Waxing and Waning Republics and Their Citizens

The democracy of ancient Athens managed, in effect, to vote itself out of existence via military misjudgments during the Peloponnesian War.  The Roman Republic had a mostly unwritten tradition (constitution) of limitations upon its democratic assemblies; but the Gracchi brothers, while serving as tribunes, undermined those limitations by imposing various costly policies: Land redistribution in the country, cheap grain in the cities, shovel-ready infrastructure jobs for the unemployed, and overseas colonies for the landless.  Opposition to these policies initiated a new tradition of political violence culminating in the collapse of the Roman Republic and the institution of the Roman Empire.

In the subsequent Western tradition, there is a history of kings, oligarchs, tyrants, or democratic assemblies presiding over populations of subjects, clients, persons of indefinite servitude, or citizens, etc.  (This listing is not meant to be exhaustive.)  To the extent that democracies and republics have track records of fairly miraculous creation and ultimate collapse, one expects any given population occasionally to transition between a more-democratic status and a less-democratic status.  Indeed, an analytic industry for ranking democracies has sprung up online.  In other words, democracies and republics wax and wane.

Kings, oligarchs, and tyrants typically seize power and assign populations to subordinate status.  Successful democratic uprisings or constitutional conventions are relatively rare and assign populations to the status of citizen.  It would seem that a relatively leisured class - - of independent means, if not of wealth - - must first exist and take the lead in forming a republic before an entire population can assume its role as citizens.  Theorists typically assume that a republic is maintained in existence by all its citizens.

If, as Benjamin Franklin said, the U.S. Constitutional Convention “gave you a Republic, if you can keep it”; and if a class of independent U.S. citizens is necessary for the maintenance of the U.S. as a republic; then any factors that degrade and depopulate the class of independent U.S. citizens also undermines the Republic established among them. This is the current writer’s formulation of the concern expressed by the author Victor Davis Hanson in his excellent book, The Dying Citizen (Basic Books, 2021).  In the Introduction to his book, Hanson mentions the theory of democracy as expounded by Kant in Teil I of his Die Metaphysik der Sitten.  (This Part I is also known in English as The Metaphysical Elements of Justice.)  This blog posting summarizes Kant’s work in this regard.

We note at once that the U.S. Constitutional Convention occurred in 1787, whereas Kant’s analyses of “perpetual peace” and “metaphysical elements of justice” appeared in 1795 and 1797, respectively.  These political developments seem to have developed in parallel from a common Zeitgeist.

In Section 44 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant states that the necessity of public lawful coercion is not empirical but rests on an a priori idea of reason, namely, that even if we imagine mankind before the institution of government to be entirely congenial and good-natured; individual men, nations, and states can never be certain of being free from future violence, because each man in a state of nature has a right to do what seems to him to be just.  (Note that a nation is a group of people with some commonality of language, history, socio-economic traditions, culture, religion, place of origin, etc.; whereas a state is a group of people under a common, lawful government with coercive power.)  If one wants a system of justice, then one must quit the state of nature and join in a civil society (societas civilis), i.e., a state that recognizes some things (external goods and intrinsic dignity) as one’s own.  Acquisition of things and of rights are only provisional as long as there is no sanction of public law.

In Section 45 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant further describes the state (civitas, sometimes rendered in English as civil state) as the union of a multitude of people under laws of justice.  Every state contains three authorities: The sovereign authority resides in the person of the legislator; the executive authority resides in the person of the ruler (who conforms to the law); and the judicial authority resides in the person of the judge (who decides who is due what in particular cases).

In Section 46 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant discusses the legislative authority and the citizen.  The members of civil society who are united for the purpose of making laws are called citizens (cives).  The citizen has three juridical attributes: First, he has the lawful freedom to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent.  Second, he is equal to all others before the law.  Third, he is civilly independent, owing his existence and support, not to someone else’s arbitrary will but rather to his own rights and industry as a member of the commonwealth.

