Progress thru War and Collectivism

[anthony]

By Stephen Hicks 

Kant on collectivism and war [EP]

 January 26, 2010 Meta  2 Comments Collectivism, Emile, Enlightenment, German philosophy, Heinrich Heine, Idea for a Universal History, Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent, Immanuel Kant, instinct, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, liberalism, Lutheranism, Neo-Enlightenment, Pietist, Prussia, Reason, Review of Herder, self-sacrifice, skeptical, Speculative Beginning of Human History, subjectivist epistemology, The End of All Things, war

[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]

Kant on collectivism and war

Of the major figures in German philosophy in the modern era, Kant is perhaps the one most influenced by Enlightenment social thought.

There is a clear intellectual connection between Rousseau and Kant. Biographers often repeat Heinrich Heine’s anecdote about how Kant always took his afternoon walk at a set time, a time so regular that neighbors could set their clocks by his appearance—except on one occasion he was late for his walk because he had been so caught up in reading Rousseau’s Emile that he lost track of time. Kant had been raised as a Pietist, a version of Lutheranism that emphasized simplicity and eschewed external decoration. Kant therefore had no pictures or paintings hanging anywhere on the walls of his house—with one exception: over his desk in his study hung a picture of Rousseau.[37] Wrote Kant, “I learned to honor mankind from reading Rousseau.”[38]

Neo-Enlightenment thinkers attack Kant for two things: his skeptical and subjectivist epistemology and his ethic of selfless duty. Kant’s account of reason divorces it from cognitive contact with reality, thus destroying knowledge; and his account of ethics divorces morality from happiness, thus destroying the purpose of life. As discussed in Chapter Two, Kant’s powerful arguments were a mighty blow to the Enlightenment.

Politically, however, Kant is sometimes considered to be a liberal, and in the context of eighteenth-century Prussia there is some truth to that. In the context of Enlightenment liberalism, however, Kant diverged from liberalism in two major respects: his collectivism and his advocacy of war as a means to collectivist ends.

In a 1784 essay, “Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent,” Kant asserted that there is a necessary destiny for the human species. Nature has a plan. It is, however, “a hidden plan of nature,”[39] and as such it is one that requires special discernment by philosophers. That destiny is the full development of all of man’s natural capacities, especially man’s reason.[40]

By “man” here, Kant did not mean the individual. Nature’s goal is a collectivist one: the development of the species. Man’s capacities, Kant explained, are “to be completely developed only in the species, not in the individual.”[41] The individual is merely fodder for nature’s goal, as Kant put it in his “Review of Herder”: “nature allows us to see nothing else than that it abandons individuals to complete destruction and only maintains the type.”[4] And again, in his 1786 “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” Kant argued that the “path that for the species leads toprogress from the worse to the better does not do so for the individual.”[43] The development of the individual is in conflict with the development of the species, and only the development of the species counts.

But it is also not the case that the species’ development is about happiness or fulfillment. “Nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well.”[44] The individual and even all existing individuals collectively now living are merely a stage in a process, and their suffering is of no account in the light of nature’s ultimate end. In fact, Kant argued, man should suffer, and deservedly so. Man is a sinful creature, a creature that is inclined to follow its own desires and not the demands of duty. Echoing Rousseau, Kant blamed mankind for having chosen to use reason when our instincts could have served us perfectly well.[45] And now that reason has awakened it has combined with self-interest to pursue all sorts of unnecessary and depraved desires. Thus the source of our vaunted freedom, Kant wrote, is also our original sin: “the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.”[46]

Accordingly, Kant admonished us, “we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves as moral.”[47] Man is a creature made of “warped wood.”[48] Powerful forces are therefore needed in order to attempt to straighten our warped natures.

One of those forces is morality, a morality of strict and uncompromising duty that opposes man’s animal inclinations. A moral life is one that no rational person would “wish that it should be longer than it actually is,”[49] but one has a duty to live and develop oneself[50] and thereby the species. Inculcating this morality in man is one of nature’s forces.

