Peace cannot be built on the “cemetery of freedom” (Kant)
The Notepad of Michael the Great
His name is sometimes evoked to claim the nobility quarters that the doctrine of "peace at any cost" has. In the articles of the most irreducible intellectuals of ethical pacifism, however, it is often cited to legitimize a sort of conscientious objection to the sending of weapons to Ukraine . The name is that of Immanuel Kant, the author of Zum ewigen Frieden, known in Italy with the improper but now canonical title, Per la pace perpetua. It is considered one of his most famous and evocative texts, an authentic masterpiece of unparalleled elegance and extraordinary originality. However, as an essay by Marco Duichin (to which these notes are indebted) demonstrates, over the course of over two centuries it has produced a boundless bibliography in which the most disparate interpretations can be found. It was in fact read as an edifying pacifist appeal, a passionate revolutionary manifesto, an essential point of reference in the theoretical debate on international relations (Alla pace del cemetery, Firenze University Press, also available in pdf ).
In a letter dated August 13, 1795, four months after the ratification of the separate peace of Basel between the kingdom of Prussia and revolutionary France (April 5, 1795), received by Kant with "intimate joy" and greeted by many observers as the premise of a definitive and complete peace between the European powers, the elderly philosopher announced to the publisher Friedrich Nicolovius the imminent sending of a manuscript entitled, precisely, Zum ewigen Frieden. Already on 4 October, the small volume saw the light in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in a first edition of two thousand copies, which quickly sold out and was followed by an immediate reprint. The booklet, drawn up according to the classic forms of international peace treaties, complete with preliminary, definitive and secret articles, guarantee supplements and even a safeguard clause with which Kant intended to protect himself from Prussian censorship, opened with a brief but a crucial preamble, which reiterated the title of the work in the exergue, curiously inspired by the satirical inscription placed on the sign of a Dutch inn, where a cemetery was painted.
Celebrated by many German contemporaries as an unsurpassable model on the coveted theme of "perpetual peace", Kant's writing, sometimes unduly assimilated to the chimerical Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (1713) by the abbot of Saint-Pierre, aroused a huge echo, enjoying a great success with the public even outside the Germanic borders. Viewed with suspicion in conservative English circles as a “Jacobin” text, dangerously oriented in favor of revolutionary France with which Great Britain was still at war, it was above all in the circles across the Alps close to Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès that received enthusiastic appreciation.
As Duichin recalls, by custom Zum ewigen Frieden was thus approached to that large line of works that, starting with some rhetorical-exhortative and philanthropic-religious writings that appeared in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as the Querela pacis by Erasmus of Rotterdam ( 1517), will culminate in a conspicuous harvest of eighteenth-century treatises on the theme of "perpetual peace", where by virtue of this kinship, despite the abysmal differences that separate it from these works, it has often been seen as a real pacifist manifesto, sometimes hastily elevated to the rank of model of ethical pacifism, in which the humanitarian condemnation of war goes hand in hand with the edifying appeal for an ecumenical coexistence between men of every race and nation.
But unlike pacifist fundamentalism, anchored to the Erasmian assumption that "the most unjust peace is better than the most just of wars", that is, that peace is the supreme good, to be unconditionally preceded by any other value (including freedom), Kant it decisively rejects the idea of a peace achieved at any price, even at the cost of being built on the "cemetery of freedom". And, while recognizing war as a "scourge of mankind", he does not consider it a "so incurable evil" as the much more feared "tomb of a single dominion". In fact, he warns against the risks of a universal and lasting peace achieved "under a single sovereign", destined to lead to the "most horrible despotism". It is therefore not surprising that Zum ewigen Frieden, already in the aftermath of his appearance, was welcomed with favor in progressive and Francophile circles, with distrust and suspicion in conservative and absolutist circles, from whose pages even implicit support for the violence that France promised to unleash against the Old European regime.
However, if the eighteenth-century image of a pacifist Kant is largely improbable, the specular thesis of a Jacobin Kant is without foundation. His “peace of reason”, based on the recognition of the “peaceful contrast between peoples”, certainly has very little in common with the naive pacifist utopia that longs for the extinction of all conflicts. Moreover, without prejudice to his undisputed sympathy for republican France, the warnings and fears expressed by the philosopher in various places by Zum ewigen Frieden concerned precisely the indiscriminate recourse to the "pacifying" war theorized by the most radical wing of French revolutionaries, convinced supporters of the idea that, on the altar of future peace, any means could be justified, even a war of extermination. In short, the Kantian project of replacing war with law is sidereally distant both from revolutionary and messianic fundamentalism, for which all means are legitimate in order to obtain the final pacification of the European states under French domination, both from the "peace of love" of Robespierre: of a love, however, destined to triumph fully only after forcibly eliminating those who suffocate.
