GENEALOGY OF MORALS—PRESENTATION

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals investigates the reasons why we have historically insisted upon the good-vs.-evil pairing as the determining principle of moral action, when, inherent in that pairing is a certain wrinkle, a glitch, introduced by the incongruous fact of the bad. What is bad to Nietzsche? Perhaps it is the blow from nowhere; the shock of pain that only registers as hostile once the overwhelming presence of feeling wears off enough for the victim to judge it. It is bad yet Nietzsche welcomes it. If, as Professor Buck-Morss has suggested, we are to re-think the universal/particular formula as, instead, the universal/singular, the oppositional relation would become less clear, less self-evident—the two terms begin to look a lot like each other. Similarly, if we were to turn our attention away from good-and-evil and toward something else instead, would we find ourselves in a world less easily distilled into a system of interdependently significant and thus utterly comprehensible opposites? That comprehensibility is the key to what Nietzsche contests in our moral behavior. Something about our love of good and distaste for evil implies a retreat from the real conditions which might provoke such evaluation in the first place. It is our emphasis upon comprehensibility as the most sought-after quality of reality that, for him, weakens us. Thinking isolated from experience and enthroned as life’s transcendent principle is the threat, the insult, to which we are enslaved. When it is the good/evil pairing that directs the manner in which one approaches or avoids things in life, it is in fact that mediation, that dependence upon the director, that threatens us—not evil. The evaluative faculty itself is our highest good and then, what would our evil be—the body? Is Nietzsche’s project in Genealogy of Morals, then, to eliminate the “good” and thus find a new mate for the “bad”? And, in doing this, would he consequently put an end to the ease and quickness with which we recognize one thing as another thing’s opposite?

Deleuze gives us insight into how that might happen in his discussion of Nietzsche’s famous frail-bodiedness. (and this is a quote from Pure Immanence): “(Nietzsche did not) think of illness as an event that affects a body-object or a brain-object from the outside. Rather, he saw in illness a point of view on health; and in health, a point of view on illness” (58). The difference between these two modes has to do with where the point of view originates. With illness construed as “an event that affects a body-object or a brain-object from the outside,” the affected body regards the fact of its pain in terms of that pain’s assumed cause. The illness has little to do with a lived and felt physical state and has everything to do with reason. My discomfort is to me nothing more than its reason, its cause, as once I feel it I have already evaluated and accepted that cause. Feeling begins in the quick move of my consciousness to step in and identify what I feel and why. And, in separating the pain I experience from who I am, I expel the body from the human in an effort that, for Nietzsche, belies my acquiescence to weakness, to fear, in this very attempt to protect myself. That I can remain a stable “I” despite undergoing attack by an outside enemy means that I’ve retreated from battle. Perhaps, under Deleuze’s formulation, evaluative intellect is itself a disease, attacking presence from an outside that only exists because the intellect says it does.

Then there is the other way to understand illness, which, according to Deleuze, served for Nietzsche as “a point of view on health; and in health, a point of view on illness.” Here, mind does not transcend matter but unfolds as a material activity. Illness, the feeling in the body, is itself a point of view, and that it is distinguished from health is only an expression of the fact of difference, which is the engine of experience. One feeling illuminates the next, so that what begins as the simple operation of difference can be called good or bad only as “an afterthought, an aside, a complementary color.” And the immediate intensity of feeling that accompanies both states serves to complicate any judgment that insists they are strictly opposed. The illness that faces health and the health that faces illness do not relate to each other simply in a mutually constitutive fashion—as, for example,the words “yes” and “no” whose meanings are annulled once either term is removed—but both terms are in fact each singular and very real—they are events—and it’s just that there’s no way of knowing what either one really is without removing oneself from the event. Perhaps there’s nothing to know, and it might do us good to stop wishing to know. To be satisfied in finding enough reason for illness in health and vice versa is the manner of living life that would constitute overall wellness in Nietzsche’s terms. It is a welcoming of the workings of difference whereas “happiness at the level of the powerless…(is) essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, sabbath, relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs” (21).