Another force to straighten the warped wood is political. Man is “an animal that, if he lives among other members of his species, has need of a master.” And that is because “his selfish animal propensities induce him to except himself from [moral rules] wherever he can.” Kant then introduced his version of Rousseau’s general will. Politically, man “thus requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”[51]

However, strict duty and political masters are not enough. Nature has devised an additional strategy for bringing the species man to higher development. That strategy is war. As Kant wrote in his “Idea for a Universal History”: “The means that nature uses to bring about the development of all of man’s capacities is the antagonism among them in society.”[52] Thus, conflict, antagonism, and war are good. They destroy many lives, but they are nature’s way of bringing forth the higher development of man’s capacities. “At the stage of culture at which the human race still stands,” Kant stated bluntly in “Speculative Beginning,” “war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.”[53] Peace would be a moral disaster, so we are duty-bound not to shrink from war.[54]

Out of this self-sacrifice of individuals and the war of nations, Kant hoped, the species would become fully developed, and an international and cosmopolitan federation of states would live peacefully and harmoniously, making possible within themselves the complete moral development of their members.[55] Then, as Kant concluded in a 1794 essay entitled “The End of All Things,” men would finally be in a position to prepare themselves for the day of “judgment of forgiveness or damnation by the judge of the world.”[56] This is the hidden plan of nature; it is destined to happen; so we know what we have to look forward to.

[anthony]

19 hours ago, anthony said:

By Stephen Hicks 

Kant on collectivism and war [EP]

 January 26, 2010 Meta  2 Comments Collectivism, Emile, Enlightenment, German philosophy, Heinrich Heine, Idea for a Universal History, Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent, Immanuel Kant, instinct, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, liberalism, Lutheranism, Neo-Enlightenment, Pietist, Prussia, Reason, Review of Herder, self-sacrifice, skeptical, Speculative Beginning of Human History, subjectivist epistemology, The End of All Things, war

[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]

Kant on collectivism and war

Of the major figures in German philosophy in the modern era, Kant is perhaps the one most influenced by Enlightenment social thought.

There is a clear intellectual connection between Rousseau and Kant. Biographers often repeat Heinrich Heine’s anecdote about how Kant always took his afternoon walk at a set time, a time so regular that neighbors could set their clocks by his appearance—except on one occasion he was late for his walk because he had been so caught up in reading Rousseau’s Emile that he lost track of time. Kant had been raised as a Pietist, a version of Lutheranism that emphasized simplicity and eschewed external decoration. Kant therefore had no pictures or paintings hanging anywhere on the walls of his house—with one exception: over his desk in his study hung a picture of Rousseau.[37] Wrote Kant, “I learned to honor mankind from reading Rousseau.”[38]

Neo-Enlightenment thinkers attack Kant for two things: his skeptical and subjectivist epistemology and his ethic of selfless duty. Kant’s account of reason divorces it from cognitive contact with reality, thus destroying knowledge; and his account of ethics divorces morality from happiness, thus destroying the purpose of life. As discussed in Chapter Two, Kant’s powerful arguments were a mighty blow to the Enlightenment.

Politically, however, Kant is sometimes considered to be a liberal, and in the context of eighteenth-century Prussia there is some truth to that. In the context of Enlightenment liberalism, however, Kant diverged from liberalism in two major respects: his collectivism and his advocacy of war as a means to collectivist ends.

In a 1784 essay, “Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent,” Kant asserted that there is a necessary destiny for the human species. Nature has a plan. It is, however, “a hidden plan of nature,”[39] and as such it is one that requires special discernment by philosophers. That destiny is the full development of all of man’s natural capacities, especially man’s reason.[40]

By “man” here, Kant did not mean the individual. Nature’s goal is a collectivist one: the development of the species. Man’s capacities, Kant explained, are “to be completely developed only in the species, not in the individual.”[41] The individual is merely fodder for nature’s goal, as Kant put it in his “Review of Herder”: “nature allows us to see nothing else than that it abandons individuals to complete destruction and only maintains the type.”[4] And again, in his 1786 “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” Kant argued that the “path that for the species leads toprogress from the worse to the better does not do so for the individual.”[43] The development of the individual is in conflict with the development of the species, and only the development of the species counts.

But it is also not the case that the species’ development is about happiness or fulfillment. “Nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well.”[44] The individual and even all existing individuals collectively now living are merely a stage in a process, and their suffering is of no account in the light of nature’s ultimate end. In fact, Kant argued, man should suffer, and deservedly so. Man is a sinful creature, a creature that is inclined to follow its own desires and not the demands of duty. Echoing Rousseau, Kant blamed mankind for having chosen to use reason when our instincts could have served us perfectly well.[45] And now that reason has awakened it has combined with self-interest to pursue all sorts of unnecessary and depraved desires. Thus the source of our vaunted freedom, Kant wrote, is also our original sin: “the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.”[46]

Accordingly, Kant admonished us, “we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves as moral.”[47] Man is a creature made of “warped wood.”[48] Powerful forces are therefore needed in order to attempt to straighten our warped natures.

