Floyd Rudmin: Kant on War

Kant on War

By Floyd Rudmin
Counterpunch.org
January 1, 2010

Immanuel Kant was born on April 22, 1724, in Königsberg, East Prussia, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad. Kant is considered to be one of the greatest philosophers in the history of Western Civilization. He was also an opponent of perpetual war. Possibly influential in Kant’s thinking about war was the fact that his family were Pietists, which were a Lutheran sect similar to Quakers.

The European wars of Kant’s era included the Russo-Swedish War (1741–1743), the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the Seven Years War (1754–1763), the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), the Partitions of Poland (1772–1775), the American War of Independence (1775–1783), another Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790), the French Revolution (1789–1799), the Russo-Persian War (1796), and at the very end of his life, the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1797–1815).

The Seven Years War was probably the first “world war”, pitting Britain, Prussia, Portugal, and smaller German states against France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Saxony, and Spain, with fighting raging in Europe, North America, and India. Another modern aspect of this war was that it began as pre-emptive defense, when Prussia attacked Saxony based on suspicion that Austria and Russia were planning to attack Prussia. Another modern aspect of this war was that the small German states were proxies for the larger conflict between England and France each striving for global imperial dominance.

Kant published his booklet on “Perpetual Peace” in 1795. (See L. W. Beck’s 1963 translation in Kant on History (pp. 85-135), NY: Macmillan). As with the wars of his era, his essay has many modern aspects. First, as with our contemporary academics working to oppose war, Kant expected that his efforts would be dismissed by those in power, those who decide to make war. In his preface, Kant wrote (1795, p. 85) that “The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in now way threaten the security of the state”. But Kant (1795, p. 85) was nevertheless fearful that he might be accused of being a “traitor” or a “terrorist” for criticizing the militarism of the state, and cautiously closed his preface with the statement that “the author desires formally and emphatically to depreciate herewith any malevolent interpretation which might be placed on his words”.

Kant’s essay was comprised of six preliminary articles for perpetual peace, and three over-riding definitive articles. Kant’s (1795, pp. 85-91) six preliminary articles derive from the rational requirement to avoid contradictions. For example, Article 1 states that “No treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is a tacitly reserved matter for a future war” because that would essentially be a contract made in bad faith and would furthermore violate the concept of a “peace treaty” which by definition terminates the causes of future wars.

Article 2 states that “No independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of another state” because that destroys the moral basis of the nation. Kant reasoned that a nation is by definition “a society of men whom no one else has any right to command”. For one nation to subsume another nation contradicts and destroys the essence of being a nation. Our contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unresolved and maybe unresolvable, in part, because Israel had taken dominion of another people, the Palestinians, who Israel will not accept as part of the Israeli state but also will not allow to be a coexisting state. The logic of the conflict thus leads to the conclusion that Palestinians have to somehow disappear, by enclosing them behind high walls, by emigration, by denying them the resources for survival, etc.

Continued. . .