holds sway. Any idea of “natural law” or “natural right” would then be clearly delimited by this transcendental argument: Any such supposed right would be merely a play of opposing forces (and nature would then be what it indeed is to a purely theoretical or scientific gaze). Natural law would in that case be mere law of nature, in the sense that the concepts of law and, therefore, of necessity are constitutive of nature in the theoretical sense. This would leave us with a nature that is on the one hand constitutively lawful (in the eyes of science) and on the other absolutely illegal (in the eyes of morality or politics). In leaving the state of nature, assuming that that is intelligible, man must leave lawfulness for legality, thus marking the becoming nonnatural of nature.
The very idea of natural right thus involves a paradox, clearly stated by Spinoza in his political writings. In nature, the only right is natural force, which is not a right strictly speaking; and once man has left nature, he is no longer natural enough to lay claim to nature as grounding any right. Here is what Spinoza says in the Political Treatise:
And so by natural right I understand the very laws or rules of nature, in accordance with which everything takes place, in other words, the power of nature itself. And so the natural right of universal nature, and consequently of every individual thing, extends as far as its power: and accordingly, whatever any man does after the laws of his nature, he does by the highest natural right, and he has as much right over nature as he has power.19
And, a little later:
But inasmuch as in the state of nature each is so long independent, as he can guard against oppression by another, and it is in vain for one man alone to try and guard against all, it follows hence that so long as the natural right of man is determined by the power of every individual, and belongs to everyone, so long it is a nonentity, existing in opinion rather than fact, as there is no assurance of making it good. And it is certain that the greater cause of fear every individual has, the less power, and consequently the less right, he possesses. To this must be added, that without mutual help men can hardly support life and cultivate the mind. And so our conclusion is, that that natural right, which is special to the human race, can hardly be conceived, except where men have general rights, and combine to defend the possession of the lands they inhabit and cultivate, to protect themselves, to repel all violence, and to live according to the general judgment of all. For the more there are that combine together, the more right they collectively possess. And if this is why the schoolmen want to call man a sociable animal—I mean because men in the state of nature can hardly be independent—I have nothing to say against them. (Political Treatise, 296–97)
First of all, natural right must be reduced to natural force, which means it disappears qua right. It follows that there can be natural right only once man has left nature behind. Natural right does not belong to nature20 but to what comes after nature. It is, therefore, no longer quite natural. Man, as agent (or patient) of nature’s getting outside itself in this way, is thus essentially a social or political animal (as Spinoza recognizes), a zoon politikon.21
It is not enough, however, to say that man leaves nature behind (or should leave nature behind) to become truly human. Spinoza clearly shows that “nature” is the name of its own having-left-itself-behind. From which we should conclude not that nature should be denied, abandoned, or denounced in the name of all its others, and especially history and politics (this was the gesture of the so-called human sciences and everything that still takes its bearings from them), but that “nature,” having not been left behind, insists now as that which one is supposed to have left behind. “Nature” then becomes the name not of a state supposed to have existed before social or political organization (a state before the State), but the name of the never-accomplished crossing of its own frontier.
This schema, which is classical (Aristotelian, as we shall see in a moment), gives man an exorbitant privilege with respect to what is usually thought of as an animality situated on the other side of a clear-cut frontier. The animal is on the “nature” side of the frontier that defines man as already having crossed it. Arcadia is for the sheep, to the extent that for man nature is an unsustainable state, and therefore not a state at all. There is no state of nature, except as a fiction in the text; in fact, nature is always already political. Which also means, paradoxically, that, even though one has always already left the state of nature behind, one cannot ever quite leave it (or, therefore, animality) behind:
In a civil constitution, which is the highest degree of artificial improvement of the human species’ good predisposition to the final end of its vocation, animality still manifests itself earlier and, at bottom, more powerfully than pure humanity. (Anthropology, 232)
Nature is therefore nothing other than its own frontier with humanity, a frontier that corresponds to politicization. The complex logic we have seen to be at work thus allows for all imaginable metaphors and analogies between nature and its others.22
Nature, then, is naturally and immediately unsustainable, goes outside itself in the shape of man in order to name itself nature after the fact and know itself teleologically in view of its own teleological knowing (teleological and not theoretical knowing, not demonstrable, and therefore analogical, as we shall see in detail in Chapter 5). We just said that this schema is essentially Aristotelian, which we shall now rapidly verify.
At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle affirms that the State is a type of association (koinonia), that every association is made with a view to an end (i.e., a good, because all human actions are carried out with a view to a good [agathon] or at least what is assumed to be a good). It follows that the association that includes all the others, and thus aims at the highest good, is the highest association: such an association is the State (polis). We should not assume, however, that all associations are of the same type (at least as concerns the exercise of power). One can bring out the difference between king, magistrate, and father, says Aristotle, who has Plato in his sights here, “in accordance with our regular method of investigation” (1252a 17–18), i.e., by analytically decomposing complexes into their elements, while expositing synthetically a process of natural growth that will lead from these simple elements, which are found at the origin [arches], to the whole that we are investigating.