The complex relation that Deleuze illustrates via Nietzsche between healthy and unhealthy—the good and bad of the body—is exciting to me and hopeful because it emphasizes the existence of a reality that lies beyond the screen of logic and language. To Nietzsche, reality is only constructed if there is a will to construct it. He imagines a life that unfolds in reality rather than above it, trying to explain it. The mind he wishes we would claim for ourselves is something more interesting than a mere dissecting or bisecting tool, or a mechanism of dominance. It is in and with the body and as such does not absent itself from the present in order to find a strategic position from which to evaluate and thus subdue other minds. It is unconcerned with dominance and is instead interested in contest—a more generous, more respectful, even a loving relation to the would-be-dominated other.

Nietzsche writes: “actual love of enemies is also possible here and here alone—assuming it is possible at all on earth. How much respect a noble man has for his enemies!–and a respect of that sort is a bridge to love…For (the noble man) insists on having his enemy to himself, as a mark of distinction” (22). To appeal to the enemy rather than eliminate him. To recognize that there is a threat and to address that threat despite the risk it poses. Nietzsche’s call to invite contest into the practice of living is similar to Alain Badiou’s emphasis upon love. Both thinkers regard the perspective of the two—both my enemy and I, or both my lover and I, or both sickness and health, or both bad and good—as the optimal means for viewing reality. To incorporate into my nature the different nature of an other will would be to decline to live as just an “I” and to actively resist the stability of self-identity. Identity is a drive which neither Nietzsche nor Badiou imagine can or should be abolished but both posit that the acceptance of conflict—in the form of either battle or love—would activate a constant check upon one’s effort to settle into a stable—and thus dominating—selfhood.

Nietzsche’s critique isn’t aimed at power-as-such—for he accepts bloodlust as a healthy and undeniable expression of the animal in the human—but at our tendency to protect our potential for power by refusing to recognize and meet other wills-to-power. The I that truly wants dominance immerses itself in the work of asserting it. And here I am inclined to think about the surfing scene in Apocalypse Now, where the initial assault is staged from above, and the pretext for brutality is the anticipated pleasure in a spectacle sport, the aesthetic delight in that end rendering negligible any ugliness entailed by its means, so that the soldiers don’t experience the act of murder and can’t see how many they’ve killed. The surfer/soldier’s ardent wish to be both in the scene of battle and somewhere else indicates the kind of mind that wants health, that wants the good, that wants to win, without ever descending to taste the illness that threatens it. The good that positions itself above everything rather than in it, is perhaps the role we temporarily assume when we look at the world via the perspective offered by a movie camera. The wagnerian romance of Francis Ford Coppola’s battle scene grants to the cinema audience that same aesthetic thrill experienced by the pilot firing artillery from a helicopter on fleeing villagers who, from such an elevated vantage point, appear to move with the grace and order of a ballet troupe. To seek beauty in an aestheticized technological violence poses the following problem: if culture requires the spectacle of technological warfare for its own sustenance, what happens when the war is won? If the beautiful power of the one is not sufficiently justified in the subjugation of one other, as in Nietszche’s contest, or in Badiou’s “scene of the two”, but requires instead the annihilation of everything in its technologically expanded field of view, won’t the resources for this manner of aesthetic pleasure be quickly depleted? Where will we go to find our enemy? In other words, if total domination were possible, what would happen to difference? Where would our outside be?

