This essay was submitted to the Goethe-Institut “Sapere Aude” Essay Competition, where it earned first place among college entries. Originally written in English, it is presented here in its original language without translation.
Anyone who has made a post on social media or published an article knows that information is quite difficult to present to the public. Not everybody is in an equal position to assert truth and create knowledge, and not every method of doing so has an equal chance of success. Credibility is an ever looming requirement, one that needs to be fulfilled over and over again. The more ambitious the claim, the harder it is to maintain and defend. Thus we see arguments collapsing around us all the time: a medical institution’s advice repealed of its trustworthiness, a politician’s fiery speech nullified into a viral meme. For these unlucky authorities, the task of disseminating information proved too tricky, too prone to looking foolish or propagandistic. We may turn, then, to an unlikely source for a way out. At the beginning of Toward Perpetual Peace—a treatise that arguably contains one of the most ambitious claims ever made—appears an unassuming passage, scarcely taking up half a page. Yet packed within these frequently overlooked lines is Kant’s philosophical disclaimer to perpetual peace, which, as it turns out, offers both epistemological and political recourse. The introduction to Toward Perpetual Peace presents a counterintuitive model for how to be taken seriously, and which protections one must invoke within the public sphere.A philosopher’s preamble seems an unusual place to seek counsel or to establish credibility, especially when its author begins with a joke. It is not a joke that Kant himself is making, but rather one made by someone else—specifically a Dutch innkeeper, who has captioned the image of a graveyard with the phrase “To Perpetual Peace.” There are many confusing parts to this joke, and we struggle to parse its meaning. The caption, To Perpetual Peace, is cryptic even on its own.1 Its brevity, its fragmentary nature, leave ample room for interpretation. When paired with a picture of a graveyard, an image with a heavy and singular association, its ambiguity only increases. Is this a threat? A warning? If so, who is it intended for? Still, the punchline is clear enough: those headed in pursuit of perpetual peace will achieve it only in death. In an essay that argues just the opposite, we must wonder why Kant chooses to open with this “satirical joke.”
To better understand Kant’s strategy here—to see how this particular maneuver will help him secure validity—we must develop a definition of satire. Generally, satire can be described as the use of humor or irony to point out an inconsistency, paradox or flaw, especially a political one. In her discussion of Kant’s prologue, Christiane Frey narrows this definition to cohere with Kant’s purposes: “… the literary genre or rhetorical device of ‘humorous satire’ in the sense explored here exposes and reflects precisely on [the] antinomy of the necessity and impossibility of coercion, while at the same time itself providing another and more powerful means of bonding.”2 Frey argues here that the “antinomy,” or contradiction, which Kant is highlighting through satire is a familiar one: perpetual peace must be enforced, but also inherently cannot be enforced, for its nature changes when it does not arise autonomously. Being fundamentally interested in enforcement and obligation, she goes on to assert that Kant uses satire to integrate and democratize reason, allowing it to become its own binding force. We can borrow Frey’s description of satire as a rhetorical device used to expose, reflect and bond. When done correctly, satire creates a unique kind of self-awareness which can bridge the gap between reader and writer, between preconceptions and new understandings.
Indeed, Kant seems drawn to questions of reception and demographics. In asking who the caption is satirizing, Kant is really trying to define his audience. Maybe he is writing to the general public, who will only find harmony and commonality in death; to the heads of state, who would rather die than institute perpetual peace; or to a fellow philosopher, who will carry their fantasy of peace with them to the grave. Implicit in all of these characterizations is the assumption that no matter who we are, whether we find ourselves supporting, opposing or neutral to its cause, we have all thought about perpetual peace and its profound connection to death. Our own conclusions, wherever they land, place us in one of the three categories of audience outlined above. Together with Kant, we are asked to analyze a piece of satire that might apply to our camp, or might not. This is a somewhat disorienting request, and in an attempt to regain footing, we must transform, however briefly, into philosophers of our own minds. We are forced to reflect on our preconceptions of peace as individuals, whether we believe it is ridiculous or ideal, whether or not we find resonance in the Dutch innkeeper’s condemnation. Instinctively, we try to recognize ourselves as one of the three kinds of audiences outlined by Kant. Do we skew towards the romanticism of philosophers, or reject peace like the belligerent politicians?
At the same time, the caption takes us away from personal contemplation, towards a universal bond and a certain kind of equality. Here is the other benefit of the Dutch innkeeper’s vague joke and Kant’s decision to leave it ambiguous: no matter which attitude we have towards peace, we all stand at risk of being the butt of a satirical joke. Just as perpetual peace must be universally appreciated by the end of the text, so are our predispositions towards it universally silly, equally deserving of mockery. Thus, using reason and self-awareness, Kant compels us to let our guard down, priming us to receive new information about peace. Just as Frey predicted he would in the earlier quote, we see Kant taking advantage of satire’s function as a binding force, one whose power hinges on reason and comedy.
If so far Kant has been accessing the mechanisms of satire through someone else’s joke, enjoying the democratizing effects of humor and analysis, the second half of the prologue is where he begins to make his own. The discussion of the innkeeper’s sign ended as soon as it was begun, sealed within the closed circuit format of a question left unanswered, and Kant follows it up with a stipulation. We are left to wonder: a stipulation? When did this prologue become the proper place for that? Yet we must remember that Kant is moving swiftly and compactly, using every opportunity offered by an introduction to construct a defense for perpetual peace—manipulating, disclaiming and stipulating as he sees fit. Seeing that his task is difficult and its stakes high, Kant anticipates accusations of intellectual naivete and political insubordination. Thus he dedicates the second half of his prologue to the articulation of something like a philosopher’s clause.
