Kant_in_Hiroshima.page
KANT IN HIROSHIMAA BICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF KANT2004 PEACE AS A FRUIT IN THE ORCHARD OF PRACTICAL REASON " Beati pacifici,quoniam filii Deivocabuntur." Mt.V,9.
In 2004 it will have passed 200 years since the death of Inmmanuel Kant. He was not the first to work on the subject of peace, since l'Abbe de Saint Pierre, Jeremy Bentham and J.J. Rousseau were obvious precursors. Perpetual Peace is, however, the first systematic approach on international harmony by means of juridical order.
Kant has no city in Germany to be celebrated. His Königsberg is notany more a German city and even its name, Königsberg, is out of themaps of contemporary Europe. That, in no way, disminish the extremelyimportant German presence in an intellectual hommage to Kant andKant's though. But it explains why it is not Germany necessarily theplace for such a celebration. Instead, it looks pertinent to suggesta country with a high level of intellectual activity and animpressive tradition of studies on German thought, as Japan really is(1), and a city which is the tragic symbol of how long men are ableto go in the abandonment of peace: Hiroshima.
(1) An example of the afinities with the German studies and theGerman thought in Japan is the fact of being the influence of KarlJasper in that country the strongest and most important in the theworld. Already in life of the Heidelberg's professor it was foundedthe Jaspers Society of Tokio, and japanes is at head of the series oflanguages to whicht this thinker's works have been translated.
AN ANNIVERSARY OF THE THINKING ON PEACE
The celebration of the anniversary of Kant's death, as an occasion torenew the thinking on peace, should concern Peace and ConflictResearch, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Political Science, LawPhilosophy, Sociology of Law, General Theory of the State and Law,International Law and Constitutional Law.This last discipline, particularly, because the Kant's constructionincludes constitutions as stonecorners of his pacific structure. Theconstitution was, in last analysis, an expression of rationalitywithin the State, an anchor through which every State remainsanchorage in rationality. And the process toward universal peaceshould be a way of increasing rationality in the external behaviourof States in relation with each other. Therefore, peace becomes theresult of humanisation of the human race. If, according to the oldAristotelian definition, reason is the specific difference whichseparates man from the animal realm, the increase of reason throughthe expansion of rationality in their international conduct marks,doubtless, the way through which men develop themselves moreeffectively as human beings. So, to say it with Kant's words:"...the settlement of their differences by the mode of a civilprocess, and not by the barbarous means of war, can be realised", inorder to prevent "to see oneself...degraded like the lower animals tothe level of the mechanical plays of Nature".
The abstinence of Japan and Germany from participation in the PersianGulf war, because of constitutional hindrances, suggests a distantbut clear resonance of Kant's insistence on constitutions asinstruments for the construction of peace.He was aware of the fact that a permanent state of peace was not animmediate goal but an effort for many generations. One year after"Perpetual Peace", he wrote in "The Elements of Metaphysics of Law":"...Hence the Perpetual Peace as the ultimate end of all the Right ofNations becomes in fact (for practical circumstances of the 18thCentury) an impracticable idea. The political principles, however,which aims at such an end, and which enjoin the formation of suchunions among the States as may promote a continuous approximation toa Perpetual Peace, are not impracticable; they are as practicable asthis approximation itself, which is a practical problem involving aduty, and founded upon the Right of individual men and States."A few pages later, writing the conclusions of this part of hisMetaphysic of Practical Reason, he shows how in peace converge idealand practical interest: "Hence the question no longer is as to whether Perpetual Peace is areal thing or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when weadopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition ofits