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Reading Conflict of the Faculties Politically: A More Creative Exposition of Kant's Argument
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
Abstract
John Zammito attacks Kant for bending over backwards to enlightened autocracy in Part Two of Conflict of the Faculties. Zammito calls for more creative exponents to explain how Kant's supposed advocacy of absolutism could possibly be “best.” This paper answers Zammito's request, explaining how Kant's view can be considered best by reading Kant's argument politically, in three senses of that term: the substance of Kant's argument is political in nature; its mode of argumentation should be read as politics-first, not ethics-first; and in light its publication history, Conflict's very publication should be viewed as a political act in its own right. Resituating the text and its argument shows Kant to be attacking absolutism, not defending it. As a subsidiary aim, the paper interprets the argument of Part Two of Conflict as exhibiting more internal unity than has previously been thought.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame
References
1 Zammito, John H., “A Text of Two Titles: Kant's ‘A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: “Is the Human Race Continually Improving,” ’” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39 (2008): 542Google Scholar.
2 Kant, Conflict, quoted in Zammito, “Text of Two Titles,” 542. Emphasis original.
3 Pauline Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 80.
4 Ellis, Elisabeth, Kant's Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 164Google Scholar.
5 Zammito, “Text of Two Titles,” 543.
6 Zammito also calls upon “more creative historians to explain how Frederick II can be fashioned into the exemplar of ‘republicanism’ Kant imagined.” Ibid., 542. Yet the Hollenzollern autocrat during Conflict's composition would have been Frederick William II and during its publication, Frederick William III.
7 As is well known, the German Wissenschaft means “science” but has broader connotations than that term in English. In Conflict Kant also discusses, under that umbrella, the role of truth governed by unrestricted reason.
8 Conflict, [7:20] 249. Citations to works by Kant are by volume and page in the Akademie edition followed by page in the respective Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. For Conflict I have used The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Emphases are in the original unless otherwise noted.
9 He was, however, particularly intolerant of criticisms of the state, as I discuss below. Cf. Cavallar, Georg, “Kant's Judgment on Frederick's Enlightened Absolutism,” History of Political Thought 14 (1993): 113–14Google Scholar.
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13 Ibid.
14 During one of Kant's lectures there was a “student” in the class who “transcribed every word I said, attracting everyone's attention by his industriously nervous behavior; and he never came again.” This suggested to Kant that Wöllner sent a spy to catch him teaching against Christianity and further illustrates the intellectual and political climate in—and against—which Kant is working. Kiesewetter to Kant, December 15, 1789, in Kant, Correspondence, ed. Arnulf Zweig (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), [11:113] 326–27. Cf. Beiser, Enlightnement, Revolution, and Romanticism, 50.
15 In many ways, the text is more about censorship itself and who has the right to determine if something may be published than it is about religion or theology.
16 Kant reveals this in a letter of October 23, 1797. Editor's introduction to “Drafts for Conflict of the Faculties,” in Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy, ed. Frederick Rauscher (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 357.
17 Kleingeld notes that if the question is renewed, it is unclear where the question originally came from (Fortschritt und Vernunft, 68). Reinhard Brandt suggests the original question came from the beginning of Part III of Kant's Theory and Practice essay. Brandt, Universität zwischen Selbst- und Fremdbestimmung: Kants “Streit der Fakultäten” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), 121.
18 On the jurist, see Conflict, [7:25] 253. By comparison, philosophers “can never accept it [the law] as true simply because we are ordered to (de par le Roi).” He continues, “the philosophy faculty . . . must be conceived as free and subject only to laws given by reason, not by the government” ([7:27] 255).
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25 Kant distinguishes between two kinds of predictive history: divinatory and premonitory (prophetic). Peter Fenves and Susan Shell are particularly sensitive to the German terms Kant uses to formulate his conception of predictive history. See Fenves, Peter, A Peculiar Fate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 175–80Google Scholar; Shell, Susan Meld, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 280Google Scholar.