Maybe it is the elevated perspective of the movie camera—its sweeping views that take in islands and oceans, skimming over sky and earth—that gives us a much-needed constant re-assurance that there is an outside, that there is another place from which we ourselves can be viewed. And the movie lets us temporarily occupy that place—in so doing, do we get to be Nietzsche’s poet spectators, divine witnesses, for whom the movements of war are orchestrated? The choreographed brutality that we saw in Copolla reminds me of Nietzsche’s festival for the gods. He writes: “All evil is justified if a god takes pleasure in it: so ran the primitive logic of feeling—and was this logic really restricted to primitive times? The gods viewed as the friends of cruel spectacles—how deeply this primeval concept still penetrates into our European civilization!” (44)

It seems to me that what Nietzsche primarily criticizes in his genealogy is our willingness to remain within a closed system. The mind that removes itself from battle or from love or from sickness becomes life’s own cause and outside. But what is the way out of this? I quote from the preface: “What if a regressive trait lurked in ‘the good man’, likewise a danger, an enticement, a poison, a narcotic, so that the present lived at the expense of the future? Perhaps in more comfort and less danger, but also in a smaller-minded, meaner manner? So that morality itself were to blame if man, as species, never reached his highest potential power and splendour?” (8) So, we can approach our rightful future if we allow will to lead us there rather than causal reasoning or morality, which anticipate and overtake every possible action before it is carried out. Nietzsche’s interest in allowing for the fulfillment of some potential power and freeing up the future seems to suggest that there is something waiting there, something further, that opens a sort of air vent in the present state of things. I’d like to end with the question: what is Nietzsche’s vision of this “highest potential and splendour”? What waits in our future that so desperately requires the dismantling our value systems? What ultimate value gives our potential its radiance and why, for Nietzsche,would the achievement of that potential be so overwhelmingly worth it?  

—Miriam Atkin

Qutb notes

In this presentation, my aim is to reach three goals.

First, I would like to talk about Sayyid Qutb’s book, Islam and Universal Peace and review how he connects Islam with the concept of peace.

Second, I want to talk about how Murad Idris compares and contrasts Qutb’s notion of universal peace with Kant’s ideas of perpetual peace that we just discuss last week.

And finally, I would like to raise some questions that we can discuss in class today.

So, let’s start with Qutb’s book, Islam and Universal Peace.

In this book, Qutb makes it clear that he wants to complete two goals. First, he wants to show what the concept of peace in Islam is. And second, he wants to show the solutions that Islam provides for the question of world peace.

To understand the connection between Islam and peace, I think we have to understand 5 concepts that Qutb discusses in his book. Those concepts are human nature, Islam, peace, successive stages of peace, and finally war and western civilization.

Let’s start with Qutb’s thoughts on Human Nature.

For Qutb, a man by nature has a capacity to connect himself with God or the eternal source of power, to comprehend the universe, and to harmonize himself with it. So, Qutb argues that to connect to God, to comprehend the universe, and to harmonize himself with it, a man needs a belief or an ideology. In this sense, while Kant believes in human reason to understand the world, Qutb promotes that a man needs an ideology to comprehensively understand himself, the world, and the universe.

But, what is the belief or the ideology that can fulfill human nature that Qutb’s talking about?

The answer is Islam. According to Qutb, Islam is the comprehensive religion that covers all aspects of life. He even claims that Islam is the final religion because it is more comprehensive than other religions and combines every doctrine of other religions.

For Qutb, Islam is comprehensive because it is the religion of unity.  It is the unity of all elements, from the individual life to society, and from the world to the universe. In Islam, everything is in harmony under the Oneness of God. In this sense, if we understand Islam as a comprehensive religion that covers all aspects of life, it becomes so essay for us to understand the concept of peace in Islam.

As Qutb argues, peace in Islam covers all every aspects of life. Namely, peace in Islam is a harmony of the relationship between a man and God, between a man’s body and his mind, a human being and other human beings, between one society and other societies, between a state and other states in the global level.

So, for Qutb, if we want to understand the concept of peace in Islam, we have to understand it comprehensibly, from the micro level to the macro level. And as Qutb shows in his book, there are 4 successive stages of peace in Islam.