This archeo-teleological analysis (or ana-synthesis) begins with the first association, the original association, which is marked by its necessity: that of man and woman, without which association nothing could ensue. This association, with a view to the continuation of the species by procreation, is also natural: “not of deliberate purpose, but with man as with the other animals and plants there is a natural instinct to desire to leave behind one another being of the same sort as oneself” (1252a 26–27). This is the first trace of what will be an erasure, in the name of nature, of sexual difference. In human procreation, the procreating individual does not know to what extent his or her offspring will be “of the same sort” as regards gender. But nature has also given to the male the gift of commanding (which no doubt separates humans from other animals and plants and thus is the first minimal mark of politics, which thus begins to separate itself from a certain animal or vegetable nature): “and the union of natural ruler and natural subject for the sake of security” (1252a 30–32). This first association, then, is the result of the individual’s inability to maintain him or herself in the state of nature, the necessity that there be two individuals who cannot be substituted the one for the other; here, the association involves an immediate asymmetry and hierarchization. In this case sexual difference is primordial. Both natural and the principle of the first step outside nature toward politics, it will be almost immediately forgotten or erased.
Another association (having proposed to begin at the beginning and to follow a line of development, Aristotle does not here make the order clear or linear): nature, which alone provides for procreation and which also gives command,23 also wants this command to be with the more intelligent or at least foresightful individual and wants that the less intelligent be a slave.24
We must not, however, think that these two associations (which are co-originary, or all but) can be superimposed on each other. It does not follow from the equally “natural” character of these two relations that the woman, who is subject to the command of the man, should be in the position of the slave, the nonintelligent (or else, we could say, if she is in the position of a slave, that is not natural, or follows the will of a nature other than the nature that will become political). For it is tempting to confuse woman and slave in this analysis, and Aristotle thwarts that temptation by making this confusion the mark of the non-Greek, the barbarian, the one who is outside the bounds of the city we are on our way to defining. If the woman is not the slave, this is again because of natural teleology: nature destines each being to one end, and so if one is a woman one cannot simply be a slave:
Thus the female and the slave are by nature distinct (for nature makes [. . .] one thing for one purpose; for so each tool will be turned out in the finest perfection, if it serves not many uses but one). Yet among barbarians the female and the slave have the same rank; and the cause of this is that barbarians have no natural rulers, but with them the conjugal partnership is a partnership of female slave and male slave. (Politics, 1252b 1–7)
The barbarians confuse woman and slave and by that very fact are slaves, through lack of intelligence, through stupidity: Whoever confuses woman and slave must by that very fact be a slave. Barbarity is not just a matter of linguistic identification but of the confusion of naturally willed hierarchies: The barbarians are therefore both more natural than the Greeks, closer to the origin (more brutish, in a word), and much less natural because they are incapable of following nature’s commands when it comes to commanding. The barbarians, all naturally slaves, are thus incapable of authority. They do not command, or rather only command their women, but with the wrong form of command: the one that would be appropriate for a master—which they cannot be, for want of intelligence—to exercise over true slaves.
The relations that Aristotle is positing between these first two associations are not entirely clear. The French translation of the Politics by J. Tricot (Paris: Vrin, 1995), the one used in the original writing of this book, tries to separate them out by associating the commanding-commanded relation exclusively with the master-slave couple. I prefer the interpretation that links this relation both to the man-woman couple and the master-slave couple, without for all that suggesting that the woman simply is a slave. This interpretation can find support in the Economics, for which woman and slave are both part of the man’s goods (1343a 17), and, more importantly, by the famous later discussion of slavery in the Politics, where the example of the man-woman couple returns to shore up the thesis of the natural status of the relation of subordination in general: “As between the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject” (1254b 13–14). This first book of the Politics can appear to posit the equiprimordiality of three relations, at least for the analysis of the family—master-slave, husband-wife, father-children—but the deduction of slavery that suggests the priority of the male-female relation is based on the analogical claim about the authority of the soul over the body (“it is in a living creature, as we say, that it is first possible to discern the rule both of master and of statesman: for the soul rules the body with the sway of a master, the intelligence rules the appetites with that of a statesman or a king” [1254b 1–5]), then passing via the relations between man and animals and men and women, before concluding that “the same must also necessarily apply in the case of mankind as a whole” (1254b 15). So it seems that the male-female relation does indeed precede the master-slave relation in the order of nature. But this whole argument is affected by a twist that is hard to ignore, to the extent that its general principle is that “to discover what is natural we must study it preferably in things that are in a natural state, and not in specimens that are degenerate” (1253a 35): Nature is, naturally enough, what we find in nature.
