The audacity of these conclusions lay in the fact that precisely this had happened in Prussia. Frederick the Great had died in 1786, and had been succeeded by Frederick William II, to whom the liberal policies of his predecessor seemed to smack unpatriotically of the French Enlightenment. Zedlitz, who had been Minister of Education under Frederick, was dismissed; and his place was given to a Pietist, Wöllner. Wöllner had been described by Frederick as “a treacherous and intriguing priest,” who divided his time between alchemy and Rosicrucian mysteries, and climbed to power by offering himself as “an unworthy instrument” to the new monarch’s policy of restoring the orthodox faith by compulsion.37 In 1788 Wöllner issued a decree which forbade any teaching, in school or university, that deviated from the orthodox form of Lutheran Protestantism; he established a strict censorship over all forms of publication, and ordered the discharge of every teacher suspected of any heresy. Kant was at first left unmolested, because he was an old man, and—as one royal adviser said—only a few people read him, and these did not understand him. But the essay on religion was intelligible; and though it rang true with religious fervor, it revealed too strong a strain of Voltaire to pass the new censorship. The Berliner Monatsschrift, which had planned to publish the essay, was ordered to suppress it.
Kant acted now with a vigor and courage hardly credible in a man who had almost completed three score years and ten. He sent the essay to some friends at Jena, and through them had it published by the press of the university there. Jena was outside of Prussia, under the jurisdiction of that same liberal Duke of Weimar who was then caring for Goethe. The result was that in 1794 Kant received an eloquent cabinet order from the Prussian King, which read as follows: “Our highest person has been greatly displeased to observe how you misuse your philosophy to undermine and destroy many of the most important and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity. We demand of you immediately an exact account, and expect that in future you will give no such cause of offense, but rather that, in accordance with your duty, you will employ your talents and authority so that our paternal purpose may be more and more attained. If you continue to oppose this order you may expect unpleasant consequences.”38 Kant replied that every scholar should have the right to form independent judgments on religious matters, and to make his opinions known; but that during the reign of the present king he would preserve silence. Some biographers, who can be very brave by proxy, have condemned him for this concession; but let us remember that Kant was seventy, that he was frail in health, and not fit for a fight; and that he had already spoken his message to the world.
VI. On Politics and Eternal Peace
The Prussian government might have pardoned Kant’s theology, had he not been guilty of political heresies as well. Three years after the accession of Frederick William II, the French Revolution had set all the thrones of Europe trembling. At a time when most of the teachers in the Prussian universities had rushed to the support of legitimate monarchy, Kant, sixty-five years young, hailed the Revolution with joy; and with tears in his eyes said to his friends: “Now I can say like Simeon, ‘Lord, let now Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.’”39
He had published, in 1784, a brief exposition of his political theory under the title of “The Natural Principle of the Political Order Considered in Connection with the Idea of a Universal Cosmopolitical History.” Kant begins by recognizing, in that strife of each against all which had so shocked Hobbes, nature’s method of developing the hidden capacities of life; struggle is the indispensable accompaniment of progress. If men were entirely social, man would stagnate; a certain alloy of individualism and competition is required to make the human species survive and grow. “Without qualities of an unsocial kind . . . men might have led an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ.” (Kant, therefore, was no slavish follower of Rousseau.) “Thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity, for this insatiable desire for possession and for power . . . . Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; and she wills discord, in order that man may be impelled to a new exertion of his powers, and to the further development of his natural capacities.”
The struggle for existence, then, is not altogether an evil. Nevertheless, men soon perceive that it must be restricted within certain limits, and regulated by rules, customs, and laws; hence the origin and development of civil society. But now “the same unsociableness which forced men into society becomes again the cause of each commonwealth’s assuming the attitude of uncontrolled freedom in its external relations,—i.e., as one state in relation to other states; and consequently, any one state must expect from any other the same sort of evils as formerly oppressed individuals and compelled them to enter into a civil union regulated by law.”40 It is time that nations, like men, should emerge from the wild state of nature, and contract to keep the peace. The whole meaning and movement of history is the ever greater restriction of pugnacity and violence, the continuous enlargement of the area of peace. “The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally and externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.”41 If there is no such progress, the labors of successive civilizations are like those of Sisyphus, who again and again “up the high hill heaved a huge round stone,” only to have it roll back as it was almost at the top. History would be then nothing more than an endless and circuitous folly; “and we might suppose, like the Hindu, that the earth is a place for the expiation of old and forgotten sins.”42
The essay on “Eternal Peace” (published in 1795, when Kant was seventy-one) is a noble development of this theme. Kant knows how easy it is to laugh at the phrase; and under his title he writes: “These words were once put by a Dutch inn-keeper on his sign-board as a satirical inscription, over the representation of a church-yard” cemetery.43 Kant had before complained, as apparently every generation must, that “our rulers have no money to spend on public education . . . because all their resources are already placed to the account of the next war.”44 The nations will not really be civilized until all standing armies are abolished. (The audacity of this proposal stands out when we remember that it was Prussia itself which, under the father of Frederick the Great, had been the first to establish conscription.) “Standing armies excite states to outrival one another in the number of their armed men, which has no limit. Through the expense occasioned thereby, peace becomes in the long run more oppressive than a short war; and standing armies are thus the cause of aggressive wars undertaken in order to get rid of this burden.”45 For in time of war the army would support itself on the country, by requisitioning, quartering, and pillaging; preferably in the enemy’s territory, but if necessary, in one’s own land; even this would be better than supporting it out of government funds.