Unlike Robespierre, Kant's perpetual peace is not the fruit of love between men, nor should it benefit their well-being and happiness, but "is solely in accordance with law": it is by no means "an ethical final state- religious "nor" an earthly paradise ", but the pure" juridical regulation of antagonisms ". Animated by a philanthropic, messianic, apocalyptic, expansionist ideology and certain of its righteousness, the French Jacobins instead aimed at the elimination of all antagonism and at the universal establishment of a perennial peace – that is, definitive and absolute – through a revolutionary war that would have inaugurated , thanks to a last "spasm of violence", a new era of bliss. The connection between perpetual peace, the happiness of peoples and the golden age, understood as the ideal condition for the peaceful enjoyment of earthly goods, is completely foreign to Kantian thought, but rather seems to echo, as the former Montagnard Danton had guessed, archaic and never completely forgotten folkloric beliefs in the legendary “Paese di Cuccagna”: that mythical place where well-being, abundance and pleasure are within everyone's reach. However paradoxical it may seem, the pacifist Kant on the contrary feared – no less than the "warrior" Hegel – the ruinous effects of a "long peace", in which the predominance of "low self-interest", "cowardice" and "softness" "Would have corrupted" the character and mentality of the people ".
The proposal to render with Alla pace perpetua, rather than with the usual – but misleading – Per la pace perpetua, the Italian title of the little book, rightly taking into account the prologue, in which Kant himself goes back to an eminent scholar of Kantian thought, Vittorio Mathieu refers to the sign of a tavern. It is curious that in translating this title, Mathieu noted, the error still persists despite the fact that "Kant himself explains the origin of zum: Zum ewigen Frieden, or To perpetual peace, according to a current usage in the German-speaking area, where contratted prepositions zum and zur famously introduce the names of taverns, inns and hotels […] which would sound in Italian as 'Al cervo d'oro', 'Al piuccio d'oro' … "(The French revolution and the freedom of Kant, pdf-Filosofia.it).
In short, Kant's use of the preposition zum marks the distance that the philosopher intends to mark with respect to the literature of his time, through a title that deliberately takes up the sarcasm with which the many projects of peace that flourished in the second half of the Eighteenth century under the pressure of Enlightenment philanthropism. And, contrary to what one might think, even the ewig that resonates in the original title does not allude positively to the characteristics of the new order that the Kantian project would like to establish: it is not, in fact, a "peace destined to perpetuate itself", rather, precisely of the ewigen Frieden, of the “eternal peace” that is usually attributed to the afterlife, to the atemporal condition of the dead and to the quiet of the cemetery.
The author of the three Critiques therefore adopts, as the title and exergue of his writing, a phrase that looks more like a solemn warning than a confident wish: something that evokes the "peace of cemeteries" rather than that achieved with the achievement of harmony among men. Far from being a mere joke to displace or mock the reader, the image evoked by Kant is not even an impromptu invention born of his fertile pen, but constitutes yet another variation on an emblematic topos with a "cemetery" character whose roots were rooted in an anecdotal tradition that had been circulating for some time in European cultured circles. The evocative metaphor of perpetual peace as a cemetery appears for the first time in a text by Gottfried Leibniz dating back to the autumn of 1688, written in open controversy against French expansionism, accused by the inventor of differential calculus (together with Isaac Newton) of wanting create the “paix perpétuelle” in the form of “d'un esclavage à la Turque”, which would make it similar to a “cimetière” (Réflexions sur la déclaration de la Guerre). This discloses an unprecedented interpretation of Zum ewigen Frieden, whose title, inspired by the pessimistic Leibnizian conception, still remains at the center of a curious misunderstanding which is already reflected in its first Italian translation (1885), and which will no longer be changed. .
Usually interpreted as a fervent pacifist appeal, the sarcastic motto used by Kant to title and introduce his treatise is actually nothing more than the faithful cast of a prosaic foreign commercial sign ("To eternal peace"), mentioned by Leibniz and echoed by his French followers, to show that peace and death are identified. And to underline – in accordance with the grim warning engraved on the tomb of the Dutch historian and diplomat Lieuwe van Aitzema, his possible inspirer – that the obstinate search for peace on earth leads nowhere or, at most, can only lead to grave quiet of the cemetery. On the other hand, concludes Duichin, the famous cemetery image of Leibniz, accompanied by the epigraph "À la Paix Perpétuelle" that so impressed Kant, does not seem to express an unfounded concern in the light of the sinister programmatic declaration of the Jacobin Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756 -1794), deputy to the National Convention, reported by Hyppolite Taine: “We will make France a cemetery, rather than not regenerate it in our own way”.
*The paper
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-pace-non-puo-essere-edificata-sul-cimitero-della-liberta-kant/ on Sat, 29 Oct 2022 05:49:34 +0000.