Issue #07 October 2017

Crimes of Logic in Kant’s Universal History

The few times that he does deploy “political,” he uses it to refer to political relations, perfect political constitutions, the great political body of the future, history, and changes — all of which appear to imply politics as anything that relates to the organization of groups of people and structures such as the state, not necessarily related to organic action that springs from human experiences from the bottom up. Politics becomes the property of the state and its legal apparatuses, and the eventual cosmopolitan state. As a result, the idea of the political agent through which injustices can be articulated, and a more just social order can be initiated, is left out. Granular and localized understandings of political agency are let out through the back door. His prioritization of stability and order — which might not be actually what he believes in and only insisted on to save his own skin from political persecution from Frederick the Great — also surfaces in “What Is Enlightenment?” when he argues that the exercise of reason in the private realm must be submissive like a “part of the machine,” for individuals must be “purely passive” because “obedience is imperative” (56). As Foucault elaborates in his own piece on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”, reason cannot always be used freely, because the individual must be a functioning part of society, and so reason must curtailed to the overarching interests of the harmonious state.

Karl Hofer — “Concrete” — (1924)
Bartholomeus Van Bassen — “The Great Hall of The Binnenhof in The Hague” — (1651)

Works Cited

#07

October 2017

Introduction

Crimes of Logic in Kant’s Universal History

by Truman Chen

Hegel: We’re All Idealists, Just The Bad Kind

by Antonio Wolf

Kierkegaard’s Patience

by Timofei Gerber

The Thing-in-itself: A Problem Child

by John C. Brady

Deleuze’s “The Image of Thought”

Video