The Economics (1343b 25–1344a 8) ground the power relation between man and woman on natural qualities (strength/weakness, courage/timidity, outside/inside, activity/passivity, education/nourishment), which will be standard elements of Western culture as regards sexual difference, but (at least in Book III, probably apocryphal) explicitly give woman authority over the inner domestic space (as will also be the case in both Kant and Levinas). In any case, the authority that may devolve to the woman (or the slave-overseer) remains essentially limited and so, as with the barbarians, subject to the paradox of more or less natural—slaves and women remain closer to nature in that they cannot progress to the more properly political, and to that extent less natural, levels of authority, and so are not in fact so natural, given that it is by becoming political that man will fulfill his natural finality. But this movement that takes man out of the house and into the City might also make him flee the City itself and destroy its integrity. It will follow (notably in Hegel, with the irony of the community) that only a certain femininity can guarantee the maintenance of any political organization, precisely by maintaining it under the sign of nature, whence it definitionally emerges, but into which it risks falling back at any moment.25 There is more than a trace of this already in Aristotle when he recognizes that the authority of man over woman—which is natural, as we have seen—is nonetheless political (which implies that women, unlike slaves, indeed possess the deliberative part of the soul [1260a 12–13]), even if in her case that part is, mysteriously enough, devoid of authority.
We are not yet at the end of the difficulties presented by the relation between these two (equi-)primordial associations. The next association in the synthetic line followed by Aristotle is the household, the oikos, formed by association of the two prior associations. Henceforth, subsequent associations are going to be formed by simple aggregation (beyond the household, further associations will be formed by the association of apparently similar associations), but here we have an asymmetrical association between two already asymmetrical associations: the man-woman association marked by the asymmetry of sexual difference and by a certain power relation that remains (and in the Politics at least will remain) ill-defined; and the master-slave association marked by the asymmetry of command, grounded in the fact of being intelligent or not.26 The point where these two associations meet is man: not anthropos but aner, the male, because the husband of one is the master of the other. The oikos is, thus, natural, just like the other associations: “The partnership that comes about in the course of nature for everyday purposes is the ‘house’, [. . . made up of] ‘meal-tub-fellows’ [. . .] ‘manger-fellows’ ” (1252b 12–15).
The oikos can now associate with other oikoi to form, still naturally, what Aristotle calls a “village” (komē). In fact, the village retains the traces of the asymmetries we have identified at work in its component parts, because a village is less an association of oikoi on the same footing than a grouping hierarchized according to a genealogical history, in that it is formed of an oikos and other oikoi that are its colonies or its offspring (apoikiai), populated by children and grandchildren (homogalaktas, those fed with the same milk). The village has, in any case, taken a step toward the polis itself, which authorizes a series of analogies despite Aristotle’s caution when he opens his book by warning against any confusion of household and State:
The primary partnership made up of several households for the satisfaction of not mere daily needs is the village. The village according to the most natural account seems to be a colony from a household, formed of those whom some people speak of as “fellow-sucklings,” sons and sons’ sons. It is owing to this that our cities were at first under royal sway and that foreign races [ta ethne] are so still, because they were made up of parts that were under royal rule. (1252b 17–21)
We then arrive at the polis, formed by the “natural” association of several villages, with a view to autarkeia, a self-sufficiency that goes beyond mere subsistence but that also aims at the good life.27
As we have said, this is supposed to be a natural progression, which begins from the individual incapable of sustaining him or herself in nature and ends up in self-sufficiency, autarkeia, supposed to be reached only at the level of the State. At each stage, one loses and gains in “nature,” for at every stage mankind gets further from the origin (which is nature), but at each stage supposedly realizes a little more fully his “nature,” which is, as is all too well-known, to be zoon politikon. The polis is, then, the natural fruit of a natural and quasi-genetic process. The polis, the association furthest removed from the natural origin, in fact capitalizes the nature of each stage of the process, just by being its end:
The partnership finally composed of several villages is the city-state; it has at last attained the limit of virtually complete self-sufficiency, and thus, while it comes into existence for the sake of life, it exists for the good life. Hence every city-state exists by nature, inasmuch as the first partnerships so exist; for the city-state is the end of the other partnerships, and nature is an end, since that which each thing is when its growth is completed we speak of as being the nature of each thing [telos gar aute ekeinon e de physis telos estin], for instance of a man, a horse, a household. Again, the object for which a thing exists, its end, is its chief good; and self-sufficiency is an end, and a chief good. From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal. (1252b 30–1253a 2)
The polis is, then, not only natural, a natural object among others, a natural association among other natural associations, but it is also the very nature of these other natural associations from which is proceeds and from which it is born. Precisely because it is the end of the process, it is the true nature of that process, the nature of nature. The associations of men and women, masters and slaves, households and villages, are themselves natural, but in fact attain their nature, or the nature of their nature, only in the polis in which they reach, or all but reach, their end (i.e., self-sufficiency), which is the end and the good of nature in general. Man as the becoming-politics of nature is thus the end of nature as zoon politikon: The process is one of moving to ever (no) more nature.28
