German philosophy and politics

by John Dewey

Society is an expression of man's egoistic nature; his natural seeking for personal advantage and profit. Its typical manifestation is in competitive economic struggle and in the struggle for honor and recognized social status. These have their proper place; but with respect even to them it is the duty of the State to intervene so that the struggle may contribute to ideal ends which alone are universal. Hence the significance of the force or power of the State. Unlike other forms of force, it has a sort of sacred import, for it represents force consecrated to the assertion and expansion of final goods which are spiritual, moral, rational. These absolute ends can be maintained only in struggle against man's individualistic ends. Conquest through conflict is the law of morals everywhere.

In Kant we find only the beginnings of this political philosophy. He is still held back by the individualism of the eighteenth century. Everything legal and political is conceived by him as external and hence outside the strictly moral realm of inner motivation. Yet he is not content to leave the State and its law as a wholly unmoral matter. The natural motives of man are, according to Kant (evidently following Hobbes), love of power, love of gain, love of glory. These motives are egoistic; they issue in strife—in the war of all against all. While such a state of affairs does not and cannot invade the inner realm of duty, the realm of the moral motive, it evidently presents a régime in which the conquest of the world of sense by the law of reason cannot be effected. Man in his rational or universal capacity must, therefore, will an outward order of harmony in which it is at least possible for acts dictated by rational freedom to get a footing. Such an outer order is the State. Its province is not to promote moral freedom directly—only the moral will can do that. But its business is to hinder the hindrances to freedom: to establish a social condition of outward order in which truly moral

acts may gradually evolve a kingdom of humanity. Thus while the State does not have a directly moral scope of action (since the coercion of motive is a moral absurdity), it does have a moral basis and an ultimate moral function.

It is the law of reason, "holy and inviolable," which impels man to the institution of the State, not natural sociability, much less considerations of expediency. And so necessary is the State to humanity's realization of its moral purpose that there can be no right of revolution. The overthrow and execution of the sovereign (Kant evidently had the French Revolution and Louis XVI in mind) is "an immortal and inexpiable sin like the sin against the Holy Ghost spoken of by theologians, which can never be forgiven in this world or in the next."

Kant was enough of a child of the eighteenth century to be cosmopolitan, not nationalistic, in his feeling. Since humanity as a whole, in its universality, alone truly corresponds to the universality of reason, he upheld the ideal of an ultimate republican federation of states; he was one of the first to proclaim the possibility of enduring

peace among nations on the basis of such a federated union of mankind.

The threatened domination of Europe by Napoleon following on the wars waged by republican France put an end, however, to cosmopolitanism. Since Germany was the greatest sufferer from these wars, and since it was obvious that the lack of national unity, the division of Germany into a multitude of petty states, was the great source of her weakness; since it was equally obvious that Prussia, the one strong and centralized power among the German states, was the only thing which saved them all from national extinction, subsequent political philosophy in Germany rescued the idea of the State from the somewhat ambiguous moral position in which Kant had left it. Since a state which is an absolute moral necessity and whose actions are nevertheless lacking in inherent moral quality is an anomaly, the doctrine almost calls for a theory which shall make the State the supreme moral entity.

Fichte marks the beginning of the transformation; and, in his writings, it is easy to detect a marked difference of attitude toward the nationalistic state before and after 1806, when in the battle

of Jena Germany went down to inglorious defeat. From the time of Fichte, the German philosophy of the State blends with its philosophy of history, so that my reservation of the latter topic for the next section is somewhat arbitrary, and I shall not try rigidly to maintain the division of themes.

I have already mentioned the fact that Kant relaxes the separation of the moral realm of freedom from the sensuous realm of nature sufficiently to assert that the former is meant to influence the latter and finally to subjugate it. By means of the little crack thus introduced into nature, Fichte rewrites the Kantian philosophy. The world of sense must be regarded from the very start as material which the free, rational, moral Ego has created in order to have material for its own adequate realization of will. Fichte had a longing for an absolute unity which did not afflict Kant, to whom, save for the concession just referred to, a complete separation of the two operations of legislative reason sufficed. Fichte was also an ardently active soul, whose very temperament assured him of the subordination of theoretical knowledge to moral action.