Waging war against war: Nietzsche contra Kant on conflict

Abstract

This paper examines and compares Kant and Nietzsche as thinkers of conflict. It is argued that conflict plays and essential and constructive role across the various domains of their thought, and both offer a wealth of insights into the productive qualities of conflict. Yet Kant fails to formulate a genuinely affirmative concept of conflict that does justice to the prodigious productive powers he describes. Instead he wages a philosophical war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg) against all war designed to negate war in favour of an absolute claim for peace (‘eternal peace’). The final part of the paper argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy of life is an ontology of conflict that culminates in an ideal of maximising tension on the basis of an equilibrium of more-or-less equal powers. Nietzschean life-affirmation, it is argued, commits us to a position between Kantian war and cosmopolitan law.