Immanuel Kant's Expression Of Pure Peace

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In order to succinctly delineate the peace-violence dialectic, it is important to take into account, the expressions of peace and violence within a particular context. With the advent of diplomacy and the manipulation of words and thus, logic gave rise to what I believe is the inverted expressions of presumably pure ideas. We often think of ‘pure peace’ or ‘pure violence’ without taking into account, the subliminal interpretations of these ideas. As stated before, violence becomes justified only when peace becomes a form of violence and violence becomes a form of peace, which may at first sound counterfactual but this argument will help clarify this assertion. When we try to contextualize violent peace, one of the first political events that come to mind is the Munich Agreement and that of the rotten compromise. Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement had …show more content…

he was a strong advocate of “law and order”. If pure peace had certain delineations that needed to be kept in mind, so did “pure violence” which were obviously unjustifiable. Kant’s formation of the Categorical Imperative, especially the humanity modus operandi seems to provide basic arguments against murder, mayhem, rape, destruction of property and the like. By declaring human beings as “ends in themselves” (Kant), the humanity principle seems to "prohibit calculated trade-offs in the lives of human beings, for ends in themselves are said to have dignity, an unconditional and incomparable worth that “admits of no equivalent” (Kant). Therefore, forms of violence are set in stone that is they may function under false pretenses i.e. a seemingly banal or peaceful matrix but essentially reduce to violent activity. Similarly, the divisions for peace as in Kant’s Perpetual Peace show that the required conditions for peace are exclusive i.e. motives or rationales behind violence cannot seep into this