Kant thinks that “fitness for voting is a prerequisite of being a citizen.”  Apprentices, servants, minors, and women - - on Kant’s view in 1797 - - are examples of dependent persons who are not themselves citizens and who do not have a right to vote, because they are not materially invested in the success of the state.  People without the right to vote may be designated as “fellow comrades of the state,” but not as citizens.  The presupposition seems to be that a citizen must be sufficiently muscular in order to wield the tools or war and commerce.  Hence, even the most enlightened, Kantian thought endorsed the concept of “material investment” as a prerequisite for voting and citizenship.

In Section 47 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant introduces the notion that the act by means of which the people constitute themselves as a state is the original contract.  The people give up their external freedom and take it back immediately as members of a commonwealth.  An individual abandons his wild, lawless freedom in order to find freedom within lawful dependency.

In the next blog posting we will summarize V. D. Hanson’s discussion of the contemporary waning of a U.S. citizenry overwhelmed by population groups once thought to be inimical to a republic: peasants, residents (as in “mere residents”), and tribes.

Timelessness, Natural Law, and Natural Religion

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant notes that all rational knowledge (Vernunfterkenntnis) is either material (concerned with determinant objects, either of nature or of freedom) or formal (concerned with the form of understanding and reason themselves).  Philosophy, the study of all rational knowledge, is hence divided into physics (natural philosophy), ethics (moral philosophy), and logic, respectively.  All knowledge that lacks any empirical component is “pure,” or a priori.  Logic, being formal, is pure.  In contrast, physics and ethics have both empirical and non-empirical (metaphysical) components, giving rise to the metaphysics of nature and of morals, respectively.  

      In the Groundwork, Kant relegates the empirical part of ethics to practical anthropology, proposing instead to investigate the metaphysics of morals (Metaphysik der Sitten, sometimes abbreviated as Moral) in order to explain the absolute necessity carried by moral laws.  For example, “‘Thou shalt not lie,’ could not hold merely for mankind (Menschen), other rational beings (andere vernünftige Wesen) having no obligation to abide by it … the ground of obligation must be looked for … solely a priori in the concepts of pure reason.”  Practical rules in current worldly circumstances can never be absolute moral laws.  What is absolute is that one ought never to act except in such a way that he or she can also will that his or her subjective maxim becomes a universal law.

      A precept is a guiding principle or rule that is used to control, influence or regulate the conduct of an agent.  (In this discussion, “precept” is equivalent to “moral precept,” as opposed to some relatively minor point of etiquette or to some matter of belief or doctrine not necessarily tied to conduct.)  Those precepts, if any, having royal or divine origins are referred to as commandments, because of their authoritative source (variously described as worthy of respect, overpowering, or awe-inspiring): The commandment-giver is capable of meting out extremes of reward or punishment to agents following or violating the commandment.  Those precepts, if any, arising autonomously within each rational agent (due to rationality per se) Kant refers to as categorical imperatives, which are considered to be likewise worthy of respect (Achtung).  Of course, it is not clear that a rational agent, other than Kant himself, would reliably experience enough Achtung in order to avoid occasional backsliding.

      For Kant, moral precepts and rationality itself (the a priori concepts of pure reason and the categories of the understanding) are logically prior to empirical phenomena and, as such, are timeless and uncreated.  In contrast, the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204 C.E.) maintained that moral precepts originate simultaneously with the creation of humankind.  On this view, moral precepts were created after “five days’ worth” of creation had already occurred; i.e., moral precepts are created in time, albeit it in undocumented (i.e., unrecorded or prehistoric) time.

      In the context of Maimonides’ theory, moral precepts are referred to as elements of natural law.  (See David Novak, “Does Natural Law Need Theology?” in First Things, November 2019.)  Subsequently to the inception of natural law, various human civilizations got around to writing down moral codes with varying degrees of success.  Regarding the motivation for individuals to adhere to moral precepts, Kant emphasizes respect (Achtung) for the timeless moral law and the autonomy of rational agents; whereas Maimonides emphasizes ingrained deference to (or fear of) a timeless, divine authority that also makes appearances in time.