being real. We must work for what may perhaps not be realised,and establish a constitution which yet seems adapted to bring itabout (mayhap Republicanism in all States, together and separately).And thus we must put an end to the evils of wars, which have been thechief interest of the international arrangements of all Stateswithout exceptions. And although the realisation of their purpose mayalways remain but a pious wish, yet we do certainly not deceiveourselves in adopting the maxim of action that will guide us inworking incessantly for it; for it is a duty to do this...If the ideais carried forward by gradual Reform, and in accordance with fixedPrinciples, it may lead by a continuous approximation to the highestPractical Good, to Perpetual Peace."The world is still approaching perpetual peace. That is not the minorreason why the 200 anniversary of Kant's death appears with such anextraordinary relevance in the first decade of the 21st Century. In1903 Prof. Robert Latta, from Glasgow University, wrote: "Although itis more than 100 years since Kant's essay was written, itssubstantial value is practically unpaired. Anyone who is acquaintedwith the general character of the mind of Kant will find in him soundcommon sense, clear recognition of the essential facts of the caseand a remarkable power of analytically exhibiting the conditions onwhich the facts necessarily depend. These characteristics aremanifest in the essay on Perpetual Peace. Kant is not pessimisticenough to believe that a perpetual peace is an unrealisable dream ora consummation devoutly to be feared, nor is he optimistic enough tofancy that it is an ideal which could easily be realised if men wouldbut turn their hearts to one another. For Kant's Perpetual Peace isan ideal, not merely as a speculative Utopian idea, with which infancy we may play, but a moral principle, which ought to be, andtherefore can be, realised. Yet he makes it perfectly clear that wecannot hope to approach the realisation of it unless we honestly facepolitical facts and get a firm grasp of the indispensable conditionsof a lasting peace."After the two world wars and the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima andNagasaky, that Kant would surely have qualified as "belluminternecinum", the words of Prof. Latta, written almost a centuryago, have today even more pertinence that in 1903.
A TEXT OF ANTICIPATION
Kant's book anticipates some of the peculiar evils of our time. Forinstance, cold war, that is a deteriorated state of peace, and one ofits sinister consequences: the enormous, pervasive and insidioussecret apparatus of the intelligence establishment, along with thebasic immorality of spying and clandestine activities:"...those infernal acts (assassins, poisoners, the use of treachery,spying) already vile in themselves, on carrying into use, are notlong confined to the sphere of war...vices such as these, whence onceencouraged, cannot in the nature of things be stamped out and wouldbe carried over into the state of peace, when their presence would beutterly destructive to the purpose of that state".Also he foresaw a situation like the nuclear apocalypse: "...a war ofextermination, where the process ofF anihilation, would strike bothparties at once and all right as well, would bring about PerpetualPeace only in the great graveyard of human race."It was also clear for him the intrinsic perversity of armamentscareer and militarism: "...(standing armies) are always threatening other states with war by appearing to be in constant readiness to fight. They incite the various States to outride one another in the number of their soldiers and to their members no limit can be set. Now, to the sums devoted to that purpose, peace at last becomes even more oppressive than a short war, these standing armies are themselves the cause of wars of aggression, undertaken to get rid of this burden."Kant had a preview of another issue of our days, foreign debt as aresult of armaments: "...This ingenious invention (credit) of a commercial people in the present Century is, in other words, a treasury for the carrying on wars which may exceed the treasury of all other States taken together...The ease then with which war may be waged, coupled with the inclination which seems to be implanted in human nature, is a great obstacle in the way of potential peace."
