Die Unausdenkbarkeit der Verzweiflung

In his philosophy of history Immanuel Kant designs the teleological idea that humanity “always been in progress, and will go away so henceforth.” This idea seems to contradict only superficially with the historical reality, characterized by wars and other (human) disasters. According to Kant, the cunning of nature is able to guarantee progress, precisely because nature uses these antisocial propensities of human beeings to promote the progress behind their back. The article shows that this mechanistic understanding of history holds enormous impositions for finite subjects. They are forced to endure passively every injustice in the service of a higher logic, guaranteed by nature herself. Kantian philosophy has no sensorium for the desperation of people who are victims of despotism and repression. His philosophy of history is therefore not, as often claimed in the secondary literature, only a hope-giving intellectual pleasure trip. Quite the contrary, it promotes a world view that propagates for victims the martyrdom. And anyone who fights against it, according to Kant rightly loses his head. DOI 10.1515/zksp-2014-0007 ZKSP 2014; 1(1): 162–191