      Recapitulating the natural-law theory, one might say that there is one creation event for the physical universe, including the time axis itself; followed by, in prehistoric time, the creation of humankind and the natural (moral) law itself; followed by, in historic time, the writing up of moral codes in various cultures.  In this theory, one must avoid equivocation on the term “creation” (of the physical universe, of humankind, or of civilizations); on the term “prehistoric” (after a creation event but before the origin of mankind versus after the origin of mankind but before documented history); and on the term “natural law” (in physics or in ethics).

      In at least one respect, Maimonides’ natural-law analysis has an advantage over Kant’s timeless-precept approach: Maimonides can explain why God held Cain immediately responsible for Abel’s death in prehistoric time, even though the written norm against murder would not be given until much later at Mt. Sinai.  According to Maimonides, the precept against murder already existed in Cain’s day and was, or should have been, ingrained (non-inferentially) in Cain’s conscience.  In contrast, it would seem to have been too onerous a Kantian requirement to expect that Cain should have been able to perform the world’s first “universalization of subjective maxim” (a particular kind of inference) in order to ascertain de novo that murder is illicit.

      Kant’s impressive account of the timeless source of moral obligation implies that moral reasoning is available to all rational agents in a secular universe.  This reasoning is based on the universalization of subjective maxims and is analogous to the Biblical account of the “Golden Rule.”  In contrast, for Maimonides, natural law seems to appear in time in a way that is only accidentally amenable to mankind’s rational faculties and that could elude the faculties of hypothetical rational agents on a distant exoplanet.

      The concept of timelessness has served Kant less well in religion.  Kant seems to have implied that all revealed religions overlap a common domain representing a unique, timeless natural religion of reason (Vernunftreligion), which exists as an aid in motivating moral choices and as a part of the domain of pure reason.  (See the October 2019 posting to this blog.)  This natural religion of reason, if it exists, is available to all introspective, rational agents.  But as a matter of historical record among the world’s revealed religions, it seems never to have occurred to any of the leaders of the non-Christian religions that there is any such real overlap.  Instead, this purported “natural religion of overlap” seems to be a watered-down version of Christianity that is credible only to some Deistic or Enlightenment thinkers in the West, or to their intellectual successors.  

      Kant’s timeless view of Vernunftreligion led him to some views that are distinctly unorthodox from the Christian perspective: While quoting from a minor Kantian text, T. M. Greene notes on p. LIX of his Introduction to Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Harper, 1960) that Kant considered resurrection to be unimportant, “for who is so fond of his body that he would wish to drag it about with him through all eternity if he could get by without it?”  It would seem to be more appropriate to say that religion has both transcendent (timeless) and immanent (historical) aspects.

Exploring the Coastline of Religious Experience

In last month’s blog posting, we noted that modernity, including Kant’s philosophy, sees thinking for oneself as a rejection of all tradition, even though systematic thinking itself seems to be a tradition.  Post-modernity sees modernity as a tradition that is unaware of its own status as a tradition.  On this view, modernity is either a dead end, because it and all other traditions have been discredited; or else one tenable tradition, among others, that advances some philosophical insights.

      As an exponent of modernity, Kant saw the many, traditional, revealed religions as potential sources of superstition but also as overlapping a common domain, or natural religion of reason.  For Kant, this Vernunftreligion exists as an aid in motivating moral choices, fulfilling the Categorical Imperative, and forming part of the philosopher’s proper domain of pure reason.  In contrast, Schleiermacher saw religion as based on a feeling (immediate self-consciousness) of complete dependence on the infinite.  In this Gefühlsreligion, the self feels itself to be dependent on some romantic totality. Vernunftreligion has the problem of inferring religious experience from purely rational experience, which seems too narrow.  Gefühlsreligion has the problem of differentiating religious experience from aesthetic consciousness, which seems too broad.  In either case, if one starts looking for God in one’s experience, then one may end up identifying one’s experience with God. 