The first stage is Peace of Conscience

According to Islam, there will be no peace in the world unless the individual is at peace with himself. So, as Qutb argues, it is very important for a man to have peace in his mind. This peace can be reached by using God’s guidance to create a harmony of desire, ambition, feeling, instinct.

The second stage is Peace at Home

After a man is at peace with himself, the next step is to have peace in his family. As Qutb reveals, there are many codes of conduct in Islam that aim to create harmony in family. Namely, there are norms about women dressing, marriage, sexual mixing, divorce, and polygamy. There are also prohibitions on alcohol, drugs, and social allurement. In Islam, if members in a family follow these norms strictly, peace at home can surly exists.

The third stage of peace that Qutb explains is Peace in Society.

For Qutb, an Islamic society is a peaceful society because Islam teaches people to be friendly, compassionate and cooperative for mutual security and peace. Moreover, the Islamic law which is the law that follows the Divine Law of God provides social welfare and guarantee social rights to every people. Namely, in Islamic law, there is the guarantee of welfare, the circulation of wealth, the nationalization of public utilities, and the prohibition of extravagances, usury, and the monopolization of business. Therefore, there is no social conflict and class struggle in the Muslim society. Last but not least, there is no conflict between the ruler and the subjects in the Islamic state. The ruler is not different from the subjects since he has to follow the Law of God. He can rule the state as long as he obeys God and applies God’s laws.

The last stage of peace in Islam is peace in the global level.

As Qutb reveals, Islam promotes the unity of all humanity, the unity of all religions, and the unity of all believers. Islam integrates racial and class differences and encourages mutual tolerance, friendliness, and compassion among human beings in the world. Islam aims to avoid conflicts caused by discrimination, power struggles, and material exploitation. It is a religion that aims to help people and the humanitarian spirit is the core principle of Islam.

However, to create world peace, Qutb does not hesitate to show that sometimes war is necessary.

As we can see, it seems that there is no reason for Muslims to make war. They behave so well in their everyday life, they have no conflict in their society, and they promote peace in the world. However, Qutb argues that war is justified if it is a humanitarian war to set people free from the oppression, corruption, and injustice. For Muslims, it is necessary to give men a chance to emancipate themselves from their oppressor and to restore their human rights granted by God to all mankind. This kind of mission can be called Jihad.

But what’s kind of society that are so corrupted and unjust that Qutb’s talking about?

Where are the injustice, corruption, and oppression in the world?

It seems to me that Qutb is talking about the Western civilization. As we can see from his biography, after studying in the US and traveling in the western countries, Qutb has very negative views about the West. Materialism, racism, imperialism, class conflict, economic exploitation, sexual obsession, for Qutb, lead to moral problems and moral decay in the West. As a result, it seems to me that what Qutb wants to say ultimately is that to escape from the corrupted conditions of the Western civilization, Islam is the final solution for humankind.

Now, I would like to go on and talk about the Idris’s article which he compares and contrasts Qutb’s universal peace with Kant’s perpetual peace.

In my view, the good thing about Idris’s article is that he discusses about other works of Qutb. And he also includes the last chapter of Islam and Universal Peace which we can find in the original edition but it does not appear in the new edition of this book that we read this week. So, I think Idris’s article can really provides a broader picture of Qutb’s thoughts to us.

This is a long article and it has many arguments and ideas. So I would like to draw your attention to only three crucial points.

The first one is the main goals of this essay.

What Idris wants to do in his essay is that he wants to challenge the conventional view that people have when they compare Kant’s perpetual peace with Qutb’s Islamic peace. Namely, people tend to think that Qutb’s idea of peace is the reaction against the concept of modernity, reason, and enlightenment that Kant strongly promotes. However, for Idris, we should understand Qutb’s idea of peace as the continuation of enlightenment tradition. As Idris says, “Qutb is a child of enlightenment.” Therefore, rather than being different, Kant and Qutb’s ideas reflect and mirror each other and share similar aspects of empire, colonialism, hostility, war, and peace.

