Frank Manuel

Fritzie Manuel

Utopian Thought in the Western World

The German school is Protestant in a dep theological sense, whether the writers were true believers or not—and Kant in solemn university processions marched up to the portals of the Konigsberg church without entering. There is no reliance on good works, on externals, on mechanics, on a quantitative accumulation of artifacts and their diffusion, on the development of the arts and sciences. Moral transformation is an inner illumination that takes place in crisis. Great truths have to be wrung from nature. The idea predominates that man has paid dearly and must continue to pay dearly for his moral triumphs. The French conceptions of progress feature the steady acquisitions of mankind in obedience to a rational recognition of the utility of new things. There may have been interruptions due to the short-lived triumph of the evil ones—priests and tyrants in various guises—but these have merely been temporary breaks. In the German world what comes easily is considered rather trivial The Anglo-French-American idea of progress has remained essentially additive. The German ideal is the transformation of man's nature, a change that requires conflict, hardship, a clash of titanic forces, a dialectic, a conversion.

These very different ends have sometimes been expressed in later European thought by a contrast between the rival ideals of civilization and culture. In general the men west of the Rhine have seen the problem in terms of civilization, activity, goods, sensate realities; east of the Rhine there has been an idealization of Kultur, which relates to the nature of the inner man. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Kantian notions of Kultur, however modified, permeated the Germanic world. No more than Hamann, his mystical, antirationalist neighbor in Konigsberg, was Kant impressed with the external triumphs of civilization. He saw social graces, hypersensitivity to artificial concepts of honor, outward decency of conduct. But had man become more ethical? There was only a facade of containment of the beast. Often Kant was nauseated as he contemplated man. How believe that a truly moral being would come forth from the chaos? Logic rather than observation led Kant to affirm that there was ethical progress.

The Kantian image is that of humanity training itself, a long and arduous task. Reason is a capacity that grows slowly, it is not instinctive. Human capacities are fortified only through trials (Versuche), exercise (Ubung), education (Unterricht}; and no individual can himself live long enough to go through the entire course, to attain the full rational capacity to which the species is destined. Kant's fateful decree of nature, to which only German speech gives an appropriate Lutheran intonation, has willed that everything over and above the mechanical arrangement of man's animal nature, the part with which he was endowed, should be wrung from himself, and he is to have no reward but what he achieves beyond instinct through his own efforts. Man shall make himself, that was nature's awesome rule. Nature was parsimonious; she granted man no fine equipment like other animals, no claws, no fur. She intended that he make these things for himself in order that he might strengthen his capacities in the process. Nature wanted to fashion a man, not a sleepy beast. It cared more for his rational self-esteem (vernunftige Selbstschatzung) than for his happiness and well-being. Nature denied him ease, gave him only potentialities. Man's way to salvation was not through good works set out before him in a church, but through his struggle with his own evil nature to reach faith. At another point in his essay on universal history Kant stopped to muse how strange it was that one generation was called upon to live for another, for a future generation. Such subordination of one generation to another made sense only if one believed in the rational development of the species. Otherwise the conscious serving as a stepping stone for the future was incomprehensible.

The principle of antagonism, which Kant elevated to the equivalent of a Newtonian law for the historical world of men, would recur again and again in various forms among thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century, in Saint-Simon, the Saint-Simonians, Hegel, and Marx. There is ever present in man the dialectical drive to individuate himself, which is at odds with the need to socialize his existence. This absolute self-will, divorced and in defiance of any social considerations, man senses in himself and recognizes in others. Its existence makes of his life an eternal state of tension and rouses him to action. In defense of his individuality he is paradoxically moved to social action. For man by nature is lazy, Kant learned from Rousseau, and without the stimulus of conflict might do nothing. But when his passions are awakened, he has the three libidos of Ehrsucht, Herrschsucht, and Habsucht, desires for fame, dominion, and possession, and though these desires are in themselves egotistic they breed social talents and rationality and man thereby tames his own nature. Out of evil comes good, out of a pathological situation of antagonism and competitiveness the human faculties are perfected. Without this tension of asocial sociability all of man's abilities would remain dormant, but his destiny is growth. Man would like the ease of harmony, but nature knows better what is good for the species; it has decreed discord. The essentially tragic plight of man is revealed. What is good for man as an individual—peace and tranquillity—is not good for mankind. Kant has also resolved the problem of Job and of Leibniz' theodicy in one breath. Evil, clashes, wars, passions are requirements for the development of reason, which as it ripens will in turn emancipate man from hese lusts and vanities. Whether the sum total of happiness or misery is greater is irrelevant, because happiness is not the end of man in the world order.

