Late Kant

Towards Another Law of the Earth

Peter Fenves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134540570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Immanuel Kant spent many of his younger years working on what are generally considered his masterpieces: the three Critiques. But his work did not stop there: in later life he began to reconsider subjects such as anthropology, and topics including colonialism, race and peace.
In Late Kant, Peter Fenves becomes one of the first to thoroughly explore Kant's later writings and give them the detailed scholarly attention they deserve. In his opening chapters, Fenves examines in detail the various essays in which Kant invents, formulates and complicates the thesis of 'radical evil' - a thesis which serves as the point of departure for all his later writings. Late Kant then turns towards the counter-thesis of 'radical mean-ness', which states that human beings exist on earth for the sake of another species or race of human beings. The consequences of this startling thesis are that human beings cannot claim possession of the earth, but must rather prepare the earth for its rightful owners.
Late Kant is the first book to develop the 'geo-ethics' of Kant's thought, and the idea that human beings must be prepared to concede their space for another kind of human. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the later works of Immanuel Kant.

1

THE PLEASURES OF FAILURE

Toward an unnumbered “Remark” in the Critique of Judgment

The spirit of Epicurus

The last of three Critiques sets out to accomplish at least three tasks: complete the “entire critical enterprise” (5: 170), as Kant announces in the concluding paragraph of its Preface; develop the idea of a philosophical system, as he proposes most extensively in its original Introduction; and give both the “power to judge” (Urteilskraft) and the feeling of pleasure their due, as he emphasizes in both the original and the published Introductions. These tasks are intimately related: showing the immediate relation of pleasure to an a priori principle of the power to judge is a condition for the completion of the critical enterprise, which, in turn, makes possible the articulation and exposition of philosophy as a system of rational knowledge. But the philosophical system as such has no place for pleasure – nor the power to judge, for that matter. Both the faculty of feeling and that of judgment are without any doctrinal dimensions but are, instead, solely matters of critical self-reflection on the sources of human knowledge and the projective structure of finite rationality. As philosophy lays itself out in a systematic fashion, the feeling of pleasure no longer plays any role, and the same is true of the power to judge. This is the case not only for Kant, who says little about pleasure in the doctrinal treatises he composed after completing the third Critique; it is equally true of the great systems that took their inspiration from the Critiques. In his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, Schelling – for all the talk of his supposed “romanticism” – scarcely considers the phenomenon of feeling, much less the nature of pleasure, and in the first part of the “System of Science” that Hegel publishes under the title Phenomenology of Spirit, pleasure comes into play only as the initial moment of the self-realization of rational self-consciousness, soon to be superseded by the “law of the heart.”¹ “Beyond the pleasure principle” – this is not only the title of Freud’s speculative inquiry into the “death drive” but is also an apt description of the late-born idea of philosophy as a systematic science.

