Alles in Ordnung

October 20, 2009 in Codex, The Sacred Blacksmith
Tags: Aria, Asceticism, Cecily Campbell, Christopher Goto-Jones, Chūōkōron discussions, Globalism, Hegel, Independent Trade City of Housman, Isao Miura, Kant, Katanah?, Keiji Nishitani, Kyoto School, League of Nations, Luke Ainsworth, Metaphysic of War, moralische Energie, political philosophy, The Dynamics of history, The Sacred Blacksmith, World Federation

The overcoming of Kant by means of Hegel

The ‘world-idea of the eighteenth century’ – i.e. the ‘ideology’ of the League of Nations [Nishida] – should be seen in the tradition of earlier concepts, namely Kant’s idea of a ‘peaceful…continuous community of all peoples on earth’ with the aim to ensure an ‘everlasting peace’… Hegel could never be comfortable with this plan for peace. The reason for Hegel’s animosity is his disagreement with Kant’s moral philosophy in general. this moral philosophy subscribes to the Enlightenment principle that pratical reason shouldn’t accept any exterior authority and has to decide everything autonomously and independently within itself. No maxim is acceptable, if general adherence to it would extinguish the reality upon which it relies. For example generalized theft would be incompatible with the requirement that private property shall exist. This is immediately intelligible. But at a second glance it becomes obvious that it remains unclear whether we should deputize for the preservation of private property or sanction general theft. According to Hegel such ethics remain an ‘empty formalism’. Which of the two alternatives would be choose if we had been brought up by pirates on a desert island? Our ethics become a distinct content only within a community, which is the concrete place of our morality. Such a community is a nation, a state, and that is in the full peculiarity of its individual historical life. We find similar arguments in the Chūōkōron-discussions. Kōsaka argues :

Because they are essentially transcendental ethics, the morality of Kant, too, is without any connection to history. But the nations and state, which are moving amidst history, are in fact deeply related to history. Because this has been forgotten, a kinf of ethics, which have separated themselves from history, became thinkable.

Nishitani is working along the same lines when he attacks the idea of the state as a union of free and equal individuals, and likewise of a union of equal, autonomous nations. Such an order, so Nishitani complains, relies only on the ‘mutual limitations’ of ‘the freedom of the passions and of selfishness, whether that be of the individuals or the states.’ Yet, according to Hegel :

The passions, the objectives of the particular interests, the satisfaction of selfishness are the mightiest powers; they are mighty, because they don’t respect any limit, which law or morality want to impose upon them, and because those natural powers are much closer to man than the artificial and tiresome cultivation of discipline and moderation, law and morality.

The ideal of a unity of individuals or nation-states respecting each other in their freedom and equality must necessarily become undermined by those natural powers, and Nishitani therefore calls this ideal ‘dubious’. It is by just this ‘reciprocal limitation…of the freedom of passions and of selfishness’ that it wants to preserve that same dubious freedom. ‘The recognition of the freedom of the other’, say Nishitani,

has in view only the empty, abstract ‘human being’, respectively the empty abstract ‘nation/people’…Accordingly any such order of freedom and equality must remain merely formal. So under the surface of this formal freedom and equality, the unlimited excesses of passion and the exploitation of the weak will take place in an even more perfidious way…This is, what I called the deceitful nature of democracy.

The bourgeois-liberal concept of ‘freedom’, which Nishitani is contesting here, indeed inspired kant’s understanding of the state. For Kant a state is an instrument to benefit the well-being of equal individuals aspiring to realize their personal objectives, and a law and morality serve to keep those aspirations within reasonable bounds. A world-federation is the higher form of that, and therefore Kant pleads for this idea. But according to Hegel, a state is an entity overflowing from an organic, public life in which the individual identifies itself, and that is why a state muste be an individual thing vis-à-vis others. Moreover, as a community, within which the individual identifies itself, the state and not the individual is the higher purpose. If a state is healthy, it has the power to amalgamate its parts into the whole of itself, or if necessary to sacrifice them for the sake of the whole. This happens especially in times of emergency, when the unity of the state is endangered and the individuals are called upon to lay down their life for the state. Consequentially war is for Hegel a moment of truth : in war the true ’substantial relationship’ betwen state and individual becomes apparent.

We find a similar insight in the Chūōkōron-discussions, particulary in the discussant’s diagnosis of the ailments of modernity, and the idea tha war is an effective medication to treat these ailments; in modern, liberal societies a deep rift separated the ‘atomised’ individual from state and society, the ‘private’ from the ‘public’. According to this view, modern society lacked a centre of gravity, a centripetal force to counteract the centrifugal forces exercise by the particular, private interests of the individuals. The fragmentation of the whole, the disintegration of unity in a multitude of realms of values, becoming more and more autonomous and asbolute, was the fate of modern society : ‘The entrepreneur thinks about economy, the lawyer about law etc., but thinking about things in isolated realms has now reached its limitations’ contented Suzuki. A ‘true renewal’ had to put an end to the ‘rampant spreading of such narrow subjectivity’ and the task of philosophy was to ‘tear down these borders. Precisely for that reason, ‘total war’ was defined as a ‘philosophical war’. The very demand for the breakdown of borders, the reunification of the disentegrating aeras of the military, art, economy, politics, thinking, and so on, and the re-transformation of the modern ‘homo oeconomicus’ into and ‘original human being’ was fulfilled by war in an extraordinary effective way. War, as Nishitani argues, compels the concentration of forces – i.e. the conversion of the modern state into a ‘national defence state’ – and educates the individuals towards ‘asceticism’, that is to say, to the subordination of their ’selfish’ private interests for the sake of public wealth. Elsewhere Nishitani circumscribes this ‘asceticism’ as messhi hōkō, ‘extinct the self, and serve the public’.

Re-politicising the Kyoto school as philosophy, Christopher Goto-Jones, 2007, p116