Response to Habermas on Kant on Perpetual Peace, 6 February 1999

My thanks to Professor Habermas for his talk, which has given me food for thought, and to Professor Becker and the Baptist University for offering me the privilege of being on this platform. But the platform itself raises a question.

At the very beginning of his Essay on Perpetual Peace, Kant makes a point of contrasting the attitude of intellectuals and philosophers toward political issues with those of politicans, saying that politicans can be expected to ignore the views of theorists. This is what he said: “The practical politician tends to look down with complacency upon the political theorist ase state must be founded upon principles of experience; it thus seems safe to let him fire off his whole broadside, and the worldly-wise statesman need not turn a hair”. Should we be on this platform, or in this hall? Or should it be construction workers and lorry-drivers? (I mean people who often suffer more than others in the absence of peace.) May I ask how many taxi-drivers are here? [question repeated in Cantonese: yih-gā hái nī gàan lái-tòhng yáuh géi dò wáu ge jīk-yihp haih dīk-sí gēi a ?]

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Many in our days hold the view that politicians in general have often failed to pursue honest or decent or even sensible goals, in the history of our world, and that rather few of them deserve respect. But they may also think that intellectuals in general, and many philosophers in particular, have tended to make a parade of their honesty, their devotion to truth and good causes, or to change, or to revolution, without in fact doing very much for ordinary people.

Of course, intellectual work, like any other work, is varied, and has different objectives. Yet I find myself led, on hearing what Professor Habermas has to say, to take a broader view, to be willing to generalize, and to put myself a sharp question. What have I myself done to improve the world? Perhaps encourage or help a few students to think for themselves. And that is not bad. But what have we in our profession, Professor Habermas and others on this platform, done?

Professor Habermas has in his work tried to draw something from the values of the Enlightenment, while recognizing that we have come a long way since then, and he has also drawn on the insights of Marx, and the dialectic of Hegel. He advocates a form of human communication which would escape or overcome relations of power. It is difficult not to applaud such a project, so long, of course, as it is a real and feasible project.

But we are together on this platform, and we have to challenge Kant’s implicit assumption that the voices to be heard were either those of people holding political power, or those appointed to Chairs in Universities, such as myself.

So let us listen first to the voice of an ordinary person. I had a discussion, a few months ago, with a Hong Kong taxi-driver. He did not own his own cab. (Few do, these days.) He described his budget to me in some detail. He rented the vehicle from a company for a 10/12 hour shift, and usually worked every day. After paying the rental and the fuel, he kept the remaining sum from passengers' fares. It was a living income, say $9,000 a month. But he usually worked every day. He told me that he was, nevertheless, free. He did not have an employer to obey. If he wanted to take his children to Ocean Park, or go to the hospital to visit a sick relative, or go to the races, he could simply not rent the car for that shift. Then he added: “If you can call that freedom”. Innumerable books, innumerable articles and tracts have been written about freedom, but they are worth nothing without that question.

So let me say just this: I feel honoured to be next to Professor Habermas here; I feel a bit ashamed to be talking about Perpetual Peace in an academic way, since it should be, as Professor Habermas hopes, something attainable, and I suppose that we shall not attain it this evening; but I do sympathize with the Hong Kong taxi-driver who said: “if you can call that freedom”, and I think that his remark is connected all the way with a world of peace. If it is possible, and it should be, to start from and respond in a practical way to such reflections, then things can be improved. I think this remark should be acceptable from Professor Habermas’s point of view, as his allusions to individual autonomy suggested, since it invites what he advocates — a discourse uninfected by power; yet he might have his doubts, since it invites a discourse in which intellectuals would have no privileged position. We here, along with any politicians, might all be thrown off this platform. And instead, in “involuntary community of shared risk”, we should hear clearly the taxi-driver’s question about freedom, ringing through.

F.C.T. Moore (The University of Hong Kong)

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