      Kant’s coastline analogy in the Critique of Pure Reason (A396) is meant to distinguish empirical appearances from “things in themselves” and to confine the voyage of reason to the continuous coastline of experience.  Even allowing for this necessity, it is not clear that observations of “a coastline of religious experience” are sufficient for navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of Vernunftreligion and Gefühlsreligion.  The triangulation of one’s position relative to a coastline requires not only multiple observations of known points on that coastline; not only a compass, a map, a parallel ruler, and a pencil; but also the presupposition that one’s predecessors received a reliable inspiration to create this technique and its tools.  Beyond empirical observations, what is required for distilling religious experience into religious doctrine?

      George Lindbeck (The Nature of Religious Doctrine, 1984, pp. 16-18) provided a suitably “beyond-ist” theory of religious doctrine.  If religious doctrines are thought of as purely symbolic expressions of religious experience, then one is espousing an experiential-expressive theory of religion.  This theory presupposes that some “individual genius,” perhaps one’s own, is added to experience in order to produce religious expressions.  On the other hand, Lindbeck believed that religious doctrines could be thought of as authoritative linguistic rules.  These rules are added to religious culture (experience, discourse, attitudes, and practices) in order to permit or exclude certain faith propositions, thereby creating a cultural-linguistic theory of religion.  This theory presupposes that some “cultural genius” has produced the required linguistic rules without compromising traditional propositional truth criteria.

      The experiential-expressive theory of religion is ideal for interpreting individual quests for personal meaning, because the theory has a clear starting part (the “turn to the subject”), and a clear ending point (a set of personalized religious beliefs, symbols, or doctrines).  Lindbeck (pp. 22-23) saw these theories as having extended from a post-Reformation world, with its many denominations of Christianity, to a post-Christian world, with its “multiple suppliers” of principles for organizing one’s inner experiences.  For the experiential-expressivist, all internal experiences are equally incontrovertible traces of the Ultimate; hence, all expressed religious beliefs are equally valid.

      Lindbeck’s Chapter 2 explores the extent to which the cultural-linguistic theory of religion finds support as the opposing thesis that religious doctrine plays a role in producing religious experience.  (Note that the cultural-linguistic theory only maintains that some knowledge of religious doctrine is logically prior to one’s assessment of his or her internal state, not that religious doctrine causes that internal state.)  On this account (pp. 33-41), religious doctrine is a cultural or linguistic framework (skill set) that helps shape one’s internal state (life and thought) instead of being only an expression of that internal state.  There are internal states (thoughts) that we cannot have unless we have an adequate language, consistent with Wittgenstein’s private language argument.  Becoming Christian involves learning Biblical stories and lessons well enough to facilitate the interpretation of one’s experience.  Hearing an external word helps shape experience and leads to faith. 

      Abandoning the notion that the exclusive source of religion is in prior experience is consistent with abandoning the notion that there is an inner experience of God common to all human beings and religions, but expressed differently (pp. 39-40).  On the cultural-linguistic theory, adherents of different religions have different experiences.  Lindbeck uses the example of Buddhist compassion, Christian love, and French-Revolutionary (quasi-religious) fraternité: These do not represent (express) a fundamental human awareness but are radically different ways of experiencing the cosmos.  On this view, religion is not something universal arising from the inmost depths of individuals, but is rather a class name for a set of diverse cultural-linguistic systems that help to shape the beliefs, attitudes, and sentiments of their adherents.  These cultural-linguistic systems help confine the voyage of reason to the continuous coastline of religious experience.

      (The next posting date for this blog is expected to be February 1, 2020.)

Kant, Sensus Communis, and Tradition

Common sense, or sensus communis, may refer to (1) a human individual’s “sixth sense” that organizes and unifies inputs from the five physical senses.  Common sense may also refer to (2) a widely distributed basic human awareness and ability to judge.  Descartes started his Discourse on Method with the observation that “Good sense is of all things the most equally distributed … The power of forming a good judgment and of distinguishing the true from the false, which is properly speaking what is called Good Sense or Reason, is by nature equal in all men.”  Finally, the sensus communis may refer to (3) the results of human judgments that exist in the form of viewpoints and values that are widespread within a particular linguistic or historical community.  For example, Herodotus spoke the common sense of his culture by memorializing the Greco-Persian Wars and ensuring that certain human achievements might neither be forgotten nor lose their glory.  Since viewpoints and values persist over a period of time and are inculcated into new generations while a community lasts, this third type of sensus communis may be said to form a tradition.  All three types of sensus communis play a role in creating the linguistic and intellectual environment required for philosophical analysis and synthesis.

