12 - Right, History, and Practical Schematism

Summary

Few philosophers reproduce so faithfully, in the degree of their thinking, the tensions inherent in the object under consideration. Such is certainly the case of Immanuel Kant, for whom this reproduction has a very specific sense, to the extent that the object, through its universal and necessary properties, responds to the determinations of thought. Kant, however, did not consider only the tensions; he also considered equally, as Ricardo Terra has demonstrated, the way of resolving them. It is known that for Kant, history is the history of right, or rather of juridical institutions that place themselves in the path of the realization of the rights of man. On the other hand, we know that politics, as Kant states in Perpetual Peace, is the doctrine for implementation of right, or rather it is the ever precarious realization of the idea of law, which must be reviewed or reformed as soon as the necessity for reform becomes clear to the faculty of judgment and conditions are favorable to change. Since “in the carrying out of that idea (in practice) the only beginning of the rightful condition to be counted upon is that by power … it can be anticipated that in actual experience there will be great deviations from that idea (of theory)” (Perpetual Peace, 8:371).