26 The view of history as moral regression Kant calls the terroristic manner of representing human history. He thinks this mode of representing history cannot be correct because it would (eventually) undo itself. If humans are wicked and history is regressing, its end point is the total elimination of humanity itself—a literal end of history (Conflict, [7:81] 298–299).
27 The eudaimonistic or chiliastic conception views history as moral progress. This conception is false in part because it wrongly emphasizes happiness or a golden age after Christ's coming (Conflict, [7:82] 299).
28 The abderitic hypothesis posits that morality is at a perpetual standstill as goodness and folly are not “blended” but continually neutralizing one another. Kant thinks the abderitic hypothesis cannot be right because it would render humanity a “farcical comedy” instead of a final telos, an end itself worthy of respect. Kant's dismissal of the view presumes its conclusion rather than refutes it, but from the point of view of his premises it can be granted him for the sake of argument.
29 In the title of §4. Conflict, [7:83] 300.
30 Ellis, Kant's Politics, 157. Reidar Maliks suggests that Kant's own radical followers are the onlookers he has in mind. Maliks, Reidar, Kant's Politics in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Sympathy with the Revolution was far from universal in 1789 let alone in 1798. I return to this point in the conclusion.
32 Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Part I: Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right, in Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), [6:354] 491.
33 An exception might be Elisabeth Ellis, Kant's Politics, chap. 5, though she seems to focus her political interpretation on §§8–10 without showing how Kant's discussion of morality serves it.
34 In his 1775–6 anthropology lectures Kant speculates when an internationally peaceful and perfected condition will be realized: “thousands of years will still be required.” Kant, Anthropology Friedländer, in Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), [25:696] 230. He never published that as his official timeline—and his optimism seems to require a greater sense of urgency—but it is telling that he at one point projected the realization of his political ideal so far into the future.
35 Cf. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor, [8:42] 22.
36 “Thus the prohibition of publicity impedes the progress of a people toward improvement, even in that which applies to the least of its claims, namely its simple, natural right” (Conflict, [7:89] 305).
37 Compare Kant's points here about philosophers, lawyers, and criticisms of the state with his similar discussion in the secret article of Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor, [8:369] 337.
38 Frederick the Great had absolute power to go to war. Cavallar notes that although Kant explicitly criticizes Britain his description in fact better describes Frederick the Great's Prussia (“Kant's Judgment,” 126). Where Cavallar thinks it would have better described Prussia, I think Kant meant it to describe Prussia. I discuss war and absolutism in section 4.
39 Kant argues that the British monarch is an absolute monarch. In a draft of Conflict Kant explicitly compares Britain's and France's governments. Britain is an unlimited monarchy but France is a republic because the Directory must consult the people before going to war. Kant, Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy, ed. Rauscher, [19:606] 366. Reinhard Brandt (Universität, 125) argues that Kant's specific target with this attribution is the “Anglophile” Germans who sided with Burke on the French Revolution. Cf. Zammito, “Text of Two Titles,” 542.
40 A Platonic ideal seems to serve two functions, one being the connection between the latinate title of Plato's Republic and Kant's own advocacy of republican constitutions and government, the other being the timeless aspect of a Platonic ideal and, therefore, its connection with Kant's critical distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal. An actual state that conforms to these principles “can be acquired only painfully, after multifarious hostilities and wars; but its constitution [a republican one], once won on a large scale, is qualified as the best among all others to banish war, the destroyer of everything good” (Conflict, [7:91] 306).
41 This helps to connect the arguments of §§5–7 and 8–10 further, as well, since a distinction of §7 is of critical importance to the argument of §8, indeed the stretch of argument from §8 to §10. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, [8:351–53] 324; Doctrine of Right [6:338–45]. There what seems decisive for governance is the separation of legislative powers from their execution; such a separation constitutes a republican manner of governing and combined powers are despotic. What Kant calls forms of constitution in Conflict he calls forms of sovereignty in Perpetual Peace. Kant also claims in Perpetual Peace that “A state can already govern itself in a republican way even though, by its present constitution, it possesses a despotic ruling power” ([8:372] 340, emphasis original). On the distinction, see Kersting, Wolfgang, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit: Immanuel Kants Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 413–28Google Scholar.
