Immanuel Kant and the Mastication of Poland: Leibnizian Ontology and Russian Agency in the Critical Philosophy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781545300619)

Those seeking to contextualize Kant's dedicated late political writings - especially the Theory and Practice of 1793, the Perpetual Peace of 1795 and the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797 - usually do so with reference to the French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath. In such works - it is alleged - Kant was both responding to novel issues raised by events in France and doing his part to prevent the spread of revolutionary ideas eastward towards conservative Prussia. Immanuel Kant and the Mastication of Poland calls for discard of the French Revolution interpretation of the dedicated political works of the Koenigsberg philosopher and replacement of it by a Poland-integrated interpretation. Decisive for political developments in Kant's Prussia in the 1790s was the world-historical state cleansing of Poland, featuring the Polish Revolution of 1792, the Second Partition of Poland of 1793, the Kosciuszko Uprising of 1794 and the Third (final) Division of Poland in 1795, developments interwoven with Kant's genuflection to Catherine II of Russia in 1794, this in the form of a petition (which was granted) for admission to the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Russian rulers granted such emoluments only for decades of loyal service. References to Polish events in the Perpetual Peace for example are several, including Kant's statement that governments may not 'divide [a state's] territory among themselves and make that state effectively disappear from the earth'. The philosopher went into some detail on cultural traits of Poles in an Anthropology lecture in 1792. Kant's eastern-directed purview in politics is so pronounced as to raise the question of how the Francocentric interpretation ever originated. Here Hannah Arendt's 1970s considerations on the neglected political axiology present in Kant's 3rd Critique comes into play. Arendt argued that within the Critique of Judgment of 1790 were imbedded principles of Kant's political philosophy as a whole which steered (or superceded) the more occasional publications of the remainder of the decade. In a similar vein of preference for the 3rd Critique were Goethe and the Young Hegel, the latter especially indicating the disruption of the universal-particular-individual relations set out by Kant in 1790 could serve as a basis for interpretation of the German state as a whole. Compound Russo-dependency of Prussia in Kant's 18th century could then be seen as an example of such disrupted universal-particular relations, relations reflected in due course in the Russo-Prussian Division of Poland pact as well as Kant's later texts.

Author: William F. Drischler
ISBN-10: 1545300615
ISBN-13: 9781545300619
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Language: English
Published: 04/18/2017
Pages: 82
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.47lbs
Size: 10.00h x 7.00w x 0.21d