Pleasure cannot, however, enter into the project of critical reflection on its own – as a raw datum of sensation or a sweet sensation of well-being. Only under the condition that pleasure should not be wholly mine – or, more exactly, under the condition that I can legitimately demand of all other similarly constituted beings that they feel the same feeling as I do – can the feeling of pleasure play a role in the “critical enterprise.” For this reason, although Kant had announced his intention to write a “critique of taste” long before he completed the first Critique, the inquiry into this faculty is a late offspring of earlier inquiries into the a priori principles on the basis of which human beings can gain knowledge of an external world and act in spite of their knowledge.² Only a pleasure that consists merely in the act of judgment – “bloβ in der Beurteilung,” as Kant repeatedly says – can be demanded of all others, including those who share little else in common. Such is the immensely difficult problem around which the Critique of Judgment revolves. Only insofar as philosophers can legitimately suppose that such a pleasure is something other than a fata Morgana can they further propose that there might be an immediate relation between the faculty of feeling and the power to judge. Without this proposition, pleasure would have to be mediated by a purpose, and this purpose would bring it into the sphere of practical philosophy, from which it could escape only on the basis of another, much older philosophical proposition that Kant, for his part, could never seriously entertain – the proposition, namely, that the activity of philosophy, understood as the contemplation of things-in-themselves, amounts to the highest pleasure. Since the Critique of Pure Reason denies that human beings can know such things, this classical conception of the relation of philosophical reflection to pleasure holds no promise. And since pleasure, like all modifications of the faculty of feeling, is, for Kant, a sheer fact, an indisputable but non-referential datum of consciousness, incapable therefore of being “pure,” perhaps even devoid of “intentionality” in the sense that Edmund Husserl would later develop from scholastic sources, it cannot be conceived in “ethical” terms either: it does not pertain to the comportment of the agent. Which is to say: pleasure is not grounded in, or an expression of, good or bad modes of life. The feeling of pleasure with whose help Kant seeks to complete the “critical enterprise” – a feeling immediately related to the power of judgment – cannot be considered morally superior to a pleasure that invites no such claim. Or, more exactly, its superiority can be discovered only in retrospect – as a bonus, so to speak, which allows for the successful completion of the “critical enterprise” but which does not earn any additional moral credit. Unlike Aristotle, whose thought is perhaps never more tortured than when it seeks to account for hedonai,³ Kant has no intention of establishing an axiomatics of pleasure by drawing attention to the difference between those activities that good human beings enjoy and those in which their wretched counterparts indulge. Such a distinction makes no sense in a context where pleasure is understood to be a modification of the faculty of feeling, which, in turn, consists in the ability of the finite subject to be receptive to, and therefore aware of, its inner states. Only in this way, however, can the faculty of feeling enjoy a certain independence from the other higher faculties, especially that of desire. And only insofar as the faculty of feeling achieves such independence can it enter into a genuine relation to an a priori principle of judgment through which the other two higher faculties of the mind – understanding and reason – can be brought into a mediate relation, the development of which constitutes the basis for the systematic unity of philosophical science.

Just as the modification of the faculty of feeling that can legitimately be demanded of all others cannot be represented as morally superior to the pleasures about which this claim cannot be made, it cannot be understood in accordance with an equally ancient distinction through which pleasures have been divided – the distinction between mental and corporeal pleasure. The pleasure in the mere act of judgment is, of course, a matter of the mind; but so, too, are those modes of “satisfaction” that are in each case non-generalizable modifications of particular subjects. This is not to say, however, that nothing of the traditional opposition between mental and bodily pleasures occupies Kant’s attention in the Critique of Judgment; on the contrary, it enters into the discussion at the precise point where Kant, having concluded his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment prepares to turn to its teleological counterpart, draws attention to the philosopher who, more than any other, is associated with the word pleasure, namely Epicurus. The appearance of Epicurus at a crucial juncture in the “critical enterprise” is all the more surprising in retrospect, for in the next section of the Critique, which considers teleological judgment, the laughing philosopher is judged to be the most failed philosopher of all: his pretence of doing away with teleological judgment is revealed to be just that – pretence, perhaps even perfidious deception. All of the tensions that enliven Kant’s inquiry into the faculty of feeling come to a point of crisis when it touches on the doctrine of life ascribed to the scandalous “materialist” whose name is synonymous with a life dedicated to pleasure.

From its inception, Kant’s thought is engaged with the spirit of Epicurus. The engagement does not take the form of acceptance, of course; still less does it make Kant into a champion of Epicureanism.⁴ Nothing could be more unacceptable to the author of the Critique of Practical Reason, which criticizes Epicurus by name and denounces the so-called “principle” of pleasure. The principle of pure practical reason, according to which actions ought not to be grounded on the presence or prospect of pleasure or pain – or, to cite a more authentic Epicurean doctrine, the attempt to be released from the constraints of both – can never be represented in terms of pleasure. The Kant of the Critiques also wants nothing to do with the physiological speculation through which Epicurus seeks to secure a modicum of equanimity in the face of life’s inescapable vicissitudes: the proposal, namely, that the cosmos is composed entirely of atoms and the void. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) dismisses all forms of atomism. And in the second part of the Critique of Judgment the rejection of Epicurean doctrine is even more devastating: of all the “systems” that try – and fail – to explain “natural purposes” (Naturzweck), none is a greater failure and none is closer to outright deceit than the “system” proposed by the ancient atomists: “nothing is explained, not even the illusion in our teleological judgments” (5: 393), as Kant announces, with a certain degree of outrage.