This double status of nature explains why the argumentation can appear to reverse direction here. In a gesture that will resonate throughout the tradition at least up until Marx, Aristotle proudly follows the analytic order of decomposition, all the while telling a story that starts off synthetically from the origin thus discovered: The method moves upstream and divides things up; the exposition moves downstream, finding that each association of elements is born of the preceding one. Just as narrative in general (as we have known since Barthes and Genette at least)29 is structured by a final causality presenting itself as a linear causality, according to the paralogisms of post hoc ergo propter hoc and hysteron proteron—themselves denounced as sophistical by Aristotle himself30—and can thus be said to have its end before its beginning, so we can say that the polis, the end of the story Aristotle tells, is, in fact, the beginning, or even precedes the beginning, and so Aristotle can say that it is “naturally prior” (proteron de te physei, this pretension to absolute priority being the very nature of nature) to the associations that appeared to precede it. If the polis comes at the end of a natural process, all of whose stages were natural, then the fact is that those states were not yet entirely natural, to the extent that the nature of nature is to tend toward the autarkeia that is realized (more or less realized) only at the end. The end, which is nature, arrives only at the end, which is therefore the true beginning:
Thus also the city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense, like the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a hand; because a hand in those circumstances will be a hand spoiled, and all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer such as to perform their function they must not be said to be the same things, but to bear their names in an equivocal sense. It is clear therefore that the state is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. (1253a 19–29)
Man is political to the extent that he becomes natural qua member of a polis. Politics does not so much come about because man leaves nature, but because man is only fully natural to the extent that he tends, naturally, to be part of the polis. One might wonder why man should be pre-eminently destined for this political nature (for there are many animals for whom an isolated individual is in principle no more self-sufficient than an isolated human, and indeed there are many other political animals, as Aristotle recognizes). This is because of logos, for man is the most political animal only to the extent that he is an animal endowed with speech, and thereby capable of the good (i.e., the end), for discourse is teleologically caused by its practical purposiveness:
And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech [logos]. The mere voice [phonē], it is true, can indicate [semeion] pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to indicate [semanein] those sensations to one another), but speech is designed to indicate [sempheron] the advantageous and the harmful [to deloun kai to blaberon], and therefore also the right and the wrong [dikaion kai to adikon; the just and the unjust]; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad [agathon kai kakon] and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state. (1253a 7–18)
Man is, then, the animal that he is, “rational” or at least language-using, to the extent that his nature is to realize the end of nature by defining himself from the start as a practical member of a polis. It follows that a man who does not do so is not truly human, like the stone hand is not truly a hand, and that by not naturally being member of a polis, man comes back to another, denatured nature—that of brute beasts or gods.
By suggesting an essential continuity between Aristotle’s natural teleology and Kant’s, I might seem to be ignoring all of Heidegger’s warnings as to what gets lost in the transition and translation of Greek into Latin and beyond: Physis is not natura, nor therefore Natur or nature, and by behaving as though we were dealing with synonyms here, we are dismissing everything that separates a physis thought of as blossoming and perdurance and a natura thought as “the motions of material things.”31 However, as Heidegger is the first to admit, the word physis in Greek philosophy “began quite early to take on a more restrictive sense” that prefigures the Roman translation as natura (as would be the case in Aristotle’s Physics, for example). This would mean that there is a pretranslation already inscribed in the Greek term, at least in some of its usages, that would have guided in advance the “de-naturing” translation. It is true that, wanting to show that the supposedly originary sense is not entirely lost in Greek philosophy, Heidegger quotes Aristotle himself, and more especially the famous opening of Book γ of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle defines metaphysics as the science of being qua being, to on e on (1003a 20; curiously though, Heidegger does not mention here Metaphysics δ, §4 [1014b 16ff], which deals much more directly with physis). Even within Heidegger’s perspective, we might be tempted to try to justify our hypothesis of a profound continuity between Aristotle and Kant by imagining that the word physis in the Politics would correspond to the more restricted and “physical” use of the word, which could then communicate with Kant’s “modern” usage—but this would not be a very plausible hypothesis, as it seems clear that physis in the passages we have just been reading is far from the restricted sense that Heidegger is tracking. So we might want to prefer the converse possibility, according to which there would remain in the restricted, Roman and post-Roman translation of physis at least a trace of the supposedly originary sense and that this trace would be operative in Kant (at least), even where he seems to come close to a modern and “scientific” sense of nature. Thus, for example, the first sentence of the Preface to the Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science (tr. Michael Friedman in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 183) invokes a “formal” sense of nature (“the first inner principle of all that belongs to the existence of a thing”), which is distinct from the “material” sense that is close to what Heidegger attributes to the Latin translation and that seems to retain an echo, however distant, of the supposedly “originary” sense of blossoming and perdurance. (See too Critique of Pure Reason A419/B446n.) This hypothesis would have the advantage of explaining at least the possibility for Heidegger to claim some access to this original sense, to “hear with a Greek ear” and to retranslate it for us, but would also tend to avoid the powerful Heideggerian pathos about the Greek language and the supposed primary sense of words.32
