Germany today paid tribute to Immanuel Kant, the superstar of German philosophy, considered the imposing beacon of the Enlightenment and who today stands as one of the most important thinkers in the European country. “The figure of Kant is important not only from a philosophical perspective, but also from a geopolitical perspective,” declared German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin at the beginning of his opening speech at the central event marking the 300th anniversary of the birth of the author of Critique of pure reason. The social democratic leader decided to focus his speech on the war in Ukraine and rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to claim Kant as his own, whom he says is one of his favorite philosophers, even though Königsberg, the city in which that Kant was born on April 22, 1724, when it was the capital of East Prussia, was renamed Kaliningrad by the Soviets after World War II and is now part of Russia.
Scholz recalled that “Putin’s war against Ukraine contradicts everything Kant represents.” “The Russian president does not have the slightest justification for invoking Kant,” he denounced, and pointed out that Kant’s idea of peace “differs greatly from Putin’s idea.” Kant’s thought not only exerted a fundamental influence on philosophy, but also on the cultural and political development of Europe, and especially of Germany, a country where for weeks one has encountered the Prussian thinker at every step: in books, articles, films, exhibitions, conferences and even commemorative coins minted for the occasion.
“Kant was undoubtedly one of the most influential architects of our liberal constitution,” the Federal President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, praised him on Friday during the inauguration of an exhibition at Bellevue Palace, where they can be seen until the summer handwritten extracts from the treaty About perpetual peace. According to Kant, there should not be an unjust peace that harbors the seeds of a new war. At the same time, the perspective of peace must never be lost. As Steinmeier recalled, the philosopher had no illusions about the peace of humanity, rather he sought an answer to the question of how to pacify a warlike world and how to legally ensure peace.
The fact that it is receiving so much attention these weeks is also largely due to concern about the state of our world. “At the end of the day, we are currently experiencing how the legacy of the Enlightenment – universal human rights and international law – is being attacked and threatened from several sides at the same time,” said the German president. “Russia’s attack on Ukraine has brought war back to Europe. Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel, the war in Gaza, and Iran’s attack on Israel are deepening fissures in the global community. Attacks by populist and far-right forces against liberal democracy continue to grow. I could lengthen the list. We would do well not only to remember the universal principles of the Enlightenment, but also to be guided by them,” he recommended.
Today, in Berlin, about 700 kilometers from her hometown, on a rainy and cold day, music, speeches and readings of excerpts from her work by actress Nina West and academics Andrea Esser and Marcus Willaschek marked an event full of German personalities among whom was the Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth. The famous Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, which dates back to the former Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, whose members include figures such as Alexander von Humboldt, Albert Einstein and Max Planck and of which Kant was external member since 1786, was in charge of organizing the central anniversary celebration. The place chosen was the imposing hall of the building from the industrial era, from around 1890, in the Berlin neighborhood of Moabit, of the former dairy of Carl Bolle, a businessman who achieved great success supplying Berlin with milk and dairy products, becoming in the largest dairy company of the time.
The one who was known for destroying the certainties of traditional metaphysics and revolutionizing thought focused, above all, on three questions: What can I know? What should I do? and what can I expect? These questions, along with famous phrases such as “Have the courage to use your own understanding” or “We see things, not as they are, but as we are” resonate strongly again these days. “Kant is a general educational value in Germany. Almost everyone knows the categorical imperative, and many have read some of Kant’s texts (or parts of them) at school,” Willaschek explains to EL PAÍS about a philosopher who is required reading in German schools.
“In the period after the Second World War, Kant’s ethics were an important starting point for overcoming National Socialist thought and, in the Federal Republic of Germany, a basis for the self-image of the new state: not Marxist, but oriented towards the absolute value of the individual, human dignity. This significance of Kant continues to have an effect to this day and is reinforced (in times of war) by the rediscovery of Kant as a theorist of peace,” indicates the professor of Philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Likewise, the expert who has just published a new book about the Prussian thinker under the title “Kant: the revolution of thought”, believes, like Steinmeier, that the philosopher is now “more relevant than ever.”
“Kant’s central idea is that lasting peace is only possible in a global legal order. Without this order of world peace, according to Kant, any apparent peace is nothing more than a truce that can be broken at any moment. Two years ago, in Ukraine (and in many other places before and after), we were able to see how right Kant was about this,” he reflects. “Kant knew that ‘eternal peace’, that is, a lasting and legal order of world peace, was a distant goal. He would hope that we would continue working towards this goal despite all the setbacks.” In Willaschek’s opinion, the philosopher would see current events as “a mixture of joy and disappointment”, because although on the one hand the living conditions of the vast majority of Europeans have improved spectacularly, there are still dictators, wars and many people live in poverty. “Perhaps Kant would have considered that the fact that progress has been made, at least in some parts of the world, is an encouragement to continue down this path.”
But what he would see with fascination would be the Internet, Willaschek acknowledges. “For him, social progress and enlightenment were only possible in the public sphere. Therefore, in principle he would have welcomed the Internet because it simplifies communication. But it would be nice to know what solutions Kant would have found to deal with Internet problems such as misinformation or incitement to hate.” As he himself said, “through lies, a man annihilates his dignity as a man.”