Kant’s 300 years and his responses to the present

Germany This Monday celebrates the 300th anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant, a decisive philosopher in the understanding of today’s world for his contributions to the theory of reason, morality and politics, amid a wave of publications that confront the validity of his thinking with current geopolitical tensions.

New biographical approaches such as that of Volker Gerhardt, events in various places in the country and a central one in Berlin where the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will participate, his radical defense of human dignity and – in the face of the current world situation – his approaches to achieve a path that end wars mark this anniversary.

“There are points in which Kant is absolutely current, for example his essay “On Perpetual Peace” with the conception of a world order of peace,” said Marcus Willaschek, author of “Der Spiegel,” in an interview with the magazine “Der Spiegel.” Kant: the revolution of thought”one of the books that have appeared coinciding with the anniversary.

Kant, Wilaschek explains, considers that peace required the guarantee that one state was not going to attack another and that this could occur in a federation of independent states. “That can work well. “The European Union (EU) has a structure similar to what Kant imagined and is the most successful peace project there has ever been,” he assures.

From Königsberg to Bonn

The celebrations were shaken by events and a large congress with more than 400 presentations, to be held between September 8 and 13, will take place in Bonn (western Germany) and not in Kalinigrad, the former Königsberg, hometown of the philosopher who is today in Russian territory.

At the University of Bonn, a Kant Center has recently been founded in which there are projects that go beyond the treatment of his three key works, which are the “Critique of Pure Reason”, the “Critique of Practical Reason” and the “Critique of the Judgment”.

So, for example, there is a project on “Kant and the international peace order and another about “Kant and migration.”

There are other elements of Kant’s philosophy that are often cited in recent publications to show its relevance, such as, for example, the idea that no human being can be considered a means instrument for someone to achieve certain goals.

A high point in the discussions are elements in Kant’s work that can be considered racist, not only from a current perspective but even from the ethical parameters that he himself defines in his work.

Among the books that have appeared in Germany, one stands out titled “The starry sky above me” which reproduces a series of dialogues about Kant between the philosopher Omri Boehm and the novelist Daniel Kehlmann.

Between racism and universalism

In that book there are sections in which Boehm and Kehlmann – who had begun a doctoral thesis on Kant at the time he established himself as a novelist – discuss the dichotomy between the moral universalism that Kant proposes, which should lead to condemning all racism and all forms of colonialism, and some of his clearly racist phrases.

“Some maintain that Kant was racist precisely because he was a universalist,” says Boehm, author of a book titled “Radical universalism” in which he defends, since Kant, the universality of the principles of the Enlightenment.

Such a radical definition of what a human being is, explains Boehm, runs the risk of allowing the exclusion of those who do not fit that definition. But Boehm warns that only a radical definition allows human dignity to be postulated as something inviolable.

For Boehm, as for Kant, moral principles are given neither by culture, nor by religion, nor by God, nor by society, but by human reason itself, and any human being can recognize them within themselves.

At this point, Wilaschek distances himself from Boehm and warns that the idea of ​​the autonomy of ethical principles is something that is discussed in our societies and that is not shared in other cultures and that it is not enough to try to impose the idea on them. of equal rights, but we must try to enter into a dialogue.

However, Wilaschek agrees with Boehm that there is no alternative to ethical universalism; he says that for him this is more of a political project than a theoretical postulate.

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