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In his essay 'On perpetual peace' Kant makes an interesting remark about the role of the differences between religions in the course of world history. According to Kant world history is moving towards a growing community of nations. But this process, however positive for excluding the possibility of war in the future, has a dangerous side. A universal monolithic al political system could arise which, according to Kant, can only mean that despotism will rule the world. The call for unity should be counterbalanced by something else: 'But nature wills it otherwise, and uses two means to separate the nations and prevent them from intermingling linguistic and religious differences. These may certainly occasion mutual hatred and provide pretexts for wars, but as culture grows and man gradually moves towards greater agreement over their principles, they lead to mutual understanding and peace.
And unlike that universal despotism which saps all man's energies and ends in the graveyard of freedom, this peace is created and guaranteed by an equilibrium of forces and a most vigorous rivalry. ' One should not think that the call for unity is an idealistic appeal: 'On the other hand, nature also unites nations which the concept of cosmopolitan rights would not have protected from violence and war, and does so by means of their mutual self? interest. ' Kant thinks that the spirit of commerce takes hold of every people in the end and that this spirit cannot exist side by side with war. Sometimes Kant is reproached for not having seen the possibility of economic wars. But Kant considers a future system of economic relations in which there exists a mutual dependency from which nobody can escape. This mutual dependency of nations, like the mutual dependency of individuals within a particular society, produces the necessity of a cooperation to which we are at the same time morally obliged: 'In this way, nature guarantees perpetual peace by the actual mechanism of human inclinations.
And while the likelihood of its being attained is not sufficient to enable us to prophesy the future theoretically, it is enough for practical purposes. It makes it our duty to work towards this goal, which is more than an empty chimaera. ' Kant is, of course, thinking of a world union of nation states based on mutual dependence. The historical situation of mutual dependence obliges to the transformation of this situation into a morally reasonable whole. Kant's theory of the coming world society, is established on the same principles as his theory about the constitution of a particular society. Every society is based on the development of individual talents through a basic antagonism between the individuals.
Due to this antagonism the society, formed by a social contract that overcomes the antagonism, is a developed, mature society and not a dead embryo. Religious differences have the same function in the constitution of the world order as the differences between individuals and their talents in a particular society. They give life and colour to the whole as a harmony of unity and otherness. Kant's seems to see positive what everybody deplores who is concerned about intercultural and interreligious relations: the devastating effects of religious wars. His intention is clear. He underlines the positive value of the fact that differences cannot tolerate each other.
Different religions have to fight with each other. Within a gradual approach towards greater agreement on principles that will produce peace, societies with different religions develop their antagonistic forces in interaction. By doing so the coming world society is not based on the extinction of differences, but on the contrary, on the preservation of differences. Other than Rousseau, whose theories form the background of his thinking, Kant values struggle as a positive force in the history of human civilization. But is struggle the last word? Does Kant really think that there are fundamental religious differences that should be preserved at all costs?
Is this the way Kant considers religious differences? Let us have therefore a closer look at what Kant says about religious differences. Let us look at the asterisk he puts in the expression 'religious differences'. 1. Differences, religion and morality Kant's asterisk keeps us from the interpretation of religious differences as a real plurality: 'Religious differences - an odd expression!
As if we were to speak of different moralities. There may certainly be different historical confessions, although these have nothing to do with religion itself but only with changes in the means to further religion, and are thus the province of historical research. And there may be just as many different religious books (the Zendavesta, the Vedas, the Koran etc. ) But there can only be one religion which is valid for all man and at all times. Thus the different confessions can scarcely be more than the vehicles of religion; these are fortuitous, and may vary with differences in time or place. ' 'Different religions' is as strange an expression as different moralities, because according to Kant, morality is the basic content of religion and without any doubt morality is one. Morality being one, different religions cannot exist. Existing differences therefore can only be superficial differences regarding space and time.
Is Kant again becoming an ethnocentrism by claiming the existence of only one morality? Does he not again produce the despotic monoculture and mono religion that he is afraid of? Doesn't he, in fact, absolutize something specifically European, the morality of the pure heart towards something universal? Shouldn't we become suspicious? International commerce - that is Western capitalism - creates mutual dependence.
On this basis we should advocate an international society of contractual societies, that is Western democracy. In the end we should understand religion in a typically Western way as the morality of the pure heart, which again is a modern, Western conception of ethics. Eventually our universalist thinker Kant is just an ordinary Western ethnocentrism. I want to defend Kant against this reproach, especially in order to defend his concept of morality. However he himself is not quite aware of the problems he creates. Or, perhaps one should say that he is not quite aware of the depth of the problems he sees.
The content of morality is good will and respect. Good will does not mean the propaganda of a pure heart ideology, but it means the recognition of a universal criterium in judging a good action. It is the first and only thing you are obliged to presuppose in everybody. As such according to Kant it exists everywhere and in every time.