      Did Kant think that humans possess any variety of sensus communis among their higher faculties?  If so, then is the Kantian sensus communis concerned with coordinating sensory input, as in (1); competence in judging, as in (2); or creation and evaluation of historical traditions, as in (3)?

      Regarding judgment: For Kant, sensible intuition serves as the basis for human thought about nature.  Objects given within consciousness (mental representations) arise from sensible matter (states of sense organs) and a priori sensible forms (space and time).  Only on a higher level of cognition does natural knowledge arise from the understanding (correct judgment) applied to sensible intuitions, mental representations, or given objects.  Regarding evaluation: Kant distinguishes between fulfilling hypothetical imperatives based on desire and obeying a Categorical Imperative based on a reverence for the moral law.  Thus, Kant believes that there are higher cognitive faculties related to understanding and moral evaluation that we could view as varieties of sensus communis.

      There is another Kantian higher faculty in which sensus communis plays a role: There exists an aesthetic faculty in which the imagination is applied to aesthetic intuitions (mental representations of a certain kind, i.e., aesthetic objects) in order to evaluate the subject’s feelings of pleasure or displeasure toward the aesthetic object.  The very first footnote in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (the first half of his Critique of Judgment) defines taste as the faculty of judging the beautiful.  Subsequently, in ¶ 1 of § 40 of that work, Kant says that although we may speak of senses of truth, beauty, or justice, etc. when referring to one’s dexterity in rendering judgments; we know full well that these concepts have no empirical basis but rather spring from (what we read as) “higher faculties.”  [Kant seems in this paragraph carelessly to have lumped together all higher faculties into a single Erkentnisvermögen (faculty of cognition), which would contradict his overall thesis, stated in § 1, that the judgment of taste is not a judgment of cognition.  (Das Geschmacksurteil ist also kein Erkenntnisurteil.)] 

      Continuing in ¶ 1 of § 40, Kant holds that common sense, interpreted as common human understanding (gemeiner Menschenverstand), may refer to “mere healthy understanding” (bloβ gesunder Menschenverstand); which is the least we can expect from a creature purporting to be human and which - - so far from being a positive distinction - - is actually a vulgar quality.  Kant disdains Reid’s approach to common sense.

      In ¶ 2 of § 40, however, Kant finds that gemeiner Verstand also bears the meaning gemeinschaftlicher Verstand, i.e., that common sense may refer to “public sense.”  Common sense as public sense refers a perfectly disinterested subject’s (i.e., “one’s”) act of reflective judgment (Reflexion): One takes into account the a priori form of representation of all others in order to conform one’s judgment to that of the totality of human reason, thereby avoiding the illusion that private considerations might prejudice the judgment.  This is accomplished by comparing one’s judgment not only to others’ actual judgments but also to others’ merely possible judgments, abstracting away from one’s own limitations.  Kant admits that the operation of reflection appears rather too artificial to be common, but insists that abstracting away from mere charm and emotion is necessary when rendering a universal judgment.  Nevertheless, it strikes the present writer that common sense as public sense involves more than just (2), the ability to judge aesthetic objects; and includes (3), the traditional results of judgments in particular communities in particular epochs.

      In an aside in ¶ 3 of § 40 Kant states three “maxims of common sense”: First, think for yourself.  Second, think from the standpoint of everyone else.  Third, think consistently at all times.  This is Kant’s formula for implementing the Enlightenment, blasting superstition and tradition, and restricting common sense to option (2) of our analysis.