42 Kant's point here is strange, again, from the point of view of Kant's morals because the reason individuals will behave more lawfully is “partly out of love of honor, partly out of well-understood self-interest”; hardly acting out of respect for the moral law ([7:92] 307).
43 That Kant first claims this in a footnote to §9 and repeats it in the body of §10 suggests, again, argumentative unity in these latter sections.
44 As in What Is Enlightenment?, Theory and Practice, and the Doctrine of Right.
45 Though Kant writes here rather cautiously that it behooves the state to do so, in an earlier footnote of §9 he considers it “an obligation, not of the citizens, but of the sovereign” ([7:92n] 307n).
46 Kant, “Drafts for Conflict of the Faculties,” in Lectures and Drafts on Political Philosophy, ed. Rauscher, [KSt 8] 363, emphasis added.
47 By the time Frederick the Great assumes throne in 1740 the Prussian army was 83,000 strong; it is the fourth largest army in Europe despite the fact that its territories are tenth and its population thirteenth. Craig, Gordon, Politics of the Prussian Army: 1640–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 8Google Scholar.
48 Kleingeld, Fortschitt und Vernunft, 75–80.
49 Zammito, “Text of Two Titles,” 539–40.
50 Ellis, Kant's Politics, 233n35.
51 Axel Honneth—not unlike Ellis—takes the essay's primary contribution to be the importance of publicity or the ability for scholars to speak and publish free of censors. This privileges a narrow set of claims within the text. Admittedly, Honneth's hermeneutic intent is appropriate to his reading; he aims to construct a tenable Kantian philosophy of history for the present which views progress as a set of “learning processes” centered on human agency. Honneth, Axel, “The Irreducibility of Progress: Kant's Account of the Relationship between Morality and History,” Critical Horizons 8 (2007): 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 On political choices as always being differential, see Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 30–34.
53 Wolfgang Kersting nicely captures Kant's balancing act in “Politics, Freedom, and Order: Kant's Political Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 359.
54 Kant denies that there can be a right to revolution. See Theory and Practice, [8:299] 298; Doctrine of Right, [6:320] 463.
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56 John Christian Laursen, “Subversive Kant,” 599. Cf. Reiss, Hans, “Kant's Politics and the Enlightenment: Reflections on Some Recent Studies,” Political Theory 27 (1999): 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 Ellis, Kant's Politics, 162. This suggestion is interesting, in part, given Frederick the Great's Anti-Machiavel (1740).
58 Behrens, C. B. A., Society, Government, and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 39. Cf. 36Google Scholar.
59 Cited in ibid., 38.
60 Cavallar, “Kant's Judgment,” 126.
61 Gordon Craig, Politics of the Prussian Army, 8–13.
62 On Frederick's campaigns see, for example, Cavallar, “Kant's Judgment,” 121. Frederick even advises “his successor to choose war as the main subject of his studies and to be ready for war at all times. Since Prussia was surrounded by powerful neighbors, its military should be number one in the state” (ibid., 116–17).
63 Ibid., 104, emphasis added.
64 Ibid.,105; 118.
65 Ibid., 113.
66 Cronin, “Kant's Politics of Enlightenment,” 65, 68.
67 There is an increasing use of the term “public” to denote a reading public in eighteenth-century Germany. Cf. Laursen, “Subversive Kant,” 587.
68 Enlightenment was written before the French Revolution and Kant writes that “a revolution may well bring about a falling off of personal despotisms and of avaricious or tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform in one's way of thinking; instead new prejudices will serve just as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses” ([8:36] 18). This is contrary to the significance of the French Revolution, which, for Kant, seems precisely to have inaugurated such a shift in values and perspective in Conflict. I do not have the space to discuss the highly complex terrain that is Kant's views on revolution in general and the French Revolution in particular.
69 Johann Heinrich Metzger, Äußerungen über Kant, seinen Charakter und seine Meinungen, von einem billigen Verehrer seiner Verdienste (1804), 14n; quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 342, emphasis added.
70 Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, 38.