Good will does not know any progress or gradually. That means the good will of a Neanderthaler, an Eskimo, an Indian is as good as that of a scaled civilized modern European or Japanese. Of course, there is progress in history, but Kant carefully distinguishes between the progress of social institutions and progress in morality. The latter is impossible according to Kant. By making this distinction, he avoids the pitfalls of a Hegelian type of philosophy of history in which progress in the consciousness of freedom is in danger of becoming identical with moral progress. The principle of respect that forbids instrumentalizing other human beings for your own purposes, is just an other way of stating again the value of the inter culturally valid golden rule.
Thus Kant is minimizing the differences between the religions. He does not think about cultural embodiments of these moral principles, for these do not regard morality as such. Kant therefore is not really interested in the 'ethos', a collection of maxims, a style of dealing with ethical problems and traditions of a people. He cannot be!
Of course, he does not deny their existence and even necessity, but they in themselves are not the ground of the morality of actions. Kant is definitely not Herder as we shall see. To get a good insight in the value of Kant's universal perspective we first have to deal with the Kantian idea of the sensus communis. On this basis we will advocate the universal perspective of Kant mediated by a reflection on cultural differences. 2. Sensus communis as a principle of civilization as such Kant inherited the concept of the sensus communis, which has a long history, directly from the British moralists. For Shaftesbury it was a principle of taste that guided social actions and united the good and the beautiful.
Therefore it was an eminently social principle. He dreamt of the Greek unity of the social and the ethical, of truth, the good and the beautiful. Against Hobbes he defended the Aristotelian conception of man as an essentially social being. Kant's philosophy aimed at undoing these uncritical identifications of the true, the good and the beautiful.
For him sensus communis was not a kind of unifying principle. So he first restricted it to aesthetic judgments. But it could have some social and therefore moral implications. In judgments about beauty the sensus communis is the principle of the rationality of an experience of beauty that is identical with its communicability.
Without wanting to resurrect a whole history of interpretations of Kant, one can say that it is a kind of consensus theory of beauty based on immediacy. This immediacy accounts for the difference to a scientific judgment. A scientific judgment is based upon a specific concept that can and has to be communicated in a discussion, in an intersubjective discursive process. The participants in the discussions try to convince by reinforcing arguments. Therefore there are winners and losers. Despite not being based on a specific concept, an aesthetic judgment is not irrational, for it is based on the same general powers of man that produce determinate concepts.
Only in an aesthetic experience do those powers, the faculty of reasoning and the faculty of sensibility, not force themselves to a specific concept, but engage in a free, imaginative play that never destructs the original harmony of these powers presupposed in every human activity. Not being used to produce specific knowledge, the faculties of knowledge are used for themselves, they feel their possibilities in a free play. Therefore, Kant can say that the aesthetic judgment combines the general and the particular in an immediate way. The general powers of understanding are united in an individual experience not mediated by a concept. The typical aesthetic experience therefore is 'This tulip is beautiful' and not the general statement 'Tulips are beautiful'. The immediate harmony of the powers of understanding and sense perception, is the basis of aesthetic pleasure as a rational pleasure.
The aesthetic pleasure expresses a feeling which accompanies every scientific endeavour but which cannot be explained by science, the feeling of pleasure in enacting ourselves as rational beings. Not mediated by a specific concept the communication of the aesthetic feelings functions directly. To say together: 'That is beautiful' is a way of directly communicating feelings that are provoked by a representation. For Kant this original, unmediated communication is an intrinsic part of the aesthetic experience itself.
The essence of communication as direct contact between human beings becomes especially clear in shared aesthetic experiences, that is in the faculty of taste. Communicability as such shows itself in the unmediated sharing of feelings of beauty. The consequences are important. Taste offers a better view on man as basically a communicating being than science. Science creates differences, speaks explicitly of true or false, and hence excludes. But a judgment of taste precedes these differences and shows communicability as such and therefore the basic unity of mankind.
Aesthetic feeling, that is taste, is far more commonsensical than understanding is, Kant explicitly states, if we understand 'sense' in the right way. 'Man is a rational being' can be replaced by 'man is a being with taste'. Here speaks the universal voice of mankind! This voice, this sensus communis is 'the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity, and thus to escape the illusion arising from the private conditions that could be so easily taken for objective, which would injuriously affect the judgment. ' What is its intercultural value? At first sight this seems clear: there is a voice of humanity preceding all differences and perhaps transcending all differences, at least in aesthetics.
But at second sight it is not that clear. To clarify the issue I first want to elaborate on the social and cultural value of the principle of taste in general. We take the way Kant took to reestablish the connection between sensus communis as an aesthetical principle and as a social one. Of course, from a social point of view one has to be interested in this sensus communis. For this theory of the communicability of feelings can be connected...
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