Kant on the Impossibility of Revolution

This paper reconstructs Kant's arguments regarding the moral “impossibility” of revolution, i.e., the conceivability of revolution only as a “rebellion against morality” and “devilish evil”. The paradoxical nature of this position is revealed when it is compared with Kant's recognition of the “empirical” benefit (of some) revolutions and even their necessity (in certain cases) for the implementation of the “secret plan of nature” in relation to humanity. The paradoxical nature of Kant's approach to revolution has both theoretical reasons, rooted in his doctrine of the “pure” morality of duty, and “ideological” reasons, which are examined in this paper through the prism of Nietzschean explanation of the “benefits and harms of history for life”. However, this Kantian paradoxicality is unusually theoretically productive. It encourages an understanding of the connection between freedom and evil, in which freedom begins with evil, is evil (in relation to the form of existence it denies) and only thanks to this does it acquire the only real modality of its existence – freedom-as-liberation.