Hobbes and Kant

Let us consider that we are witnesses to a man falling overboard from a ship. Excepting skeptical quibbles about errors in sense perception, we have no difficulty in stating this sort of observation as a fact. It is an observational fact but it is not a fact generated within the ambit of science. Hobbes begins with acknowledging the fundamentality of sense observations, however, he continues to a notion of science. Science takes empirical or sense observations in terms of a systematic framework of concepts defined in words or symbols. Thus, the science of physics treats the man falling overboard by a body falling a certain distance in a certain time, under certain qualifying constraints like wind resistance; physiology treats say the action of the lungs when a person – of a certain age and condition – falls a distance; psychology may treat this matter as a suicide. Each science or conceptual frame is warranted by rigorous definitions of its concepts in a particular convenient language. Consequently, the rigor of physics compared to psychology has a greater warrant to be a science.

Hobbes says, in his time, Galileo made physics a science and Harvey made physiology a science, the only previous science was Euclid. In addition to these, Hobbes claims in de Cive, to provide a science of politics. Perhaps because when he was an amanuensis of the man that Kant dedicated his First Kritik, Francis Bacon, Hobbes was influenced to ground science on the empirical and to consider science is an extension of human power. Indeed, when he spoke about the concept of a circle, unlike Plato, he did not think of it to be an a priori Idea with an ontological reality, but as the motion of a compass on a paper. This is an empirical construction from the motion of an object. Further, Hobbes shows his materialistic opposition to Platonic classical essentialism by asserting that “truth is of words and not of things.”

Consequently, , agreeing with Aristotle against Plato and Descartes and Spinoza, because for Hobbes existence is not an idea and ideas are generated by circumstance, which drives human interest, one can speak of them as constructed. In a sense, they are artificial. The distinction between what is called natural and what artificial, however, is merely useful when below the consummate viewpoint of a naturalistic orientation that reduces the objects of all scientific frames to matter in motion. For Hobbes, it is rational – an instrument of our interests as human beings -- to consider all of nature as matter in motion, mechanically determined.

Descartes also spoke of nature in the same mechanistic terms. After Newton, Kant also considered nature in these terms. However, unlike Hobbes, these thinkers invoked some sort of existence outside of Nature. This brings them closer to monotheistic religion whereas Hobbes did not convince many contemporaries of his religious sincerity by constructing a religious frame on the assumptions of the Bible. For him, in Leviathan, it was a sort of dogmatic exercise tangential to his physical theory. For Hobbes, the moral principles leading to peace are only called “laws of nature” on the assumption of God as a lawgiver but it is better to call them “theorems of nature.”

His proceeding to treat man, as Spinoza put it, “As a kingdom within a Kingdom”, evidences the sophistic strain in Hobbes since he accepts man the measure for politics. Despite his conversation with Bramhall, where Hobbes asserts man is determined -- a matter he did not wish to discloses -- he treats politics purposefully or as a final cause. His science of politics is a construction based on the motions or behaviors he observes in others -- e.g., protecting their property from thieves -- and, in himself, by introspection. The political framework carefully chooses empirical observation for its construction. The psychological observations Hobbes chose must therefore be rather crude but obvious. The primary observation is human beings are socially unreliable if they believe they can get away with satisfying passions. Consequently, because reason is treated, as later in Hume, to be merely the spy of the passions, the construction of the state must balance one passion driving a person to civil obedience against passions inclining one to civil disobedience.

Like Machiavelli, Hobbes believes fear, especially of violent death, is the most powerful passion to curb disobedience to civil law, which he defines as the will of the Sovereign. (The danger to the state is fear projected by religious narratives that suggest punishments worse than death.)The sovereign, whom Hobbes, in suggestive language, calls “a mortal God,” granted the power given to it by the social contract has a selfish interest in preserving the state and having it prosper. Therefore, his abuse of his power will be peripheral and his will, the civil laws, will try to wrest from circumstance the maximum of state stability and prosperity. Indeed, since Hobbes offers a science, he does not provide historical descriptions. Its essentialist thrust is for the normative behavior of sovereigns of “right reason” and, thus, his doctrine is a recipe for normative function. Beyond the civil laws, men may act as they wish: freedom is lack of restraint; in political frame, restraint is defined as the will of the sovereign qua civil laws. (In physics, there is no freedom because all motion is a matter of natural law.) Human beings alas lack more prudence than Hobbes’ science asks of them; this perhaps makes Hobbes’ science substantially hortatory or rhetorical.