However, before I examine the similarities between Qutb and Kant, I want to mention the differences between these two thinkers.

As Idris shows, there are two main differences.

The first one is the different views on the Assurance of Peace.

For Kant, commerce and trade are the assurance of peace in the world. But for Qutb, commerce and trade can lead to materialism and capitalism. Rather than guaranteeing peace, materialism, for Qutb, is the cause of moral decay, social conflict, and eventually war between states.

The second one is the different views on morality

For Kant, world peace does not start from morality in each individual. As he says, “A good constitution is not to be expected from morality, but, conversely, a good moral condition of people is to be expected only under a good constitution” But for Qutb, world peace cannot be created if each individual do not have personal morality. As he shows, peace in conscience is the first step in successive stages of peace.

Now I want to talk about the similarities between Qutb and Kant’s plan of peace

Even though Kant and Qutb have some different views, Idris shows that Qutb’s ideas of peace are very similar to Kant’s since he uses the same kind of enlightenment terms and language.

There are five aspects that we can similarly find in both Kant and Qutb’s texts.

First, it is the concept of “The Unjust Enemy”

For Kant, the unjust enemy is the one who perpetuates the State of Nature or the one who makes any condition of peace among nations impossible Idris argues that we can find the unjust enemy in Qutb’s thoughts too. And it is the West, especially the U.S. The UK, and France, which are the unjust enemies for the world peace.

Second, both Kant and Qutb provide a justification of war in the world

For Kant, war is one of the Driving Engines to Peace. As Idris mentions, “Kant’s morality of peace does not condemn war as evil or celebrate it as just, but affirms it as necessary and inevitable because it ultimately brings about peace.”Similarly, for Qutb, the “Pure War” is necessary to fight against Subordination, Inequality, Injustice, and Deceptions. It is not a war for a nation or a class but it is for human rights of the world.

Third, both Kant and Qutb believe in a nation-state as an instrument that can lead to world peace. The only difference is that they believe in a different form of state. While Kant believes in The Republican State, Qutb promotes that The Islamic State can bring peace to the earth.

Fourth, both Kant and Qutb believe in the formation of the Federation of Nations. For them, this kind of federation can unite different nations and guarantee peace. The only difference is that Kant and Qutb provide different forms of federation. While Kant asks for the leagues of nations, Qutb believes in the Islamic bloc.

Last, both Kant and Qutb criticize colonialism and its violence. Living in the era of European colonialism, Kant criticizes the way the European savages enslave indigenous people they conquer. Meanwhile, living in the era of post colonialism, Qutb criticizes the way people today are corrupted by materialism, neo-imperialism, and capitalism. For Qutb, these people are ignorant savages who lack the divine guidance of God.

Now I would like to conclude this presentation by raising some questions for discussion.

I have five set of questions. The first three sets of questions relate to Qutb’s book and Idris’s article while the last two sets of questions relate to the article written by Abdulrahman al-Salimi.

Let’s start with the first one

1. War and Peace

Do we need war as a driving force to universal peace? Can peace be established without the presence of war? Do you believe in “the war to end all wars”? Which one is more important; domestic peace or international peace?

2. Transcendence and Violence

What is the cost that we have to pay in order to reach the transcendental stage of peace? How does the absolute power of God lead to violence against women, immigrants, and minority groups? Does the concept of transcendence include all people? Or does it actually exclude some people out off its absolute claim?

3. Secularity and Peace

Can we establish peace in the world without referring to God? Can we, as an agent, resist against God’s secret plan or God’s Divine Law in order to create a different version of peace? What are differences between religious peace and secular peace?

4. Islam and the Modern State

Can the Islamic doctrines coexist with the modern/western/ secular concepts of the state, civil constitution, liberal democracy, and capitalism? Is it the case that Islamic parties and Islamic movements are the main problems of democratization in the Arab countries? If it is the case that we have to reform the Islamic society, which area should be the first one; politics, economy, culture, or the intellectual?