      Kant says in ¶ 4 of § 40 that taste is more justifiably designated as sensus communis or public sense than is “healthy understanding.”  Aesthetic, rather than intellectual, judgment is the effect that mere reflection (bloβe Reflexion) has upon the mind; and this effect is a feeling of pleasure or displeasure.  Taste might even be defined as the faculty of judging what makes our feeling regarding a given representation universally communicable without the use of concepts.  In a footnote, Kant identifies taste with a sensus communis aestheticus, whereas gemeiner Verstand corresponds to a sensus communis logicus.

      In ¶ 5 of § 40 Kant reformulated the idea of mere reflection as the interaction between free imagination and understanding apart from concepts, resulting in the communication of an aesthetic representation (i.e., in an aesthetic representation communicating itself) as an internal feeling of a purposive state of mind, not as a thought.

      Regarding the perfectly disinterested subject (the “one”) who is tasked with assessing common sense as public sense in the foregoing discussion: Are Kant and his readers trying to achieve a “view from nowhere,” consistent with the work of Thomas Nagel?  His view is that achieving objective reality is a great good, but that objective reality is incomplete.  Alternately, do we seek to approximate a “view from everywhere,” an estimated totality of human reason that may likewise be incomplete?  Or are we looking for a “view from somewhere,” a land of particular traditions?

      Kant embodied the Enlightenment tradition of thinking for oneself, which in turn derived from the Cartesian paradigm of retiring to a mountaintop with one’s reason and good sense (sensus communis) in order to establish all knowledge for oneself based on the cogito ergo sum.  Modernity, including Kant’s philosophy, sees thinking for oneself as a rejection of all tradition, even though systematic thinking seems itself to be a tradition.  In some of his lectures, Professor Phillip Cary has pointed out that post-modernity sees modernity as a tradition that is unaware of its own status as a tradition.  On this view, modernity is either a dead end, because it and all other traditions have been discredited; or else one tenable tradition, among others, that has something to contribute to analysis and narration.  Modernity seems to be a sensus communis of type (3) as defined in the first paragraph of this post.

      Adopting one possible post-modern perspective, religions could be seen as interacting historical traditions in the quest for meaning.  As an exponent of modernity, however, Kant saw traditional, revealed religions as potential sources of superstition.  In terms of Venn diagrams, one imagines Kant depicting revealed religions as overlapping circles on a plane representing the “religious universe of discourse.”  Kant seems to have implied that all “revealed-religion circles” overlap a common, smaller region representing a unique, natural religion of reason.  For Kant, this Vernunftreligion exists as an aid in motivating moral choices, fulfilling the Categorical Imperative, and forming part of the philosopher’s proper domain of pure reason. (This view is adapted from the Preface to the second edition of Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.)  Nevertheless, the possibility that modernity and its Vernunftreligion may themselves be Western traditions seems to loom over the Kantian project.

Kant’s Political Theory (3): Perpetual Peace

The full subtitle for this posting is “Recapitulation, Commentary, and the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace.”  This posting is the third of three installments reviewing Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch (1795).

By way of background: Natural objects, like rocks, may serve extrinsic, utilitarian purposes, such as keeping doors open.  Other natural objects, known as natural ends, have intrinsic purposes and characteristic cause-effect relationships, in which the effect is part of the cause.  [See § 62 - 68 in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), as well as Sections I.II.3 and I.II.6.3 in my book An Initial View of Final Causes (2017), described elsewhere on this website.]  Biological organisms are natural ends. For example, an acorn grows by mechanistic means (efficient causes, today known to include DNA processes) into an instance of the form of an oak.  The form is the final cause (Naturzweck) of the growth.  At a higher level of abstraction, the kingdom of nature itself might be said to have an ultimate, providential cause (Endzweck der Schöpfung).