According to Aristotle, a man who does not naturally belong in the polis, who does not assume his political nature, falls precisely into what Kant, after many others, will call the state of nature—warfare:
From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the “clanless, lawless, hearthless” man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also “a lover of war”) inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts. (1253a 3–5)
This counter-natural tendency, the possibility of which at least is here admitted into nature by Aristotle (it is possible that a man regress naturally from his nature toward that of the brutes, and, in fact, below that of the brutes, because that a brute be a brute is in the nature of a brute, but that a man be a brute is clearly enough counter-purposive, and thus in opposition to the nature of nature, which counter-purposiveness, in the human political context, leads to war), will be explicitly and dialectically integrated by Kant, as we have seen, into the very concept of “nature” itself:
[. . .] the unsocial sociability of men, that is, their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up. This propensity is obviously rooted in human nature. Man has an inclination to live in society, since he feels in this state more like a man, that is, he feels able to develop his natural capacities. But he also has a great tendency to live as an individual, to isolate himself, since he also encounters in himself the unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas. (KPW, 44)33
We left Kant at the moment when the ich kann of the transition from state of nature to state of right was causing us a problem. The “I can” seemed to resolve into an intractable dilemma, given the ambiguity of the verb: capacity or right? Are we any further along after our detour via Aristotle? Yes and no. Because we have seen that it is quite possible to think a nature such that it is naturally possible to leave it while yet remaining in it. In the Politics, man leaves pure natural necessity by entering into the polis, but the polis is not only natural but the most natural because it is the natural end of nature. Kant gives us exactly this process in which nature turns into its other while remaining itself in, for example, the fifth proposition of the “Idea for a Universal History:”
The highest purpose of nature—i.e. the development of all natural capacities—can be fulfilled for mankind only in society, and nature intends that man should accomplish this, and indeed all his appointed ends, by his own efforts. This purpose can be fulfilled only in a society which has not only the greatest freedom, and therefore a continual antagonism among its members, but also the most precise specification and preservation of the limits of this freedom in order that it can co-exist with the freedom of others. The highest task which nature has set for mankind must therefore be that of establishing a society in which freedom under external laws would be combined to the greatest possible extent with irresistible force, in other words of establishing a perfectly just civil constitution. For only through the solution and fulfilment of this task can nature accomplish its other intentions with our species. (KPW, 45–46)
Nature, then, pushes us to leave nature and enter into the law. However, this departure is said still to be natural so as not to choose between necessity and obligation. We were trying to find out if the departure were made by force (natural necessity) or right (moral obligation), or whether the relation between force and right had to be thought otherwise in view of the paradoxes we encountered when we tried to choose between them. It is perhaps no surprise, given the natural character of everything that is happening here (nature is natural; leaving nature is natural; the polis is natural) that Kant will reply: both force and right. Men leave the state of nature by necessity, and they ought to leave it. Here first is necessity, more marked in the text on universal history:
Man, who is otherwise so enamoured with unrestrained freedom, is forced to enter this state of restriction by sheer necessity. And this is indeed the most stringent of all forms of necessity, for it is imposed by men upon themselves, in that their inclinations make it impossible for them to exist side by side for long in a state of wild freedom. (KPW, 46)
And then obligation, especially marked in later texts, such as the Perpetual Peace essay (“can and ought to demand of the others that they should enter with it into a constitution” [KPW, 102]) or the “Doctrine of Right” (“a state of nature [. . .] a state one ought to leave in order to enter a lawful condition” [§61, MM, 119, emphasis added]). Is it necessary to enter into right (in which case one remains, as it were, still subject to the state of nature, to natural necessity) or is it an obligation (by natural right: in which case the state of nature is already a state of right)? A law of nature or a natural law? Kant does indeed say that in a perfect civil constitution, right annexes to itself an irresistible force, which would make it turn back into something just like nature (in the supposedly “restricted” sense of the term), a simulacrum of nature.34 For the problem that is tormenting these texts of Aristotle as much as those of Kant depends on the very structure (or the nature) of the frontier itself: If we cross the frontier between nature and right by nature, by necessity and natural force, we remain short of the frontier, on the side of nature, while claiming to cross it. If, however, we cross the frontier out of duty, we do not really cross it, because we were already on the other side, in right, just when we were supposed not to be there yet. The frontier between nature and right, then, does not really exist, even if there is this frontier. The nonlinear dynamics of these relations between nature and its others—physis and nomos, necessity and obligation, violence and peace, the always-already but yet never accomplished crossing of the frontier that separates these opposing terms—is precisely what we are here calling “nature,” some paradoxical consequences of which we are just beginning to see.
1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 2: “Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities, or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse” (tr. Ben Fowkes [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1976], 182). And, for the value of nature, Grundrisse (tr. Martin Nicolaus [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973], 204), where barter, “the first phenomenal form of exchange-value” begins “accidentally” “at the borders of the natural communities, in their contact with strangers.” Accidentally or contingently, where such communities touch each other (contingere from con-tangere). As we shall see, the frontier is always a place of contingency.