The framework through definitions Hobbes constructs provides nominalist essentialism rather than an ontological essentialism. It constructs a world like a particular sport constructs a world through regulative rules which define both the allowable space for play or action; its creator, protector and referee is the sovereign, which may be made up of “one, a few or all” in the state. Different states may have differently composed sovereign and different civil laws to respond to circumstance, but the goal of any sovereign is the same: its rod and staff will bring comfort. For humans are frail, in need of artifice. They need both a rod and a staff to comfort them -- education and police -- to go against the selfish impulses of their nature in order to secure the benefits of peace, and all the goods and associations that peace allows.

Kant admired Newton and Rousseau. Newton, making Galileo elegant, provided the science of physics as the basic natural framework. Here Kant agrees with Hobbes. However, Hobbes remains in nature and Rousseau also. Kant needs to secure the ethical essence of man that Rousseau[1] emphasizes not in terms of the Newtonian determinations of nature but in terms of freedom. Like Hobbes, Kant seeks another frame or realm (Reich) for his humanism. Since Kant’s urge is ontologically systematic rather than, as in Hobbes, methodologically systematic, he must think of a rational system or consummate frame where the natural and the noumenal or ethical realms are connected. His problem here is great, as he understands it when he writes, “A vast gulf exists between the concepts of nature -- the sensible realm –and the realm of the concept of freedom – the supersensible realm.” (AA8, 18) Kant’s theoretical task is to show how the supersensible freedom “realizes within the sensible realm the purpose of its own laws,” (AA5, 176) because all reality involves a systematic rational unity. Nature hides this ground of total unity but it is a “great artist” (natura daedala rerum)

This relies on Kant’s architectonic of pure reason. A system whose whole in relation to its parts can only be understood by the conception of its end: "an inventory of all our (mental) possessions through pure reason, systematically arranged." (KRV, A, xx) Kant, moreover, provides not merely formal -- just a mere system of transcendental principles (Anfangsgruende) – he offers a doctrine of the concrete realization of the systems principles; otherwise, he believes that the system is a conceptual delusion (Wahnbild). This is the profound theoretical springboard for responding to Hume’s skepticism about causality and personal identity. Kant’s task is to show the systematic perspective of the sensible and the supersensible realms and then to connect them in a rational unity.

Kant considers knowledge -- e.g. Newtonian physics -- to depend on a schematized manifold. The intuitions of space and time and the categories of the understanding construct sensible phenomena. This offers a synthetic a priori; a synthetic judgment cannot be justified by analysis since it contains both a logical and an epistemological dimension. For example, in Euclidean geometry, the shortest distance between two points is not logically entailed by the concept “straight line”; for Kant, straight is a quality where shortest is an addition that cannot be derived by analysis. In the phenomenal realm, also the complete concept of a perceived thing is within limits clearly asserting a primary character not open to analysis: completeness is in terms of predicates for distinctness of its conceptual boundary and primary by these predicates not derived from other predicates. Further, because phenomena or sense perceptions are a product of a mechanism of anthropological psychology they do not provide us with anything more than human reality. This anthropological mechanism does a particular task; but a dishwasher is not a toaster, other mechanisms can be supposed but are unknown to us, say phenomena produced by the eye of the bee. Indeed, since any mechanism in nature receives material from an unknown source, the Ding-an-sich, the initiating provocation for sense experience must remain unknown, in principle.

Within this natural sphere, the natural law perspective offers a mere concept of determinacy for what we know and do. Kant writes, for example, "Whatever conception of freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will's manifestations in the world of phenomena, i. e. human action, is determined in accordance with natural laws as is every other natural event." ("Idea of a Universal…,” first sentence.) In the same essay, he continues, "Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself independently of instinct has created by his own reason."

For his supersensible ethics, Kant’ primary predicate is freedom, about which, like Aristotle, he thinks is a clear and undeniable human intuition; though, Kant seems to believe that freedom to act is an illusion, except as it is a noumenal assertion of the ethical pure will: presumptively, the non-illusionary character of our rational integrity. Consequently, this intuition is not a natural law from the perspective of scientific construction. It is beyond the sense world because freedom, (illusionary or not,) presents itself with a powerful simplicity. Schopenhauer called it a “hypophysical fact.” Nor does he consider it as an illusion though, as old Plato discouragingly put it in the Laws, sometimes one feels that one is merely a puppet on golden strings pulled by the gods.”