By way of recapitulation and commentary: Kant should have recognized that peoples and nations are natural objects of a sort, produced by the efficient mechanisms of language-formation, common history, cultural achievement, religious experience, and political events.  In addition, the vision of speakers, actors, cultural innovators, and religious leaders; and the leadership of influential monarchs, aristocrats, and populists have served as final causes for peoples and nations.  However, Kant’s political contract theory downplays history and focuses entirely on the idea that the natural state of neighbors (individuals or nation-states) is either actual or threatened warfare.  Kantian neighbors either must agree upon some common constitutional system or else be forcibly ejected from each other’s neighborhood. Kantian neighbors do reciprocally renounce some natural rights for the sake of mutual peace.  This leaves open the question whether any neighbors might reciprocally renounce other natural rights for the sake of culture, language, or religion; leading to great differences among nation-states; and culminating in grave difficulties in forming the league of nations favored by Kant (see the second posting in this series).  

By way of exposition on the guarantee of perpetual peace: According to the “Addition” section of Kant’s 1795 essay, that which guarantees perpetual peace is nothing less than the great artist, nature, from whose merely mechanical operations shines forth the purposiveness (design) required to generate political concord from discordant individual wills.  Nature’s purposiveness can be considered to be a necessitation of natural law according to an unknown cause (destiny, fate, or Schicksal); or to be a deep wisdom of a higher, predetermining cause directed to the objective final end of the human race (providence or Vorsehung).

As a technical matter, Kant believed that providence must be “thought into” nature by reflective judgment during the conceptualization of purposes immediately prescribed by reason; and not recognized, inferred, or known from experience in any strict sense.  Any claim that providence is knowable, Kant thought, would imply, presumptuously, that one could put on the wings of Icarus in order to come closer to the secret of nature’s inscrutable design.  

Now we come to the question of what nature has done, or at least of what our reflective judgment leads us to believe that nature has done, to enforce perpetual peace in case mankind does not respond to its moral duty to renounce some rights for the sake of peace.  How does nature aid the establishment of constitutions appropriate for civil, international, and cosmopolitan law? Kant offers three numbered sections paralleling his three determinative articles for perpetual peace mentioned in the second posting in this tripartite series.

1.  Even if a recognizable group of people does not choose to submit to civil law (Staatsbürgerrecht) because of discord among its individuals, nature, in the form of actual or threatened warfare from outsiders, will eventually require that people’s submission to civil law.  If that civil law establishes a republican form of government with its separation of powers, then there is the best chance for political concord to arise from the cancellation of selfish, opposing, and ruinous individual inclinations.  Individuals are forced to be good citizens even if not morally good persons. Nature inexorably wills that the right will prevail.

2.  The idea of international law (Völkerrecht) presupposes the existence of independent nation-states, because the amalgamation of nation-states under one superior power, Kant believed, leads to soulless despotism.  National “identity politics” implies the futility of attempting to fuse nation-states into a higher-order state. Even though reason may prescribe the existence of exactly one all-encompassing Weltrepublic, the reality of nation-states jealous of their identity implies that only a league of nations is achievable.  Nature enforces the separation of states by differences in language, religion, and culture. Nature, in the form of actual or threatened warfare between nation-states, will eventually force those nation-states to submit to international law.

3.  The idea of cosmopolitan law (Weltbürgerrecht) is the necessary completion, albeit in an unwritten code, of civil law and of international law.  Moreover, nature unites some peoples, for whom the concept of cosmopolitan law might not have secured peace, by offering a principle of reciprocal self-interest (wechselseitgen Eigennutz) or spirit of commerce (Handelsgeist), which will ultimately empower every people.  The power of money (Geldmacht) may be nature’s most reliable means to promote a noble peace.

In this manner, Kant concludes, nature guarantees perpetual peace by the mechanism of human inclinations, away from actual or threatened military conflict, and toward what can serve as their substitutes, economic competition and the power of money.  Military and economic conflict ensures the development of a league of nations to limit that conflict. This guarantee does not come with a security sufficient to predict the future; but it suffices for the practical purpose, which is also a duty, of working towards the end of perpetual peace, which is anything but chimerical.

Today, of course, one may note that the economic development of late 19th century Europe made the prospect of European warfare unthinkable, until World War I occurred.  Thereafter, the combined effects of the League of Nations, disarmament treaties, and general appeasement were incapable of preventing World War II.  For promoting peace, it is not clear that trans-national institutions fare better than a balance of power between nation-states.