DEMOCRACY AND WARPerhaps the more actual relevance of Kant's thought lies in hisinsistence on the consent of the affected by war to enter in it:"If, as must be under this (republican) constitution, every one ofthem is required to determine whether there shall be war or not,nothing is more natural than they should weigh the matter well,before undertaking such a bad business. For in decreeing war, theywould of necessity be resolving to bring down the miseries of warupon their country. This implies: they must fight themselves; theymust hand over the cost of the war out of their own property; theymust do their poor best to make good the devastation which it leavesbehind; and finally, they have to accept a burden of debt which willembittered even peace itself, and which they can never pay off onaccount of the new wars which are always impending".He over estimated, however, the efficacy of the formal republicanconstitution, i.e. the mere separation of legislative and executivepowers, as an instrument to prevent wars; and he could not pay enough attention to a fact with which we are nowadays quite acquainted: that the legislators who may consent war are not the people who actually wage wars and die in them; that the political class solely find out ways to exclude their sons from wars, as it is shown in the cases of former U.S. Vice President, Mr. Dan Quayle, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and U.S. President George W. Bush, who, when young men, evaded the dangers of the Vietnam war. The political class use to do as a Brazilian general who, according oral tradition, before a battle during the Argentine-Brazilian war (1824 1826) harangued his troops in this way: "Let us animated ourselves, and you go".Precisely in this point, as in others, the following generations ofscholars should advance in the path initiated by Kant. They must looknot only for formal constitutional and legal remedies but especiallyfor social and political implementations of the basic idea accordingto which nobody who does not consent war must be compelled wage it or suffer its consequences.Probably that means to neutralise the manipulations of the mass mediaover public opinion, to denounce the pressure of economic interestsrelated to the military-industrial establishment and arm'straffickers, and to annul pseudo-patriotism, demagoguery and politicopportunism. And, moreover, to prevent the "fait accompli" techniquethrough which States's populations find themselves in war withouthaving had neither the time nor the chance of political reflectionand debate to decide rationally about it, as it was the case in suchdifferent conflicts as the Vietnam and the Malvinas/ Falkland wars.
WAR AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
This last consideration is particularly important because peace is amajor goal in term of social justice. Since poor young men areprimarily the victims of wars. As says Marc Shields:"In any war, most of the fighting and most of the dying are done bythe youngest soldiers holding the lowest rank. In Vietnam, more thanthree out of four of the American killed there were enlisted menbetween the ages of 17 and 22 and under the rank of staff sergeant".Then, the draft system, especially the exemptions to it, was grosslyunfair: by grating generous deferral to those enrolled in university(in a country where university is basically for the rich), iteffectively allowed the clever and the affluent to avoid service,while condemning the rest, mainly black and blue-collar whites, tofight and, often, die; even within the services, the proportion ofblacks in combat roles was higher than in non-combat roles.In the Malvinas war, the Argentine army had a very few officers dead,while the dead soldiers were hundreds, and in the sinking of thecruiser "General Belgrano" all the officers evacuated the ship andthe hundreds of deeds were sailors and sergeants. In the Persian Gulf war, and in the U.S. side, although blacks made up just 14% of the enlistment-age population, accounted for nearly 22% of the active-duty recruits. In the Army which could probably suffer the most casualties, the number was 28%. The rich were unlikely to suffer much: the children of the top 15% of earners had joined at a rate one-fifth the national average. Among enlisted servicemen, only about 20% had a parent who has graduated from university. The offspring of the elite were absent from the sands of Saudi Arabia: only two congressmen and no members of the Bush cabinet had children in the Gulf. The leaders were insulated from the consequences of their decisions and opinions on war. Political classes tend to behave like a hypothetical Brazilian general that according to oral tradition, during the argentine-Brazilian war of 1824-1825, who before a battle harangued his troops in this way:”Let us animated ourselves, and you go”.