The ethical law is wedded to freedom and it is unconditional and universal for all rational beings, say for porpoises, beings on other planets and God, if they are rational existents. Freedom, consequently, reflects the essential ontological essence or personhood of man as a noumenal being rather than his natural personality. However, this putative ontological sphere is not a place of action, nor can it be understood under by a clear and distinct description; somehow, mysteriously Kant admits, the noumenal is linked to nature by the consummate and thus speculative systematic viewpoint.

Since it is mysterious, and since there are limitations on what we can know, one must speculate by “a rational faith.” Upon the assumption of freedom as the quality of ethical pure will, in addition with ethical rational character as a self-identity notion, Kant sees it necessarily obeying a non-contingent, necessary and universal demand for action.

The Third Kritik, Part II, provides the outline of such a speculation through the systematizing power of the human judgment (Urteilskraft). To the putative firmness of our intuition of freedom, only in a pure ethical will, a conception of God is particularly necessary yet moves speculation into mystery. Kant writes, "To have recourse to God, as the Author of things, in explaining the arrangements of nature, and their changes is at any rate not a physical explanation but a complete confession that one has come to the end of his philosophy, since he is compelled to assume something of which in itself he otherwise has no concept." (KPV, [139])

Yet more hesitantly, because of its conceptual reliance on a Menschlich-allzu Menschlich sensibility, obviously moved by revenge, outraged justice and personal demand, Kant completes the speculative trinity with immortality. The last two are not matters of knowledge or perception; they are rational postulates necessary to Kant’s construction of a realm outside the natural that can explain certain important question about the relation of the non-natural ethical realm to the natural realm.

In the Second Kritik, Kant writes, “postulates give objective reality to the Ideas of speculative reason in general.” (#88) Postulates are a product of judgment and “Postulates because they are dependent on the highest good are not directly necessary to morality or revealed by pure reason and they cannot be theoretically justified.” (#207) Nevertheless, the proviso suggests theory is only justified within the critical limits of natural science. Speculative metaphysics is Kant’s attempt to answer Hume’s skepticism, and to ground moral duty, with its circumstantial aspect, in a non-contingent formal ethics. The answer both is aside from the historical or sociological but, on its assumptions, grounds the putative progressive direction of human history to an ethical eschatology.

Kant’s agenda for metaphysics was present as early as his prize essay; “Ontology is a system of all concepts of the understanding and principles, insofar as these are given to sense, and are concerned with the objects that may be experienced. It does not concern itself with trans-sensible objects, which, nonetheless, are the final goal of metaphysics. Ontology therefore belongs to metaphysics as a preliminary science of metaphysics proper, as its porch or front garden. It is called transcendental philosophy, because it comprises the conditions of all knowledge a priori and its initial elements.” (W.W. VIII, p. 283)

From the sense or natural perspective, Kant tells us, cause is determined according to the rules of the understanding in our anthropological psychology. Yet, the initiation of sense is in mystery as a mere natural action but tangential to an ethical demand. However, God’s pure power is assumptive, expressed as always acting ethically. God’s creation of nature as a mechanism of conflict (Streit), whose historical purpose is the progress of the human race to a republican form of government, contains perfection aside from a natural perspective. Kant has wrought a complex systematic groundwork for agreeing with Rousseau’s politics: Republicanism represents the ethical in the world of circumstance. Kant writes, “As Hobbes maintains the condition of nature is a realm of injustice and violence, and we have no option save to abandon it and submit ourselves to the constraints of the law, which limits or freedom solely in order that it may be consistent with the freedom of others and with the common good of all.” (KrV A752/B780)

Broadly, politics in representing the ethical is formally like the work of judgment in appreciating the beauty of art[2]. However, where the latter is a presumption of taste, a human illusion about the universality of judgment, politics has a non-presumptive quality because it is in the realm of natural as consequential action. Thus, the Third Kritik discusses the creator God, mysterious in His nature, assumed rational and ethical; providing His act of creating nature. The concept of creation has a phenomenal root it returns us to the ding-und sich aspect of reality, which dislocates time as a mystery.