Nevertheless, regardless of his immense failures as a moral and natural philosopher, Epicurus is not to be despised. On the contrary, Kant associates his own “critical enterprise” with the careful, methodical reflection on the limits of human cognition that distinguished Epicurus among ancient philosophers. To the extent that Epicurus’ method of inquiry consists in a rigorous reticence to overstep the bounds of possible experience, “he showed,” as Kant notes in the first Critique, “a more genuine philosophical spirit than any other philosopher in antiquity [zeigte er daran echteren philosophischen Geist, als irgend einer Weltweisen des Altertums]” (B: 500), which is to say, a spirit that serves as a prolepsis of the critical mind – to cite the only philosophical doctrine of the ancients that finds its way into the exercise in “first philosophy” that Kant undertakes in the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique.⁵ Just as the ancient philosopher refuses to overstep the bounds of experience and thus allows for things that no philosopher will ever know, so, too, does his modern successor. And this critical stance, which consists in cheerful reticence, cannot fail to appear as a general assault on all those who indiscriminately apply theological and teleological principles. Philosophical spirit, in other words, consists in wanting nothing to do with the “dreams of spirit-seers.” Even if the idea of prolepsis is itself implicated in spirit-seeing – future and present being exchanged for each other, as simulacra communicate themselves throughout the cosmos – the implication nevertheless does no harm: understood in a critical manner, prolepsis is only the ghost of the spirit supposedly seen by “spirit-seers,” a Geist to the second power that can legitimately be called, for this reason, “philosophical spirit.”

The remarkable peon to Epicurus in the Critique of Pure Reason is safely tucked away in a footnote. The opposite is true of Kant’s first major natural-scientific enterprise, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). Just as the young Marx greets Epicurus as a friend to all those who wish to liberate themselves from servile social relations,⁶ so, too, in his own more cautious, less untroubled way does the young Kant. And so, too, does the young king whom Kant seeks to serve both in body (as a professor) and in spirit (as a philosopher), namely Friedrich II. The young philosopher is so impressed by the king’s Epicureanism that the Critique of Judgment, many years later, memorializes a half-dozen lines from one of the poems Friedrich composed “in imitation of Lucretius.”⁷ And it is not difficult to see why Kant would be impressed long before he began the critical project: “Epicurus,” the king writes in a letter of 1759, “is the philosopher of humanity, Zeno that of the gods.”⁸ Only a single circumstance prevents the pleasure-loving king from following Epicurus’ principal prescription for healthy living and retreating, sans souci, into a garden with a group of friends: his public duties, which is to say, the requirement that he be supremely visible.

The young Kant, who does not have the luxury of this option, goes in the opposite direction, as he throws himself into the world of publication. The most ambitious of his earliest publications – and the only one dedicated to the “Most Illustrious, Most Magnificent King, Most Gracious King and Lord” (1: 217) – announces in its Preface a Promethean imperative that gives direction to everything else Kant placed into print: “Give me only matter, and I will build a world out of it for you” (1: 229). Prometheanism is not, however, the name of the threat under which Kant finds himself as he – unsuccessfully – publishes his Universal Natural History: it is, rather, Epicureanism. For the bold treatise is suspiciously close, on the one hand, to a theoretical philosophy that allows only atoms and the void and, on the other, to a practical philosophy that takes its principle from the prospect of pleasure. As Kant announces – or confesses – in the Preface, “I enjoy the satisfaction [genieβe das Vergnügen] of seeing a well-ordered whole generate itself on the occasion of fixed laws of nature without arbitrary fictions [Erdichtungen], a whole that looks so much like the one we have before our eyes that I cannot refrain from considering it the same” (1: 226).