One of those forces is morality, a morality of strict and uncompromising duty that opposes man’s animal inclinations. A moral life is one that no rational person would “wish that it should be longer than it actually is,”[49] but one has a duty to live and develop oneself[50] and thereby the species. Inculcating this morality in man is one of nature’s forces.

Another force to straighten the warped wood is political. Man is “an animal that, if he lives among other members of his species, has need of a master.” And that is because “his selfish animal propensities induce him to except himself from [moral rules] wherever he can.” Kant then introduced his version of Rousseau’s general will. Politically, man “thus requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”[51]

However, strict duty and political masters are not enough. Nature has devised an additional strategy for bringing the species man to higher development. That strategy is war. As Kant wrote in his “Idea for a Universal History”: “The means that nature uses to bring about the development of all of man’s capacities is the antagonism among them in society.”[52] Thus, conflict, antagonism, and war are good. They destroy many lives, but they are nature’s way of bringing forth the higher development of man’s capacities. “At the stage of culture at which the human race still stands,” Kant stated bluntly in “Speculative Beginning,” “war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.”[53] Peace would be a moral disaster, so we are duty-bound not to shrink from war.[54]

Out of this self-sacrifice of individuals and the war of nations, Kant hoped, the species would become fully developed, and an international and cosmopolitan federation of states would live peacefully and harmoniously, making possible within themselves the complete moral development of their members.[55] Then, as Kant concluded in a 1794 essay entitled “The End of All Things,” men would finally be in a position to prepare themselves for the day of “judgment of forgiveness or damnation by the judge of the world.”[56] This is the hidden plan of nature; it is destined to happen; so we know what we have to look forward to.

6

"They destroy many lives, but they are nature's way ...etc."

"...the species would become fully developed, and an international and cosmopolitan federation of states would live peacefully and harmoniously..."

"War is an indispensable means for bringing it [human race] to a still higher stage".  I.K.

It is hard for me not to draw connections from Kant's writing to contemporary calls for an ambiguous "globalism" - apparently directed by the ideology of "Progressivism". (I mean, I try not to glibly make any obvious conclusions in such complex subjects... ;))

Fascinating, by way of Hicks brief essay, to see Kant in this light and in his own words, quite confirming for me from dipping-in to writing about and by him, the sense I had all through that he was *up to something*, a preconceived plan. I'll venture the idea that Kant softened up man with his view of nature, beauty as the moral good, ran it into a duty ethics which denies personal  "inclination'", compromised individualism and volition ... and above all, introduced self-doubt with an attack on man's mind (limiting its efficacy to directly grasp reality as it is) and followed these by laying down the necessity to succumb to men's natural "antagonism" (our "instincts"), by undertaking wars. That somehow fulfills nature's purpose of uplifting our species, and finally we can gather men into societies which exist in harmony under a federation of states.

Simple: Make obedient men and women who can be easily collectivized and controlled and we can 'progress' to Universal Harmony. Which rings far too many bells heard from the New Left to be coincidental to me.

I won't, and could never summarize the massive bulk of the genius' writing, but I ask, does it not look somewhat as if Kant began at the end, so to speak, with a pseudo-liberal political dispensation that promises to maintain peace and brotherhood, in harmony with the "hidden plan of nature", so to await the final judgment ... and therefore worked his philosophy 'backwards' (in contrast with Objectivist method), that of molding man and men to fit within his predestined end, carrying out the ~purposiveness~ of his mystical "Nature's way"?

It is immaterial to me whether Kant was "the most evil, etc.", but if he had any philosophical influence on modern thinking which he noticeably has, many say, and in 'Progressivism' (along with other thinkers - like Karl Marx, of course), if only by the logical consequences of his doctrine, even assuming he was innocently unaware through his "good intentions", he was no sweetheart. Add his cavalier attitude to sacrificing individual lives and his utilitarian death by warfare, and his master plan must be rejected, by Objectivists and libertarians.