Noteworthy, this recalls that human beings have the same ontological ethical essence as does God. However, they have it in a formal but not material manner of immediate action since they recognize it in themselves through freedom. However, by being in nature, the human creature through vanity or false humility is suspect of ever achieving a pure obedience to the moral law. Kant writes,” Although many a thing demanded by duty may be done in accordance with it, yet there is always reason to doubt that it is has been actually done out of duty, and thus has moral worth.” (Metaphysics of Morals Sect. 2, first para.) Kant frequently doubts that any human being has ever acted from a pure will; yet, humans can act in concert with the actions of a pure will: this is called ethical duty it is an expression of, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, of a Menschlich alzu Menschlich nod to the autonomy of a further unqualified essence of all rational beings.

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I have offered a canvas with broad strokes; however, before I extend implications and add important considerations within Hobbes and especially Kant’s position, I shall emphasize certain fundamental considerations with some summary comparative remarks. When considering nature, both Hobbes and Kant substantially agree about physics being the reductive science whose laws are a determinative or efficient causality. Hobbes takes this as the only system open to mankind and always provides a materialist explanation, even in theology he argues for the mortalist doctrine of bodily resurrection. In the Second Kritik and the Grundlagen, Kant, however, demands freedom as the necessary quality of ethics and thus he has to provide another realm than nature. Since he considers knowledge to be of nature, this realm is posed as a speculation based on reason. Hobbes as a naturalist thinker, without recourse to Plato’s ontology of existence takes the position of Aristotle that a form must be given to any existence thing by the definitions creating a system or framework for a science. Unlike Aristotle, Hobbes like Kant is subjectivist, by emphasizing the mind must function in a particular manner (he anticipates Kant, when in response to Descartes, he points out even if the world is destroyed or an illusion, one must still think in categories attached to matter in motion). From this perspective, freedom for Hobbes is following one’s desires without impedance and morality is the conditions, which are most beneficial to the human being considered in the abstraction of generalizing from sense impressions, which are evidence for a few innate psychological inclinations. For Hobbes, social functioning needs peace. Peace is only had by living within the state and the simultaneously created social order. His empiricism ground is evidenced by saying that peace, state and in personal relations as well, is to be considered by empirically grounded theorems of nature like promise keeping, gratitude, accommodation, etc., which if one is monotheistic, a matter of non-empirical faith or obscure argumentation, one would less properly call the laws of nature.-

Kant’s non-natural freedom finds its resource in the monotheism of a creator God, a God without a human face, but who has made man in his image or paradigm (Hebrew: zal). That image is not a sensuous one but a shared ethical essence, which has a rational quality because reason is Platonically, qualified to the extent it demands a systematic judgmental justification for noumenal ontology. Here Kant’s resource is the logical tradition of Leibniz-Wolff-Baumgarten. Kant employs the distinction of Baumgarten between conceptibilis and comprehenibilis; that is, between having concepts clear and distinct within an intellectual domain, say a natural science, and the sort of rationality, whose characteristic is clarity, that is a reasonable speculation. Speculation using freedom and God, is clear in presenting a formal system on such assumptions but it is not distinct, it does not have a boundary like the intuitions and categories provide; thus, it is not knowing. This “rational faith” sets the problem that we shall attend to, viz. a bridge between the two spheres in terms of a consummate system at the limit of human possibilities to think. The problems of systematic coordination are very great; e.g., from the scientific perspective, Kant accepts Hobbes’ chains of cause and effect but from the noumenal perspective, free or uncaused action intrudes into the chain. The ethical human act, if indeed there is such, is like God’s creation of the world uncaused; for Kant, this “philosopher’s stone” is an actus purus a spontaneous response recognizing of the actor’s ethical essence. To obey in a spontaneous manner one’s essential nature is to have an identity that cannot be undercut naturally, like the social identity accepted by a Humean or Wittgensteinian conventionality, a socially qualified understanding of individual autonomy.

Now there are several matters of similarity between Hobbes and Kant, which fall into a general cultural orbit, though they of course, by argument, they are projected into philosophical doctrine. For one, both are of a Protestant background are in opposition to Catholicism, which Hobbes called “the Kingdom of Darkness.” Catholicism has historically had political aspirations and it interferes with the power of secular orientations, which both thinkers applaud. Both Hobbes and Kant see Catholicism as a politically organized entity that not only subverts secularization and tolerance but increases superstition, subverting clear thinking by idolatry and the superstition of ghosts and devils, called holy or not.

From the Protestant side a subjective orientation leaves a trace. Particularly, Luther’s verborgene Innerlichkeit (secret inwardness or conscience) becomes the ethical essence, which is universal and unconditional as law to all human beings. Hobbes and Kant both avoid religious dogma and reduce Biblical religion to simple assertions – Hobbes says the Christian is merely one who has a faith in Christ as bringing salvation; Kant says the essence of all religions is ethics. Nevertheless, unlike Hobbes, Kant weaves many Christian themes into his rational system: the reality of sin, the anti-natural approach to perfection, and immortality as a condition of God’s justice.