2. Aristotle: “the members of the primitive household used to share commodities that were all their own, whereas on the contrary a group divided into several households participated also in a number of commodities belonging to their neighbors, according to their needs for which they were forced to make their interchanges by way of barter, as also many barbarian tribes do still; for such tribes do not go beyond exchanging actual commodities for actual commodities, for example giving and taking wine for corn, and so with the various other things of the sort. Exchange on these lines therefore is not contrary to nature, nor is it any branch of the art of wealth-getting, for it existed for the replenishment of natural self-sufficiency; yet out of it the art of business in due course arose. For when they had come to supply themselves more from abroad by importing things in which they were deficient and exporting those of which they had a surplus, the employment of money necessarily came to be devised” (Politics, tr. H. Rackham [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932], 1257a 20–32). Marx regularly pays tribute to Aristotle’s analyses in Capital (see, for example, 152).
3. See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, remark to §247, and more recently Michel Foucher, Fronts et frontières: un tour du monde géopolitique (Paris: Fayard, 1988).
4. Livy, The Early History of Rome, tr. Aubrey de Selincourt (London: Penguin Books, 1960), 37.
5. We could reread here Lyotard’s strange little text Le mur du pacifique (Paris: Galilée, 1979) as a way of wondering whether Rome might not be taken as the paradigmatic case of the frontier in general. I attempt a preliminary reading of this text in “ ‘Ces petits différends . . .’: Lyotard and Horace,” in Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction, 152–71 (London: Verso Books, 1994).
6. H.-O. Peitgen and P. H. Richter, The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1987), 19.
7. See the now classic book by Benoît Mandelbrot, Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1977), and the popularizing work by James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1988).
8. This is no doubt the major problem of Jean-François Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), tr. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi as The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983): Lyotard argues against crossing the frontier between language games but then does exactly that in finding a model for postmodern justice in postmodern science. His slightly later treatment in Le différend (1983) is more cautious in this respect.
9. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 2nd enlarged ed., 41–53 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) (hereinafter KPW), and Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, KPW, 93–120. I will not insist on everything that separates the manner and stakes of my reading from, for example, that of Jürgen Habermas, in La paix perpétuelle: le bicentenaire d’une idée kantienne, tr. Rainer Rochlitz (Paris: Le Cerf, 1996). Alongside the thinkers who have most influenced my reading (who indeed taught me how to read), most notably Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, my understanding of Kant owes a great deal to some more specialized essays and commentaries. Among those that have had the greatest impact, let me mention Eric Weil, Problèmes kantiens (Paris: Vrin, 1963); Gilles Deleuze, La philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: PUF, 1963); Françoise Proust, Kant: le ton de l’histoire (Paris: Payot, 1991); and, in English, Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) and A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World History in Kant (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
10. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), A312/B369 (hereinafter CPR).
11. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Mary Gregor, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8 (hereinafter CPrR).
12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, tr. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 116n. On Kant’s use of Latin, see also Jacques Derrida’s remarks in La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 104–5, tr. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod as The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 91–92.
13. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le discours de la syncope, I: Logodaedalus (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976), tr. Saul Anton as The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
14. This is the argument of the Critique of Teleological Judgment, which will detain us at great length in Chapter 5. See especially §75. Kant is extremely cautious in his appeal to Providence here, writing that “in contexts such as this, where we are concerned purely with theory and not with religion, we should also note that it is more in keeping with the limitations of human reason to speak of nature and not of providence, for reason, in dealing with cause and effect relationships, must keep within the bounds of possible experience. Modesty forbids us to speak of providence as something we can recognize, for this would mean donning the wings of Icarus and presuming to approach the mystery of its inscrutable intentions” (KPW, 109).
15. As explicated by Jacques Derrida in De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), esp. 361ff, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 255ff.
16. The very beginning of the Perpetual Peace text makes a distinction between a mere truce or suspension of hostilities (“ein bloßer Waffenstillstand, Aufschub der Feindseligkeiten”) and true peace, which “means an end to all hostilities, and to attach the adjective ‘perpetual’ to it is already suspiciously close to pleonasm” (KPW, 93).
17. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant cites Hobbes: “Hobbes’s statement, status hominum naturalis est bellum omnium in omnes, has no other fault apart from this: it should say, est status belli . . . etc. For, even though one may not concede that actual hostilities are the rule between human beings who do not stand under external and public laws, their condition (status iuridicus), i.e. the relationship in and through which they are capable of rights (of their acquisition and maintenance) is nonetheless one in which each of them wants to be himself the judge of what is his right vis-a-vis others, without however either having any security from others with respect to this right or offering them any: and this is a condition of war, wherein every man must be constantly armed against everybody else. Hobbes’s second statement, exeumdum esse e statu naturali, follows from the first: for this condition is a continual violation of the rights of all others through the presumption of being the judge in one’s own affairs and of not allowing any security to other human beings in theirs save one’s own power of choice” (tr. Allen Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 108n). Kant does not follow Hobbes further than this; see the whole second section of the essay on “Theory and Practice” (KPW, 61–92). In the Religion book, Kant distinguishes between a juridical state of nature and an ethical state of nature: It is possible (and, in fact, inevitable) to remain in the second even having left the first. For now, let’s note that if “state of nature” can be qualified as “ethical” or “juridical,” it is already not so very natural.