5. Islam and the Future

Does the Islamic state have the future? Are Muslims “the lagging others” who cannot catch up with the train of modernity and civilization? -What are political choices for Islamic states? Do they have to be only secularized, modernized, and democratized like the West? What is the future relationship between Islamic countries and the West?

Please feel free to share your opinion and I’m sorry that this presentation is pretty long

Thank you

Deleuze notes

  • Frame thinking about Deleuze as about a different ontology of and orientation to some notion of transcendence
    • On the one hand, we have a metaphysics of subject and object that can transcend and can be transcended
    • Deleuze opposes to this his metaphysics of virtuality, singularity, and event in the plane of immanence
      • And it is from this plane that we get the transcendental field, a subject, an object, consciousness, and so on as rhizomatic unfoldings from the field of immanence
      • This is where one finds Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism”
  • What is this plane of immanence?
    • It is immanent to nothing but itself; it does not belong to a subject or depend on an object
    • It is defined A LIFE, with emphasis on the indefinite article
    • It is virtual and it is multiple
  • We should think of immanence and think of A Life as potentiality, not actuality
    • They contain only what Deleuze calls “virtuals:” events, singularities, virtualities
    • It is NOT that they lack actuality, but they can only be actualized outside the plane of immanence
      • The plane of immanence, Deleuze writes on p. 31, is only ever “actualized in an object or subject to which it attributes itself”
        • An object or a subject are thus only ever an effect of actualized potentiality; the immanent field is primary, generating subjects and objects
      • A Life: is singularity not individuality
        • Like that of the small child
          • Note that the child appears in this essay, his last essay, but the figure of the child is also crucial to the essay on Nietzsche, something Deleuze had written decades previously
          • It flows under and through THE life that a given subject lives, in which the events and singularities of A life are actualized in subjects and objects; it is potentiality “freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens” (28)
            • More than just the moment in between life and death Deleuze finds in Dickens
            • It is power, it is bliss (and here see resonances of his Nietzschean “affirmation” and Spinozan “positivity”)
  • Transcendence, then, can only ever be produced by immanence
    • Deleuze is careful to distinguish between the transcendental field and the transcendent
      • The transcendental field is defined by virtuals and the plane of immanence – it eludes the world of subject and object
        • It is NOT defined by consciousness, which is only expressed when reflected onto a subject referring to an object
      • The transcendent is composed of actualized virtuals, with reference to subject and object, separate from the plane of immanence
    • It is here that Deleuze most explicitly departs from Kant – Deleuze argues that positing some kind of universal subject outside the plane of immanence “de-natures” the transcendental
      • Deleuze calls this Kant’s redoubling of the empirical, which distorts immanence by attempting to enclose it within the transcendent
  • Related to this, certainly, is a renunciation of and challenge to Kant’s transcendental ego, and notion of unified subject more broadly
    • Instead, with Deleuze we see the transcendental field as a “pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self” (25)
      • Something metaphysically prior to even the sensations and passions of Hume
      • More like quantums or powers of sensation as becoming, or as the passage between sensation; pre-individual affect
    • No unified subject
    • For Deleuze throughout his work, the identical self is only over an effect or product of difference

      from the ever-entertaining LOLtheorists

Hello!

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Erin’s Kant notes

How to connect the political musings of an 18th century Prussian philosopher, the images of an American war film and Walter Benjamin’s famous axiom regarding history?  In truth, I confess that I am not entirely sure, and even after preparing to introduce these topics I hope and expect that it is I who will be most surprised during today’s discussion.  However, in efforts to pave way for some of the undoubtedly interesting connections, I will begin by sketching out Kant’s ideas on the progression of history and its aim towards perpetual peace as proposed in the two readings.  After that, perhaps we will be better able to apply Benjamin’s disruptive assertion that “history breaks down into images, not into stories” and whether and how this might relate to the rampage of bombs and palm trees, helicopters and straw hats, coffee cups and machine guns, surfboards and farming tools, and other surreal but somewhat all-too-realistic juxtapositions of American excess and supposed bucolic primitivism kaliedescoping throughout the first segment of Apocalypse Now.

