Organised in collaboration with the American University of Beirut
Part of the 2024–25 Lecture series: Kant and the non-European: Critique, Justice and Freedom.

Abstract:

Vladimir Putin’s wantonly barbaric invasion of Ukraine not only broke international law, setting a torch to Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter that demands that all members “refrain...from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” It is patently intended as a challenge to the very idea of an international rule of law. That thought is simultaneously demanding and opaque. Nonetheless, it belongs to a growing sense that the invasion of Ukraine and our response to it will mark an inflection point in global history. The idea that peace requires something akin to a global constitution, a cosmopolitan constitution installing an international rule of law was doubtless inaugurated by Kant’s essay “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795). Three-hundred years later, Kant’s essay still provides a central key to comprehending the stark stakes of the moment we are undergoing, of what war is and what peace can mean. In his essay, Kant argues that political realism which proposes a balance of powers as the best we can do is an invitation to future war. War is unconditionally wrong to the extent that in it might determines right; therefore, Kant appears to be arguing, war must be abolished, and not incrementally overcome. In this talk, I will examine Kant’s guiding argument; among other matters, I will consider whether international law is the appropriate framework for considering questions of war and peace. 

Bio:

Jay M Bernstein is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, where he concentrates on social and political philosophy, contemporary Continental thought, Critical Theory, aesthetics, Modernism, German Idealism and Romanticism, Anglo-American philosophy, and Pragmatism. He is the author of The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992), Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (1995), Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002), Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno's Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2007), Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (2015), and Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (2018), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on ethical modernism and political atrocity, modernism in art and philosophy, and idealism and embodiment. He is currently completing a book titled Earth Justice. 




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