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132 LITERATÛRZINÂTNE, FOLKLORISTIKA, MÂKSLA
vast expanses of land and sea is to separate humans from one another. Hence the importance
of systems of transport and communication– whose motor is trade– for overcoming
such elemental adversity and for bringing humans, against the odds, into contact.
Understood at this humbling level– from the perspective of vulnerable creatures
clinging to a finite, limited planet, mastering as best they can, the hostility of climate
and terrain– the diligent activity of traders emerges as valiant and constructive.
Whereas sea–robbers and pillagers work against the natural law in their disrespect
for the primordial right to hospitality (since no human is originally more at home on
this planet than another), traders, cognisant of the attendant dangers of travelling to
foreign territories, build up helpful reciprocal arrangements for the protection of
goods and for the shelter of the person. As such the spirit of trade (Handelsgeist) is
seen as paving the way towards an eventual cosmopolitan constitution establishing
international law and universal human rights.
Despite such apparently wholehearted and misguided optimism, Kant reveals himself
to be equally well aware of the detrimental effects commercial rivalry can have on
human minds and behaviour. In the Anthropology he defines the Handelsgeist as intrinsically
“unsociable” (an sich ungesellig), each business being a trader’s castle separated
from others as if by a drawbridge, prohibiting friendly, informal intercourse. 15 He is also
not ignorant about real world trade practises. Like Herder, he shows himself in the “Perpetual
Peace” essay to be well informed about the “inhospitable” conduct of “civilised”
trading states whose only conception of foreign lands is one of zones inhabited by inferiors
to be colonized and exploited mercilessly. Discussing the “cruellest and most calculated
slavery” of the Sugar Islands, Kant acidly concludes: “And all this is the work of
powers who make endless ado about their piety and who wish to be considered as chosen
believers while they live on the fruits of iniquity”. However, his ensuing sentence,
whose logic might well seem contradictory, runs as follows:
The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into universal
community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of
rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere16 . 17
His guiding idea appears to be that the development of long distance
trading, with all its concomitant injustices and abuses of power, is
steadily becoming a global phenomenon. A positive outcome of this expansion
is the proliferation of links between disparate parts of the earth
and the ensuing gradual formation of a world community. Indeed the
mere fact of this Königsberger professor being informed about slavery
in the West Indies, indicates just how open lines of communication were
becoming. Kant’s suggests that injustices in one part of the globe reverberate
along these ever developing lines of communication, consolidating
a public sphere which is, which should, be the concern of all rational
beings. Slavery in the West Indies, as the inverse of an event like the
French Revolution, analysed in Conflict of the Faculties, is another type
of “sign of history”; it “can never be forgotten”. 18
Kant is keen to defend his vision of a future cosmopolitan community from accusations
of fanciful thinking and hastens to reassure those who are sceptical of humans’
capacity for perfectibility, that it is not reliant on us overturning nature and becoming