18. In §44 of the “Doctrine of Right” section of the Metaphysics of Morals (tr. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], [hereinafter MM]), Kant, having restated the argument we have just read, implicitly recognizes the existence of a right before right in the state of nature: “If no acquisition were recognized as rightful even in a provisional way prior to entering the civil condition, the civil condition itself would be impossible. For in terms of their form, laws concerning what is mine or yours in the state of nature contain the same thing that they prescribe in the civil condition, insofar as the civil condition is thought of by pure rational concepts alone. The difference is only that the civil condition provides the conditions under which these laws are put into effect (in keeping with distributive justice). So if external objects were not even provisionally mine or yours in the state of nature, there would also be no duties of Right with regard to them and therefore no command to leave the state of nature” (MM, 90).
19. Baruch Spinoza, A Theological-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, tr. R. H. M. Elwes (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1951), 292.
20. In fact, Kant says little about natural right and natural law. One finds the following, however, in the introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals: “Obligatory laws for which there can be an external lawgiving are called external laws (leges externae) in general. Those among them that can be recognized as obligatory a priori by reason even without external lawgiving are indeed external but natural laws, whereas those that do not bind without actual external lawgiving (and so without it would not be laws) are called positive laws. One can therefore conceive of external lawgiving that would contain only positive laws; but then a natural law would still have to precede it, which would establish the authority of the lawgiver (i.e., his authorization to bind others by his mere choice)” (MM, 17). So there is indeed a certain priority of natural law that gives law to positive law, but this natural law is anything but the law of nature as a putative state. Law always comes out of nature.
21. This is also, almost, the conclusion of the Anthropology: “The sum total of pragmatic anthropology, in respect to the vocation of the human being and the Characteristic of his formation, is the following. The human being is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself by means of the arts and sciences. No matter how great his animal tendency may be to give himself over passively to the impulses of comfort and good living, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacles that cling to him because of the crudity of his nature” (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, tr. Robert B. Louden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 229–30). I am not claiming that Kant is Spinozist; see, for example, CPrR, 85, and Critique of the Power of Judgment, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §§73 and 85 (hereinafter CJ), which we shall be reading in Chapter 5. For Kant’s reaction to an accusation of Spinozism, see “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” (KPW, 246n).
22. Thus, for example, this passage from the Anthropology in which the frontier between nature (as animality as well as natural mechanism) and nonnature (political organization) is constantly being traversed in both directions: “The human being was not meant to belong to a herd, like cattle, but to a hive, like the bee.—Necessity to be a member of some civil society or other./ The simplest, least artificial [i.e., most natural] way to establish such a society is to have one leader in this hive (monarchy).—But many such hives next to each other will soon attack each other like robber bees (war); not, however, as human beings do, in order to strengthen their own group by uniting with others—for here the comparison ends—but only to use by cunning or force other’s industry for themselves. Each people seeks to strengthen itself through the subjugation of neighboring peoples, either from the desire to expand or the fear of being swallowed up by the other unless one beats him to it. Therefore civil or foreign war in our species, as great an evil as it may be, is yet at the same time the incentive to pass from the crude state of nature to the civil state. War is like a mechanical device of Providence, where to be sure the struggling forces injure each other through collision, but are nevertheless still regularly kept going for a long time through the push and pull of other incentives” (Anthropology, 235). The extreme difficulty Kant has in bringing his analogy to a close comes from a reciprocal contamination of each side of the frontier by the other: on the political side mankind organizes himself into a beehive; on the natural side bees are therefore political animals. This movement (and the bees) can also be found at the beginning of the “Universal History” text: On the one hand, Kant draws a sharp frontier between animals, who simply follow their instincts (and who, therefore, have a “law-governed history,” as with bees and beavers [KPW, 41–42]), and men, who act willfully but not in fact always rationally; but on the other hand, it is precisely from observation of animals that we can draw the idea of a teleological system of nature pursuing an end.
23. The equivalence or confusion between commencement and commandment (arkhe and archon) in Aristotle is a theme strongly brought out by Sylviane Agacinski in Volume: philosophies et politiques de l’architecture (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 38–44.
