Kant and the Nobel Family's Missing Medal

Kant and the Nobel Family's Missing Medal

"Wenn... die Bestimmung der Staatsbürger dazu erfordert wird, um zu beschlie?en, ob Krieg sein solle, oder nicht, so ist nichts natürlicher, als dass, da sie alle Drangsale des Krieges über sich selbst beschlie?en müssten... sie sich sehr bedenken werden, ein so schlimmes Spiel anzufangen."

- Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (8:351)

When we address the issue of peace we are often confronted with an incomplete tapestry which, like fragments from a papyrus text, reads with an underlying belief that history only lives in modernity.? Intention and will only begin with someone who is modern.? Like blind moths we are admonished not to look back before a certain date like fin-de-siécle.? We are expected, like the canals of Venice, to build individual histories and routes which make for no resonance.? We are trained to know where but not why.

We become prisoners of our own sight because only that seen and witnessed is considered true, prima facie, without blemish.? And then Kant appears, short, predating the invention of the DVD by some 270 years.? We imagine him walking in K?nigsberg, and we imagine Beethoven walking in the hills of Klosterneuburg.? The daguerrotype has not yet been invented.? In contrast to the modern, there are no photographs, there is no Robert Capa or Magnum Photos and reels to sell.

Either we acknowledge that Kant, in due course if not in a gondola, has outpaced modernity before it came to be, or we risk losing a section of individual and colllective human genius. His admonishment appears like throwing pearls to the pigs or the making of new primitives, something between Picasso, Wagner, with a new consciousness of self which yields an anthropology rather than a belief:? ... As you would have to consider all of the limitations that war brings, you would harbor considerable doubt about beginning such an awful game.? Why do Putin or Zelenskiy fail to understand this message?? Is it that they have become typological rulers fed with abundant ego and hate, like hunter-gatherers claiming the booty in dark forests?

Why not take Kant's example, why not not predate his words, why not take them to heart?? Because primitives act primarily on instinct, like the Cro-Magnon Man said to be our forbear.? Their spears raised, there is no Odysseus in their libraries or their memory.? There is the sound of war, the galvanizing sound which for lack of musicality brings new heights of cacophony into Ukraine where once violinists and orchestras played, where wines flowed in ambrosian vinyards.

Like new Pilates, todays warriors dictate without reason.? They acknowledge and disavow as if playing a slot machine.? I didn't say that, I didn't mean that, please understand, in fora which make the School of Athens look small, a mere tracing or mnemonic activity for those who believe that there were different golden ages where pagan wines tasted equally good to the sanguine.? The world witnesses a new containment, un-christian, unlike the Wedding at Cana, unneeding of a miracle because all is defined by new aggregates and so-called supply chains.? Instead of new and old wines which Ukraine is known for like those of Prince Trubetzkoy, the free Ukraine deals in artillery shells and their delivery times, in weaponry of certain death.? Pilates are having a day of it, not as we deem to recall at Easter or Passover; they are having a day of it every day.? Offering their does not equal (≠) signs and antiquated forms of high-school geometry, sets empty, merging or filled, the new authoritarians yield no better than the formulas of a primitive, dead antiquity, formulas which are god-free and fruitless.

Many people wait in December not to remember Mozart's death or Beethoven's birth; after all, who, like Kant, are they?? Instead they await the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize which is, to all extents, within the context of Picasso, Wagner, or Chagall, a naming of sorts, a localization which we do in addressing the internet or in seeking a price at the grocery store.

Kant's peace maxim in the face of the Nobels reveals itself a victim of a modernity which does not have a history, the modernity of chaos theory and the now.? Who ever heard of an Eritrean politician with a land that looks like something out of herd tribesmen's parched paths?? Yet let us get the spelling right, for children of Jeopardy and the National Spelling Bee.? Language?? Local.? Place?? Local.? Time?? Now.? We have just augmented the Now.? Did Kant do that?? Did he speak Swedish and English?? Did he park his IKEA fortune in Switzerland?? Did he believe in aggregates and starter families or in Grogg?

The Nobel Family dismisses Kant as an antiquated state of mind, as a dream which we cannot possibly share.? Our locality, our time, our station, our life all point to a model of do-it-yourself pragmatism rather than adherence to wisdom embracing the divine.

I'm not sure I understood you, sir.? Did you say diverse?? No?? Oh, divine.? Oh.

I'll take that question.

We fear for lack of the comfort of Group Think that perhaps Kant is too much.? One man is not allowed to do that.? We need systems which allow for calculable outcomes.? What does rationality have to do with the divine?

Kant's remains a work not merely of philosophy, but a work with direction and intent in a world which has lost its coordinates.? Yes, men even before their 300th anniversary are resurrected.? They, too, deserve a medal this year albeit not from the Nobels.