Another similarity between Hobbes and Kant is the acceptance of political order as part of the betterment of humankind, this contrasts with Plato’s philosopher as self-sufficient, an idiota. This is done by both accepting a sort of equality; for Hobbes it is the natural equality of vulnerability in a condition of nature that drives the contract for choosing a sovereign; for Kant, it is the equality or noumenal autonomy of any rational being that provides the ethical condition for an appropriate political representation. Further, their analysis and arguments are formal with gravity toward the legal. They both present conclusions for humankind not for individual instances. Both Hobbes and Kant are not intuitive or aesthetic existentialists, neither of the stripe of Sartre or Rorty, nor would they follow the romantic track from Herder to Bergson of opposing élan vital to radeur mechaniqu, the intuitive to the abstractions or concepts, much less the schwaermerei of Hamann’s radical mysticism[3]. Nevertheless, Kant’s historical doctrine shows traces of romanticism, Herder’s[4] organic historicism, especially when he contrasts the mechanical determination of nature and the freedom the progress of history. In “Idea of History from a Cosmopolitan Viewpoint” Kant writes, “Nature intended that man develop completely on his own everything that goes beyond mere mechanical regulation of his animal being.”

Further, Kant, though more mutedly than Hobbes, accepts the modern political notion of the social contract. However, Kant finds Hobbes logically exhaustive depiction of the sovereign as “one, some or all of the state” to lack distinction of quality. He mentions his opposition to this formal exhaustion of possibility in “Toward Eternal Peace,” without a direct reference to Hobbes. Instead, as we have seen, for Kant only the republican form of government captures moral duty and is the instrument to ethically legalize or legitimize the state as a representative of ethical laws. Where Hobbes isolates each state as a world unto itself, created by the will of that “moral god, “the sovereign, Kant has a “cosmopolitan viewpoint” and, in the path of St. Pierre and Rousseau speaks of a league of nations, united in representation of a shared humanity. Kant, unlike Hobbes, thus, at the least, suggests the possibility of universal human rights. World government, nevertheless, is a logical possibility for Hobbes, but before our global technological horizon, it was too unpractical to mention.

Notwithstanding obvious differences, some scholars of a previous generation have seen a fundamental similarity at least the political/ethical doctrines of Hobbes and Kant. I mention some of these: A. E. Taylor[5], Warrender[6], and Lamprecht[7]. The basis of their conclusion arises from such a statement in Leviathan: “The law of nature consisteth as the fountain and original of justice.” They argue that Hobbes’ view of nature having a logical bearing on keeping the promise of allowing the state to limit one’s freedom of movement or behavior captures Kant’s Hobbesian conclusion of state disciplining individual interests and, further, that obedience to civil law ought to be grounded in an ethical code fundamental to human beings. Opposition scholars find those that make this argument about fundamental similarity too glibly superficial. The opponents quote the continuation of Hobbes’ above quote, viz., “For where no right hath been transferred and every man hath a right to everything; and consequently no action can be unjust.” (Ibid) This addition, albeit the in foro interno germ of the state by prudence, misses the dramatic shift of Kant’s opposing the natural to the absolute ethical, where justice has its source.

However, without further ado, let us proceed to weave some details that can lay the grounds for such a debate. Kant says, “it is quite terrifying” of Hobbes’ de Cive statement, which he quotes: “The head of state has no contracted obligations; he can do no injustice to the citizen, but may act towards them as he pleases.” (Gemeinspruch, #14) Against this position, Kant responds, “The people have inalienable rights against the head of state, even if there cannot be rights of coercion.” (Ibid. #84) Kant takes all naturalist theories to have the goal of happiness, his non-natural ethics treats man as an end-in-himself: it is not telic. The goal of ethical dutifulness is an ontological dignity.

Consequently, Hobbes state seems to Kant as if constructed “by a group of intelligent devils.” I believe, Kant misunderstands an important moment of Hobbes thought; the state provides not happiness but, by security, the condition for it. Though Kant is correct in location a naturalism in the tradition of Aristotle and Hobbes in terms of happiness. The naturalism of Plato is more ambiguous but Kant has rather co-opted Plato’s idealism in terms of the Christian tradition of the Church Father, and especially Augustine, for a none-naturalism if that word is your preference for the word “supernatural.”

