Kant on the Relations of Politics and Nature

In the murky depths in which it floats, as if it were a castaway, the possibility of the political finds a tension that is impossible to contain completely, a mismatch of force (human, animal) that produces bifurcations, cuts, intervals and, finally, shortcomings whose cause would be found in human nature. So, to achieve political behaviors (and at a higher-level ethical behaviors), to make an appropriate use of force (der Anwendung eigener Kräfte), each one, as soon as he is able, must make himself the primary object of an intensive and intransigent economy even if he cannot access his innermost recesses (the heart). For himself, Kantian man is at the same time natural (which means subject to intelligible laws, even if they may seem arbitrary, as he himself maintains in his Ideas) and unfathomable (unerforschlich). It is from this condition of radical split that a political community must be produced, as an intermediate stage between animality and ethics. Such, in fact, is the Kantian claim but its achievement is besieged by the propensities that could perpetuate the bestial and the diabolical. Kant also aspires to dispel the ambiguity of human actions and character, but he knows that we have only a limited power to realize our possibilities. For this reason, he postulates that this power must be channeled through time at all times (Ideas, third principle). What the philosopher proposes is that we finally achieve the government of (our) nature thanks to a single source of force or, rather, through an immanent process in which the human animal becomes a person or subject. Only that in this becoming, instead of making ourselves one – the foundation and end of ourselves – we voluntarily and rationally constrained ourselves to the laws (of coercion and virtue) and to the community, which form a unity. This would not imply, of course, a limitation of freedom but, on the contrary, its realization. There would no longer be unilateralism, much less authoritarianism, but, instead, the possibility of an eternal peace that is not, as Kant warns, concomitant with an excess of earthly or animal happiness. The relationship between the political and the natural does not admit to a merely contemplative interest in the latter, instead, political behavior aspires to produce events (Begebenheiten) of such a nature as to bring about decisive transformations capable of altering their agents and their circumstances together. Therefore, by calling nature sublime (erhaben) the philosopher does so to emphasize that it elevates (erhebt) our imagination by making possible "those cases in which it can come to feel its own sublimity, which lies in its vocation and elevates it even above nature." Hence, in Religion at the Limits of Mere Reason, Kant warns that only a new birth (ein Art von Wiedergeburt) and, even more, a "new creation" (eine neue Schöpfung) is what would make political coexistence possible. That is, an event, an elevation, an abrupt transformation of humans. This means that the political is not, in any way, a behavior that will appear without the presence of decisive influences and removals.