2024-04-20 13:50:39
Culture Immanuel Kant
Making peace with Immanuel Kant
Status: 3:50 p.m. | Reading time: 2 minutes
Quelle: picture alliance/empics/Martin Rickett/PA Wire; picture alliance
The war in Ukraine, the Middle East conflict, social division: times are more warlike than they have been for a long time. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant knew over 200 years ago under what conditions peaceful coexistence is possible.
When Immanuel Kant published his short text “On Eternal Peace” in 1795, he was not a young striker and pusher, but a 70-year-old philosophical star. The writings of the “Crusher of Everything” destroyed metaphysical certainties and revolutionized thinking. Now the enlightener wants to bring about peace. Kant lives in a century of crises, wars and revolutions. The bourgeoisie fights against the nobility and each other. No wonder that in “On Eternal Peace” Kant – true to Thomas Hobbes – speaks of war as a state of nature, with the “outbreak of hostilities” always threatening.
Unlike naive pacifism, Kant does not believe that people are naturally or originally peaceful. On the contrary: peace must be established – and that can only happen “in a legal situation”, through equal rights. Kant asks – as a Protestant to the last consequence – about the conditions of possibility: What is needed for peaceful coexistence? Republican constitutions, international law, cosmopolitan law. They are groundbreaking ideas that have not lost their appeal even 300 years after Kant’s birth on April 22, 1724.
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The astonishing thing is: Kant’s utopia is not a dream, but rather radical realpolitik. “Idealism without illusion, realism without adaptation,” is what Jürgen Habermas calls it, who with his “constitutional patriotism” belongs just as much to the tradition of Kant as Raúl Sánchez Cedillo with his “constitutive peace.” Kant’s message for today is as hopeful as it is sobering. It is not a guide for times of war, but rather a timeless idea. A fixed star between the “starry sky above me” and the “moral law within me” against which one can align one’s actions without any certainty of realization.
This is also Kant: You can only live as if the impossible were possible. No higher being can help you. This is something we learn to this day from writings like “For Eternal Peace”: Living in a modern age without gods does not mean living without utopias. You have to imagine Kant as a happy person.
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