. Hobbes is quite modern in his broad view that happiness is provided to different persons in a variety of ways, this avoids a specific content for happiness and is open to temperament, education, and condition in terms of a “right reasoned” balance of desires in the circumstance that one finds oneself. Kant’s emphasis on duty seeks a supernatural reward. In an implicit answer to Habakkuk’s questioning God’s allowance of prosperity and well-being for evil men, Kant needs immortality to give happiness to the morally deserving; one recalls Plato’s solution is more humanistic by choice based on habituated character and experience in a mythos of reincarnation. Kant employs the traditional Christian notion of evil in his immortality speculation; evil is a strange instrument for correction by a God of love. The theologically tangential strands, as I believe this to be, are seemingly the weight of acculturation.

Hobbes’ original covenant for a “mortal God” treats the sovereign as outside of the state, as God is outside of His creation. His power, as he responds to Job, makes God immune from questioning since he has provided, as the mortal God the wherewithal of existence. However, Hobbes emphasizes, the sovereign has a mortal interest to secure the good that accrues to power; it must preserve the state in order to exist; it must have the state prosper in order for its human pride to be satisfied. One cannot collect taxes from thieves; the sovereign overwhelms simple thieves and, indeed, the thievery of mind, money and dignity of powerful interests that might impudently compete with the sovereign for managing aspects of the state. Consequently, if the sovereign does not do this rational functional condition of his position he is vulnerable. At the end of Leviathan II, Hobbes steps outside the formal order of a scientific state construction. He warns the King that if he is lazy or confused in attending to the needs of sustaining his condition he shall engender rebellion – which is not a political concept because it is a return to nature. Hobbes believes this is necessary as surely as a stone falls downward; that is, by this material metaphor, Hobbes emphasizes uncontrolled human nature will destroy the artifice of the state.

This is different from Kant’s republicanism of which he writes, “Whatever a people cannot impose upon itself cannot be imposed on it by the legislator.” (Ibid. #85) This limits civil law by inalienable rights as corollaries of the ethical law. One might call such human rights. This thought is extended in “Toward Perpetual Peace” when Kant writes, “For any form of government which is not representative is essentially an anomaly, because one and the same person cannot at the same time be both the legislator and executor of his own will.” As we have seen, Hobbes’ sovereign is just that. In principle, he has the executive, legislative and judicial function or civil will; of course, Hobbes understands that in the large entity that a state is this means a large civil service; most decisions are carried out in the name of the sovereign. Hobbes asks such functionaries to suppose that the sovereign wills the theorems of nature, though the sovereign can reverse any of his servant’s judgments. This is not logically equal but a practical asymptote of Kant’s deference toward the King: Kant writes, “The non-resisting subject must be able to assume that his ruler has no wish to do him injustice.” (Gemeinspruch, #84) The thought here moves to an ideal in “Eternal Peace” where Kant writes of political freedom: “it is a warrant to obey no external laws except those to which I have been able to give my consent.” (#99) Thus, Hobbes mortal God has subjects and servants whereas Kant has citizens.

A civitas maxima germ is in Kant’s cosmopolitan attitude. Kant writes, “The greatest problem of the human species, the solution which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a human society which can administer justice universally.” (“Idea of History…”) That essay, written in 1784, is elaborate in 1798 in relation to a purposeful cosmopolitan goal. The following quote appears there; it is in Kant’s last lecture series, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. “The character of the species as it is indicated by the experience of all ages and all peoples is this: that taken collectively, (the human race as one whole), it is a multitude of persons, existing successively and side by side, who cannot do without associating peacefully. And yet cannot avoid constantly offending one another. Hence they feel destined by nature to [form] through mutual compulsion under laws that proceed from themselves, a coalition in a cosmopolitan society (cosmopolitanismus) -- a condition which, though constantly threatened by dissention, makes progress on the whole.” (191) Despite the moral ground on which these comments ride, the aspects of humankind in nature leading to a compulsion for the purposeful forming of society and the discipline that must maintain that society is simply Hobbes.