WAR AND IMPERIALISM
No less significance has Kant's remarks on imperialism andcolonialism, those evils of the 17th and 18th Centuries whose presenteffects are evident. Especially in the Third World, whose peoplescontinue to be victimised in the wars at the end of the 20th and thebeginning of the 21st Century, as it was obvious in the Persian GulfWar, distantly but distinctly rooted in the arbitrary design of thepolitical map of the region at the collapse of the Ottoman empire, adraw drawn with obvious imperialistic purposes. These effects are also shown in the international bullying of big powers, systematic violators of the non-intervention and self- determination principles.The condemnation of "Perpetual Peace" keeps actuality and congruity:ôIf one compares with this (mankind at last near to a cosmopolitanconstitution) the inhospitable behaviour of the civilised, primarycommercial States of our Continent, one is horrified at the injusticethey show in their visit to foreign countries and peoples, sincevisiting appears to be to them synonymous with conquering; America,the Negro countries, the Moluccas, the Cape, etc. wherein theirdiscovery regarded as countries that belonged to no one, for thenatives were entirely disregarded. Into India they introduced on thepretext of merely establishing trading centres a foreign soldierlyand with this widespread wars, rebellion, treachery and the wholelitany of all the evils which can burden mankind..."Kant distinguished himself from a certain cynicism of other sons ofthe Enlightenment, prone to a Weltanschauung of double standard. Letus take, for instance, the U.S Declaration of Independence. Thissolemn proclamation combines these two strong affirmations:“all men are created equal” “the merciless Indians savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”. It is hinted not too subtly- that subjects in the second sentence are not included in the rhetorical “all” of the first one.Only after two centuries, historians now in the U.S are more inclinedto accept the genocidal extermination of the previous population ofIndians. Says Benjamin Schwarz, in "The Diversity Myth: America'sLeading Export". included in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1995:"...building America required nearly 300 years of genocidal waragainst Native Americans, a fact that impels to-day's historians tocharacterise American expansion on the continent as 'invasion' ratherthan 'settlement'. These wars, one of the longest series of ethnicconflicts in modern history, were resolved not by power sharing butby obliterationö. In what regards the French revolution, it sufficesto read, in the first revolutionary constitution of 1791, art.8 fromtitle VII which stated:”Colonies and French posessions in Asia,Africa and America, since they form part of the French empire, arenot comprehended in the present constitution” , which was eloquentenough, because this was the constitution that included the famousDeclaration of Man and Citizen Rights from 1789. As one can see,rights of some men, of some citizens...
KANT, FREEDOM AND TRAGIC OPTIMISM
For countries of the Third World, particularly for the youngrepublics of Africa, Kants thought has a special meaning. Answeringto the sceptics of his time who saw in the French RevolutionaryTerror a proof of the immaturity of the masses for freedom, assceptics of our days have seen the same in the horrible genocidad warof Rwanda and Burundi, the philosopher replied: In one accept thisassumption, freedom will never be achieved; for one can not arrive atthe maturity for freedom without having already adquired it; one mustbe free to learn how to make use of ones powers freely and usefully.The first attempts will be surely be brutal and will lead to a stateof affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition underthe dominance but also the protection of an external authority.However, one can achieve reason anly through ones own experience andone must be free to be able to undertake them To accept the principlethat freedom is worthless for those under ones control and that onehas the right to refuse it to them forever, is an infringment of theright of God himself, who has created man to be free (Quoted by NoamChomsky, Language and Freedom, The Chomsky Reader, pag.144).His confidence in freedom was part of an attitude of tragic optimism,to discribe it with the words of Emmanuel Mounier; a confidence injust the possibility ûnot the certainty- that the human person has toovercome his own negativeness. A celebration of Kant must be theoccassion to re-affirm this conditional confidence in man and hisfreedom.The Major of Hiroshima, Mr. Takashi Hitoaki, issued in August 1997 aPeace Declaration in which he quoted the UNESCO Constitution: Sincewar begins in the mind of men, it is in the mind of men that thedefences of the peace must be constructed. That is exactly the idea of Kant and the idea of a celebration ofKants contribution to peace as a matter of practical reason: to fightfor peace where war can emerge, that is in the human mind, in thehuman heart, in the human emotions.The celebration of the bicentennial of Perpetual Peace will be theopportunity to think again on the intellectual and politicalresponsibilities, and the duties of reason, in the last first decadeof the 21st Century, years after the end of the Cold War, a time whenthe illusion -only the illusion, as it is evident today- of a periodin which the enormous economic resources of war might be transferedto fight hunger, diseases and illiteracy.
by Salvador Maria Lozada,Former Full Professor of Buenos Aires UniversityHonorary President, International Association of Constitutional Law
Return to Exhibition - 2001 --->
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