First, what is Kant concerned with in these two readings?  In short, as Kant declares in the fifth proposition of his 1784 essay “Idea for Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective “The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men,” and to paraphrase him later, even if that universal civic society is one of devils administering to devils.  But this problem is really not so much a problem, as we must infer from Kant, for, as he says so himself, Nature drives man to the solution whether man is aware or not, willing or not. And how would Nature do such a thing?  Primarily, he claims, with the same trick she uses to raise man’s reason to its highest power or to spread society to the furthest corners of the earth: through discord, unsociability, self-interest, in short: WAR. It is hostility, either between individuals or groups, which necessitates the existence of both the state and the peace pact.  Before such a peace pact, all neighbors are strangers whose intentions are unknown, and therefore their mere presence can be justly construed and reacted to as a wrong.  The peace before war therefore is merely accidental and artificial, only war can transform it into a real and lasting peace.  Of course, this is not war’s only blessing.  Without this peculiar technique of nature, Kant claims in his fourth proposition, “Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped.”   Eleven years later in his essay Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant uses the same premise to guarantee his proposed articles for the progression of perpetual peace.  What we may see here, is that what separates man from the beasts — reason — is the product of violence.  War reveals the hidden fruits of man’s destiny.  Only through horror may mankind transcend.

What to make of this riddle?  And what exactly is this nature that drives forth history and how does Kant claim to know it?  Kant attempts to reveal the universal principle that guides the seeming chaos of history under the freedom of the will in the much the same way that Newton revealed the three laws of motion.  In his eight proposition, he writes: “The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state…”   All human action, much like all motion, no matter how random seeming at an individual level, must operate in general according to laws previously unrevealed.  Kant reveals this law — or rather guiding principle, method and aim of nature — through the use of text and a bird’s eye perspective that subsumes the particular under the universal.  In the introduction, he writes “if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.” His use of visual metaphors should not be taken at face value, even though, in some ways, they long for Benjamin’s assertion.  But the appearances which history narrates — at least here — are merely prior narrations.
What to make of all this seeing with precisely no image before us?  The history which Kant describes, or rather the progress of the past, like nature’s secret, or the laws of motion, has no image, and yet our striving to understand, to put that striving and understanding into language, always seems to require the metaphors of vision, perspective, clarity, revelation, etc.  Is this but the observation of the nitpicker?  Perhaps.  But perhaps also it relates to the curious exchange within Kant’s political philosophy between the private and public, the secret and the apparent, the revealed and unrevealed, and the violence of thought that must occur in each binary’s reconciliation.  Already, Kant hopes to have demonstrated that nature’s cruel tactics are really the signs of a wise and benevolent creator, a strange breed of reverse paranoia made possible only by a severe adjustment of one’s lenses so to speak.  Nature’s truth is not face value, for its goodness — as Kant proposes — operates in the costume of evil, and requires the rare diviner to interpret.  Humankind and its politics, however, are not to follow Nature’s example.   Kant concludes Perpetual Peace with the assertion that actions incompatible with publicity are necessarily wrong, and that maxims which require publicity harmonize with right and politics combined.  What must be kept secret is therefore bad, what is good requires publicity to thrive.  But what is publicity?  Does he merely mean the official statement of the state or individual?  That is certainly one form of publicity, but it is certainly not all.   If we consider publicity as the entire spectrum of testimonies of the forces which produce history  — bound by no no particular sense, method, perspective, judgment or interpretation, then perhaps, just maybe, we can being to draw connections between Kant, Benjamin and the images of Apocalypse Now.