For Kant, philosophers occupy a very particular position in the public sphere, one that is uniquely suited to the task of asserting truth. Drawing for a moment on another section of the text, the “Secret Article Toward Perpetual Peace,” we can start to understand what Kant sees as the philosopher’s occupational advantages. Unlike the lawyer, who tends to be heavy-handed, or the king, whose faculty of reason is corrupted—necessarily, says Kant—by his power, the philosopher is much weaker and can therefore focus on matters of truth and justice. As societal underdogs with no access to power, philosophers possess unique privileges: they are fundamentally credible, “beyond suspicion of being mere propagandists,” capable only of speaking the truth. Therefore, says Kant, the king and the philosopher should work together, even in secret, to better serve the public (93). One entity holds the keys to political power; the other, the know-how to correctly wield it. Thus Kant imagines himself to be a disseminator of reason and moral thought, whose output is indispensable to politicians despite being outwardly dismissed and perceived as incompatible.
If one were to publicly ask the politicians how much epistemological authority one ought to grant to philosophers, they would undoubtedly provide an entirely different account. Kant understands this and uses it as the source of his satire. Putting on the affected tone of an imaginary politician, he condemns his own work as abstract, utterly impractical—in the literal sense, as in, not based on practice—and therefore trivial. He does not truly mean any of this, of course, even though some scholars have suggested otherwise, taking his words at surface level. For example, Peter Fenves interprets Kant’s prologue as an undertaking twice failed: the first time because anything “eternal” is definitionally impossible and the second time because Kant himself professes it to fail due to its intangibility.3 Fenves’ reading, however, ignores all contextual and tonal clues that would point towards a more accurate assessment of Kant’s comments as ironic. By looking at Kant’s choice of “weltkundige,” for example, to describe the politician, we can see that he is intentionally underlining the politician’s pragmatism, his worldliness, so as to caricaturize him into a monster of practicality (67). The true intent behind Kant’s self-criticism is to invoke the philosopher’s occupational protections:
if indeed their work holds no weight, then they should be granted the same freedoms as other harmless things. In other words, the same voice which dismisses philosophy as useless babbling also exempts it from serious criticism; it cannot be valid and invalid at the same time.
Kant must be careful here, though. Even as he satirizes the politicians and the double jeopardy they present, he does not wish to fully invalidate his own points. Kant finds himself caught between two risks: on the one hand, not being taken seriously enough and losing impact; on the other, being taken too seriously and endangering himself. Neither is the ire of politicians the only thing that Kant must watch out for. There is also the jeering Dutch innkeeper and his sympathizers, returning from the first part of the prologue to haunt Kant with their ridicule. Perpetual peace is a pipe dream used to console the gullible, they seem to suggest, and anyone foolish enough to advocate for it should know they look thoroughly ridiculous. Kant takes precautions against this line of mockery by employing satire. Just as he protected peace from looking ridiculous using a trick of satire, breaking down our preexisting biases towards peace so that we take it more seriously, Kant is now protecting himself by claiming to be less serious—in other words, by disclaiming the responsibility of political significance, or appearing to. The only place in which Kant may find dignity and credibility, then, hangs in perfect balance between seriousness and unseriousness.
Two times now, Kant has brought up the arguments of his direct ideological opponents, first with the Dutch innkeeper’s cynical sign and then with the practical politician’s dismissive assessment. Not only that, he has feigned to take these arguments seriously, allowing satire to implicitly do the work of discounting them. It is a counterintuitive way to present one’s argument, to be sure—but it works. In advocating for the incredibly slippery concept of perpetual peace, Kant adapts by forming an intelligent and persuasive new prefatory mode. He lays out the exact terms of his disadvantages, catches us off guard by inviting us to gaze upon them with him, then subtly and systematically takes off their edge. The innkeeper’s sign is too ambiguous to be convincingly bleak, instead leaving us to laugh, albeit nervously, at ourselves. The politician’s disdain relies too hard on a paradox, protesting that the philosopher’s words matter too much and also not enough. No matter our initial standing on peace, Kant anticipates our doubts and neutralizes them with satire and rhetorical flair. Almost unwittingly, we become receptive to the possibility of perpetual peace, learning to grasp it in precisely the way it must be perceived. Against all odds, a philosopher’s prologue from more than two centuries ago shows us that today’s issues can in fact be accorded much more legitimacy and weight. No matter how vast and unwieldy one’s initial argument, there is a way to make it effectively understood and, perhaps more importantly, believed.
1 Despite its importance, Kant’s prologue to Toward Perpetual Peace has received little research—with the exception of Georg Cavallar, who offers an early analysis in his Pax Kantiana: systematisch-historische Untersuchung des Entwurfs “Zum ewigen
Frieden” (1795) von Immanuel Kant (Wien 1992). Here, Cavallar retraces the origin and context of the Innkeeper's signpost. Later, Marco Duichin provides a more sustained contribution in Perpetual Peace or Eternal Peace? Kant, Leibniz, and the Dutch
Innkeeper’s Sign, Revista de Estudios Kantianos 6. 2 (2021): 212–33, offering further insights but still falling short of explaining the prologue’s function.
2 Christiane Frey, The Inn and Out of It: Treaty, Satire, Peace, (Johns Hopkins Kant Symposium, 2024), 15.
3 Peter Fenves, “Under the Sign of Failure: Toward Eternal Peace,” Late Kant: Towards another law of the earth, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 92.