Just as Kant does not have the luxury to retreat into a private garden, however, he cannot enjoy another of his king’s privileges: exemption from legal proceedings. Even when the king, as a would-be Epicurean, makes irreligious remarks, he cannot be brought into a court of law. Kant, by contrast, is very much at the mercy of the courts for the remarks he publishes. As a precaution against the threat of legal proceedings – which issues from his close association with the spirit of Epicurus – Kant produces a prolepsis of the very forum from which he wishes to escape; he subjects himself, in other words, to an improvised legal process and arraigns, as a result, his first tribunal of reason: “Since I know that these reflections are free from all criminalities, I will loyally present what well-meaning as well as weak minds might find objectionable, and I am prepared to subject it to the rigors of the orthodox [rechtgläubigen] Areopagus, which is the mark of a sincere disposition” (1: 222). The “orthodoxy” of this new Areopagus does not consist in its allegiance to any articles of faith but, rather, in its desire to separate right from wrong by distinguishing the rational from the irrational. By subjecting himself to the decision of a tribunal of his imagination, the young philosopher hopes to immunize himself from a real courtroom and thereby achieve something like a simulacrum of the royal privilege: freedom from every law other than those to which he subjects himself. The idea of autonomy has its origin in this Areopagus of the scientific imagination. Its origin, in turn, is the barely concealed accusation of orthodox theologians that the lines of inquiry Kant pursues so closely parallel those of Lucretius’ De rerum natura that his work threatens to unleash a new Epicureanism. If this were indeed the case, then the young Kant would ironically turn into a reborn atomist – ironic, of course, because Epicurean doctrine, much to the chagrin of the Church fathers, runs counter to the Platonic conception of the soul in which the idea of rebirth takes hold. And since the crux and crisis of the Universal Natural History will be a wholly non-Christian idea of rebirth – nature as a “Phoenix” (1: 321) that restores itself from its own ashes, without the intervention of extra-mundane intervention – the accusation carries a certain degree of urgency:

If the structure of the world with all its order and beauty is only the effect of matter abandoned to its own universal laws of movement … then the proof of the divine author that one draws from gazing at the beauty of the cosmic architecture is completely undone; nature is sufficient unto itself; divine governance is unnecessary, Epicurus lives again in the midst of Christendom [Epikur lebt mitten im Christentume wieder auf], and an unholy world-wisdom [Weltweisheit] tramples on the faith that offers a light to illuminate philosophy.

(1: 222)

Such are the words of the “attorney for the faith,” who, by speaking in these terms, ironically indicts himself – not of Epicureanism, to be sure, but of being under the unconscious influence of its teachings. For the image by which he seeks to cast suspicion on the author of the Universal Natural History is drawn from some of the most famous lines of De rerum natura: “Quare religio perdibus subiecta vicissim/ obteritur, nos exaequat victoria coelo [Religion has been hurled down and trampled underfoot, And victory has raised us to the heavens].”⁹ Kant, however, cannot rest content with this not-so-subtle allusion. He defends himself from the charge of Epicureanism by presenting himself as the unambiguous champion of reason. The ancient atomists, by contrast, fail to be fully rational, and the sign of their failure is their reliance on the clinamen or “swerve” for the explanation of two scenes of ori...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Note on Translation
• Introduction
• 1 The pleasures of failure: toward an unnumbered “Remark” in the Critique of Judgment
• 2 The sovereign sentence: from the Preface to the first edition of the first Critique to the Doctrine of Right
• 3 The other sovereign sentence: “On the Failure of All Philosophical Attempts at Theodicy”
• 4 Out of the blue: “On the Radical Evil in Human Nature”
• 5 Under the sign of failure: Toward Eternal Peace
• 6 In the name of friendship; or the case for inconsistency
• 7 Revolution in the air; or the end of the human regime on earth
• Conclusion: making way for another law of the earth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Sources
• Index