A Study On The Peace Thoughts Of Immanuel Kant

Peace is an eternal and beautiful human ideal.Under the universal rule of the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Pope in the late Medieval Age,the modern European sovereign states gradually rose after the endless war.However,with the rise of the sovereign states,Europe plunged into war.War made the state,and the state made war.Witnessing the continual wars and conflicts,Immanuel Kant made his peace doctrine with the influence of Saint Pierre and Rousseau.As a famous Germany philosopher in the culmination of the Enlightenment,Kant's peace thoughts were a product of the Enlightenment.He exalted the reason and freedom of human beings.In his opinion,man was essentially a moral being.Freedom was the ratio essendi of the moral law,the latter was the ratio cognoscendi of freedom.The politics must be subjected to the morality,constituting a lawful context for human freedom.Perpetual Peace was the other side of the same coin with the universally lawful human society.As a systematic philosopher,Kant's writings on peace were underlay by his critical philosophy.In the epistemology,Kant made the distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenon about the subject.In his practice philosophy,he made the distinction between the internal freedom and the external freedom about the freedom.In his moral philosophy,he made the distinction between the categorical imperative and the hypothetical imperative about the ground of will.In his Critique of the Faculty of Judgment,he proposed the natural teleology.All these were applied and reflected in his peace thoughts.Kant's peace thoughts were elaborated in On Perpetual Peace,but not confined to it.In order to understand his peace thoughts comprehensively,we must not only place his analysis of peace within his critical philosophy,but also study his writings on philosophy of law The Metaphysics of Morals and his other essays about political philosophy and philosophy of history in his later years in depth.His peace theory covered the field of international thoughts,philosophy of law,history and politics.The theme of his critical philosophy was about the human beings.Human freedom constituted the subject of his philosophy.For human freedom,reflecting morally on human life inevitably led to think about the modern political issues.So his political philosophy was essentially a series of political ideas about the progress possibility of human morality.For him,practical reason should make the rules for the politics.As the highest political good,Perpetual Peace was not only the crown of his entire philosophical system,but also the condition for the freedom of man who is thought to be the ultimate end of nature.Such public legal justice systems as states were always necessary for the maximum external freedom and lasting peaceful coexistence of man who wanted to live in a condition of moral freedom.As the practical theory of Recht,politics was the necessary form to realize justice.For Kant,peace did not mean the end of a war.It was neither a temporary truce between the two states nor an unstable peace under the balance of power.Peace meant an end to all hostilities and nullified all existing reasons for future wars.Unlike the early modern natural law thinkers,Kant argued that peace must be based on laws,rights and justice.Therefore,his doctrine of peace was essentially a theory of Recht.For Kant,Perpetual Peace must be based on domestic law,international law and cosmopolitan law.However,he believed that the concept of universal Recht could only derive from pure practical reason a priori,rather than experience.Formalism was the most eminent characteristic of his concept of Recht.It was both a manifestation and a guarantee of human freedom acting from these transcendental principles.Peace must be based on law and right,instead of power.If the domestic and international order was constituted by power,Perpetual Peace was impossible,the only result was either a temporarily unstable condition under the balance of power or peace in the graveyard under the soulless despotism.For Kant,peace was a rightful condition established by the people,rather than a state of nature which is a state of war.What was necessary for the move from the state of nature to the rightful condition were three definitive articles of Perpetual Peace that was established by the institutions:the establishment of republican government within a state,the establishment of a federation of states among free states,the establishment of cosmopolitan constitution around the world.Through the three institutions,the right of individuals,the right of states and the cosmopolitan right were all secured.Finally,human freedom and rights were guaranteed.This was the necessary requirement of practical reason of man as a finite rational being:leave out of the state of nature among people and states.Six preliminary articles and three definitive articles of Perpetual Peace derived from human reason a priori,constituting the transcendental laws toward peace.In addition to this,it was through the unsocial sociability of man that the dynamic to peace was provided.Using the a priori idea of a state of nature,Kant pointed out that the republican was the only form of constitution which could be derived from and made consistent with the idea of the original contract.Furthermore,a republic was the domestic foundation for Perpetual Peace because it had not only peaceful dispositions,but also peace-building inclinations.However,the republic was just an idea,which was very different from all existing states.The difference between the idea of republic and the existing state was only the reflection of the difference between the noumenon and phenomenon.Only through the continuous top-down reform could the domestic constitution gradually approximate to the idea of republican.According to the universal law that everyone's freedom can coexist with the freedom of every other,Kant believed that it was a necessity that the mutual relations both between people and between states should be put under the law in order to attain Perpetual Peace.For the international order,Kant advocated the coercive world republic in early essays,but a voluntary league of sovereign states in later essays.The reason why he changed his mind later is that he put more and more emphasis on the moral problem of world peace after he witnessed the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic expansion.For him,a world republic was really necessary for Perpetual Peace,but it was not the immediate goal.Instead,it should be approached via a voluntary league of sovereign states.In Kant's peace writings,there are both statist and cosmopolitan sides,both realism and idealism sides.However,the mainstream of his peace thoughts are still liberalism.He advocated that the relations among both individuals and states should be based on right through law.He argued that human freedom could only be achieved by reforming the domestic and international order.He exalted the reason of man,arguing that man could not only legislate for nature,but also for themselves.Man could choose a future for themselves.For Kant,as a moral cause,Permanent Peace was not only possible,but it should be.However,the transcendental normative feature of his peace doctrine led to the result of operational and practical difficulties facing with complex reality.