In Kant’s writing on education,[8] discipline (Zucht) is negative in by merely providing boundaries for action; Kant writes, “It is discipline that prevents man from being turned aside by his animal impulses from humanity, his appointed end …Discipline, then, is merely negative, its action being to oppose man’s natural unruliness.”[9] In this, we have the rational for Hobbes’ politics: the state as an artificial container of chaotic or unruly nature. However, “Discretion and sympathy is a matter of temperament; morality is a matter of character.” Kant continues the penultimate quote, writing, “”Moral culture must be based on “maxims” not upon discipline. …Maxims[10] ought to originate in the human being as such. …Morality is something so sacred and sublime (Erhebenheit) that we must not degrade it by placing it in the same rank as discipline.” One recalls the Greek word for the sublime hypsos, thinking of Plotinus” ontologically consummate Alone moving, “unsprung and springing” the soul’s solitary flight toward it. Kant, in this popular essay on education, clearly emphasizes the positive aspect of the task of political representation of the noumenal determination of human dignity. Kant’s point for moral education -- (and recall the Latin origin of the word viz. the placing on the outside what is on the inside) – is “Our duties toward ourselves consist in guarding, each in his own person, the dignity of mankind.”[11]

Yet, as the American poet, Ogden Nash put it: “Oh duty you are no sweet petudy.” Granted, but in a theory that strives for rational system, Kant must avoid schizophrenia by linking natural action in circumstance and its non-natural ground: a difficult task. In Metaphysic of Right, Kant first writes, “Every action which by itself, by its maxim, enables the freedom of each individual’s will to co-exist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is a right.” (para. A) Then, he writes, “Right in the strict sense, that is right unmixed with any ethical considerations requires no determinants of the will apart from purely external ones.” (para. E) But, if not a quest for certainty, then a quest for a “rational faith” must wrestle with confusions of the natural psyche.

Kant agrees with Hobbes suspicion of human nature, Pace Isaiah Berlin, using the phrase from Plato’s Protagoras, Kant spoke of human nature as a “warped wood” near impossible to straighten. When Kant says,” [The human being] thus needs a master to break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will under which everyone can be free” (“Idea of History…”), how can we not find the immediate wisdom for ourselves in Hobbes’ negative original in constructing political order. Kant seductiveness is by a positive position, he has a pure stream flowing within and finally transforming a muddy ocean of human circumstance where Hobbes is silently unbelieving in such eschatology. The matter continues in its ambiguity. Kant seductively stands against ethical relativism and its corollary in a conventional approach to grounding values; he opposes Hobbes’ utilitarian muteness about soul qua noumenal essence of a rational being. For Kant, Hobbes offers a mere tactic without a strategic understanding of the warfare nature imposes to achieve an eternal peace. Here Kant, like Plato is an opponent of the relativism and conventionalism of our sophistic and skeptical age that accepts these tactical doctrines, evidenced by the success of Wittgenstein and Rawls. The era’s cutting-edge hoi-polloi combines tactical toleration with the strategic ideology of human rights.

If human rights are not inalienable rights, they are just the rhetoric of ideological imperialism. Rawls’ doctrine shows a usual ambiguity. He offers a confused merging of a radical equality for a conventional idea of citizenship. His “veil of ignorance” has no individual quality –without qualities one is not man or woman, right or poor, intelligent or stupid – one is merely a liberal democratic citizen constructing “A” justice as fairness; yet, Rawls calls this a Kantian construction, when Kant views justice as “THE” supranatural noumenal basis offsetting falsely conflicting natural interests sometimes ideologically posed as justice. Ideology is opposed by both Kant and Hobbes, in Kant it disappears in the illumination of ethics and a cosmopolitan spirit, in Hobbes it disappears but the artificial construction of a state with a few essential laws that reasonably make for security and prosperity and leave all else to the natural disposition of freedom as a personal choice. Both stand against an age that shifts between tolerance gone amuck – Kant calls tolerance “a haughty characteristic” --and a determined and irrational brutality.

Yet, for the individual viewing his world, let us call that person the good man or woman, he cannot but sympathize with Plato’s saying of that the philosopher is a person “who must huddle near a wall until the storm of life passes.” In Kant’s lifetime, Robespierre soaked republicanism in blood and, in ours, the main police station in Paris has three portals each with one of the following words liberte, egalite, fraternite; Hobbes’ protection oriented, utilitarian politics can find irony in supposing this building rests on a cosmopolitan edifice, a Kantian construction.