24. The Economics (a text not certain to be entirely by Aristotle) is much clearer as to the order here: “nothing is more natural than the tie between female and male” (The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes, tr. E. S. Forster and G. C. Armstrong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], 2:1343b 7–8). As we shall see, however, the State itself can also be said to be the most natural association. This confusion at the origin is just what we are tracking under the name “nature.” The same principle of confusion is visible in the supplementary remarks to be found in the Economics on the naturality of procreation. Here it is specified that “among the other animals, this intercourse is not based on reason” but on instinct, whereas it is based on reason for human animals who are therefore less purely natural (especially as regards children, the closest final cause of the male-female association, with regard to whom the parents have a calculative relation that aims to secure an advantage later in life) (1342b 20–24). But because man behaves rationally in this respect, it also follows that he is also more natural than the other animals because he is closer to the ends of nature. Both the Politics and the Economics quote a line from Hesiod (“First and foremost a house, a woman, and an ox for the plough”), the former to see in the ox a figure of the slave, the second to insist on a primordiality of the maternal relation to the earth: “agriculture is natural; for by nature all derive their sustenance from their mother, and so men derive it from the earth” (1343a 30–1343b 1).
25. See too Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 210–11, tr. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand as Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 187–88.
26. Here too the Economics gives a more differentiated picture, distinguishing between slaves, for it turns out that some slaves are less slave than others (overseers, or those who “have more liberal occupations”), who deserve greater consideration.
27. See too Economics, 1343a 10–11: “A city is an aggregate [plethos] made up of households and land and property self-sufficient with regard to the good life.” The text of the Politics curiously qualifies the autarkeia of the polis as being “more or less,” “just as though,” “os epos eiein,” “so to speak,” “as it were.” See also 1261b 12–13, where Aristotle argues against Plato that self-sufficiency is not the same as unification or oneness (which are, in fact, exemplified by the non-self-sufficient individual) and so a less unified City has a greater chance of achieving the autonomy it needs. We shall see later the importance of these slight hesitations in the definition of the City in terms of its autarkeia.
28. See too Metaphysics A (tr. Hugh Tredennick [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933]), 982b 3–8: “that science is supreme, and superior to the subsidiary, which knows for what end each action is to be done; i.e. the Good in each particular case, and in general the highest Good in the whole of nature.” This end is also an end, what puts an end, in a mortal logic that will be giving us a great deal of food for thought: “Further, the Final cause of a thing is an end, and is such that it does not happen for the sake of some thing else, but all other things happen for its sake. So if there is to be a last term of this kind, the series will not be infinite; and if there is no such term, there will be no Final cause. Those who introduce infinity do not realize that they are abolishing the nature of the Good (although no one would attempt to do anything if he were not likely to reach some limit); nor would there be any intelligence in the world, because the man who has intelligence always acts for the sake of something, and this is a limit, because the end is a limit [telos peras estin]” (994b 8–16). According to the Nicomachean Ethics (1094a–b), the highest science is not, in fact, metaphysics but politics. This tension between philosophy and politics will run throughout the tradition, up to and including Jacques Rancière’s La mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995). Following the thread of nature, we shall be attempting to move behind this distinction between metaphysics and politics, just as later, on the basis of Kant’s teleology, we shall try to move behind the distinction between theory and practice.
29. See Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale du récit,” Communications 8 (1966): 7–33, tr. Stephen Heath as “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” in Image, Music, Text, 79–124 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et Motivation,” in Figures II, 71–99 (Paris: Seuil, 1969), tr. David Gorman as “Vraisemblance and Motivation,” Narrative 9, no. 3 (2001): 239–58. The practical demonstration of this is already to be found in Sartre’s early novel La Nausée (1938).
30. See, for example, Poetics, 1452a, and Sophistical Refutations, 167b.
31. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 17, and, more generally, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Pathmarks, tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 1–56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
32. The principle of this remark could be extended to the important 1939 text devoted explicitly to the concept of physis in Aristotle (“On the Essence and Concept of physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, I,” tr. Thomas Sheehan in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, 183–230 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]), and especially its slightly brutal discussion of Kant (200ff). I discuss this at greater length in the full version of “Emergencies,” Oxford Literary Review 18 (1997): 175–216, 210n21.
33. This is still an Aristotelian point. See an important passage at the beginning of the History of Animals, in which Aristotle fleshes out considerably the specificity of the human in the context of other animals, especially other political animals such as ants, wasps, bees, and cranes, and recognizes that man is “mixed” with respect to his gregarity and solitariness (487b 33–488a 14). “Mixed” here is a way of translating the verb epamphoterikein, which is used by Aristotle in his works on animals in situations where the phenomenon in question does not fall unambiguously on one side of a classificatory frontier: So the sea anemone is both animal and plant (Parts of Animals 681b 1), monkeys are both biped and quadruped (689b 32), seals are both sea animals and land animals (566b 27).
34. Perhaps this is the place to refer to Derrida’s fundamental text Force de loi, which explores this paradox on the basis of Pascal’s famous pensée that begins “Justice, force. It is just that what is just be followed, it is necessary that what is stronger be followed” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma [Paris: Seuil, 1962], no. 103). Curiously, in this text Derrida does not mention Paul de Man’s reading of the same pensée in “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. S. Greenblatt, 1–25 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). I sketched a critical reading of de Man’s reading in “Aberrations: De Man (and) the Machine,” in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters, 209–22 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), reprinted in Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso Books, 1995), 137–51.