The first immediate manifestation of rationality after a period of strife is the establishment of a citizen society. The similarity of this idea to that of the citizen society of the Contrat social is unmistakable. Citizenship in Kant's liberal society is perhaps the best definition of one type of freedom. It becomes the underlying presupposition of liberal history, as Kant writes of freedom under external laws combined with irresistible force. Both elements are present in the just civil constitution. On the one hand there is individual freedom; on the other, absolute power vested in society. While a synthesis is achieved in an ideal constitution, tension remains between them. The realization, after many trials and bloody internecine wars, that men could not live in wild, self-willed freedom has forced them to submit to this constitution. It was necessity, not rational comprehension, that brought about the legal order. But does the civil constitution with its absolute power crush freedom? For Kant the seminal element of growth and creativity, man's will, remains strong; society merely tames it, channelizes it, directs it. Kultur is the process of taming freedom without stifling it, and the result is the optimal social order, the highest expression of man's nature. But Kultur involves mankind's overcoming its own asocial instinct, disciplining itself so that true freedom can grow. Progressive history is the acquisition of Kultur.

Kant's optimism was never naive. Man was an animal who needed a lord, a Herr, to break his anarchic individual will and force it to obey einem allgemeingultigen Willen—Rousseau's volonte generate in German dress. Whether the Herr is one man or a group of men, he is still a lord, and the perennial problem of who guards the guardians is central to Kant's ideal society—perhaps not wholly or adequately resolved. Granted that there must be a rule of law, a civil constitution, who but a man can enforce it? Montesquieu and Beccaria felt that they had achieved the purpose of justice when they depersonalized the law Kant was not so easily satisfied. In quest of a way out he offered the possibilities of good will and experience. Such a solution, if it was ever embraced, could only come late in the history of mankind. Somehow an identification of human will with right recognized for its own sake ultimately had to transpire. The nature of man had to be prepared to receive the just civil constitution—the ideal of law had to be internalized, one would now say—yet at the same time man's nature could not really be perfected until a just civil constitution was in force. In the world of Immanuel Kant on the borderland of the Slavic wilderness, there were no comfort:ng assurances of man's eventual triumph. At times Kant was overwhelmed by a Protestant sense of human frailty. Man was like warped wood, and nothing truly perfect could be carpentered from crooked, warped wood.

It is only in other works by Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics and the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, that we gain an insight into the actual content of morality if man's reason should ever come to full fruition under a just civil constitution. Moral action would result from the reign of law internalized. The good and the pleasurable are quite distinct from each other. Pleasure, Kant contends, is the consequence of the influences of purely subjective causes upon the will of the subject. These can vary with the susceptibility of this or that individual, but a rational principle of morality is valid for all in all times and all places. Previous ideal systems of morality have been based on what Kant calls hypothetical imperatives. An action was deemed good because it was a means to something else. A truly rational morality requires that the action be good in itself; it is a categorical imperative. The categorical imperative from on high makes its demands on moral man: 'Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law,' and 'Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature.'

There is only one being in the world, man, who is an end in himself, not merely a means to something else. Rational beings are by definition persons, not things, and moral action with respect to persons ought to be motivated by considerations of their being absolute ends in themselves. The practical moral imperative then becomes: Always act so as to treat humanity, the rational human being, whether in your own person or in the person of another, as an absolute end, never as merely a means. In an ideal moral world there would be no contradiction or conflict between these rational imperatives, the law of the state, and the inclination of men's wills and desires. The will would be free and autonomous because it would be ruled not by sensate desires, interests, contingencies, circumstances, external force, but by itself. It would be an absolute good will, the embodiment of the categorical imperative, and would be governed by one precept only, that the principle of every action had to be capable of being made a universal law. Grained man's natural instincts, the adoption of this universal criterion was not much in evidence in the world Kant saw about him, and at times he doubted that it was ever attainable. But without this practical enforcement through free will there could be no morality.