In a last word, let us leave aside the pedantry of scholarship and the technical slippage of academic philosophy. In the aspiration of human beings, at their best, is a measured response to manage together, what is often presented by an either/or, viz., happiness and dignity. If a choice is to be made between morality and expediency "The rights of man must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice (from the viewpoint of natural desires) the ruling power may have to make. The transcendental, pure will ought to be the guide of mankind who, nevertheless, "is a long way from moral maturity." ("Idea for a Universal History. . .") Hobbes search for security, as Kant rightly understood, is a surrogate for happiness because security is the condition that allows its possibility. Wisely or not, Hobbes is silent about dignity. Kant is not. He takes the enlightened soul as a pure white bird flying against a chalk white cliff during a summer solstice noon. Courage and hard work, the temperament for thinking for oneself, Kant believes brings enlightenment. Otherwise, however, dignity is a constant shared equally; it is each soul’s place aside from possibility, unconditional in its demand.

Let us consider the aporia of the either/or of happiness/dignity by the starkest, unmeasured instances of the need for security against, alternately, radical self-sufficiency. On the need for security from inhumanity, we have in living memory, Kant’s countrymen making lampshades of human beings; grotesquely, of the people who wished to be a light to the nations. In an alternate extreme measure, how many human beings have the perhaps insane, perhaps sane strength of acting in concert with Socrates words, spoken near the hour of his death: “Dear Crito, the ONLY thing that can harm a person is the mutilation of the soul?”

[1] In "Mussmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte" (1786: "Conjectural Beginning of Human History"), Kant presents his own reading of Rousseau: "the assertions of the celebrated J.J. Rousseau are often misinterpreted and has an appearance of inconsistency: Rousseau’s On the Influence of the Sciences and On the Inequality of Man shows correctly the inevitable conflict between culture and the human species considered as a nature. But in Emile, in Social Contract, and other writings, Rousseau tries to solve a harder problem: how culture may move forward to bring about a ethical development of mankind and, thus, to end the conflict between natural strife and morality. Now here it must be seen that all evils which express human life, and all vices which dishonor it, spring from this unresolved conflict." (116)

[2] Herder and the Goethe Kreis (circle, group) stress intuitive artistic sensibility are not only in harmony with nature but Genius is also a creative force in culture and politics. Hamann, Herder’s mentor after he left Kant’s tutelage, has the characteristic romantic view dismissing the systematic thinker. Hamann called them "rational spiders" (Spinne is a pun on Spinoza: B ii, 203) and his advice to Herder was "Think less and live more." (B ii, 330:1765)

[3] Jacobi provokes an important cultural controversy defending theism; he held that "God as Nature" (Deus sive Natura) in the rationalism of the exemplary Spinoza leads to nihilism and to a pantheistic "atheism." Impressed by Hume’s skepticism, but yet being an intuitive believer, Jacobi allies himself with Hamann’s (1730-87) radically subjective theism who says, "The light is in my heart but as soon as I seek to carry it to my head it goes out." (Werke I, 367) This quote could have as well come from Rousseau. Further, Hamann writing to Jacobi suggests his distance from Kant, his fellow Koenigsburger: "I am close to suspecting that the whole of philosophy consists more of language than of reason, and the misunderstanding of countless words, the personification of arbitrary abstractions."(Briefwechsel v, 272

[4] A visionary and unrestrained tone in Herder has traces of Hamann. In Kant’s review (1795) of the second volume of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind, he makes more explicit his defense of the Enlightenment against Herder than in his review of the first volume (1794). Kant is against Herder’s discursively undisciplined erudite showmanship and conjectured analogies which, is also applicable to Hamann and, before him, to such figures as Bruno, Campanella, and others of a Gnostic and hermetic mystical stamp: "we want to question whether the poetic spirit that enlivens the expression does not sometimes also intrude into the author’s philosophy; whether synonyms are not valued as definitions and allegories as truth . . . whether the tissue of daring metaphors, poetic images, and mythological allusions does not conceal the corpus of thought." (61

[5] See, “The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes,” Philosophy XIII (1938).

[6] See, Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: 1957). Also “A Postscript on Hobbes and Kant,” Hobbes-Forschungen (Berlin: 1969) 153-8.

[7] See, “Hobbes and Hobbism,”American Political Science Review 34 (1940) 31-53.

[8] Kant, Education (University of Michigan Press:1960) 96.

[10] Ibid. pp. 84-5. Note: Kant claims maxims derived from the categorical imperative are synthetic a priori since they can have no empirical origin for limiting the subjective principle, which, because asserted without conditions, their range is universal. Here empirical consideration is merely of presenting the opportunity for a “logos” measurement. A discussion that disagrees with this claim is too complex and technical to pursue here.