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.