The Anthropology of Volunteering. Philosophy: The Next Step

Perpetual Peace

Almost a hundred years after Hobbes and Spinoza, Immanuel Kant proposed a fundamentally different justification for the nature of social relations. Kant’s philosophy—with its emphasis on moral duty, free will, and universal ethical values—clearly aligns more closely with the worldview of today’s volunteer movement and was entirely incomparable with the views of his contemporaries, as well as their successors a couple of centuries ahead.

Kant’s categorical imperative demands that one act only according to a maxim that one would will to become a universal law. In Kantian terms, the principle "the end justifies the means" is a false and perverted approach. One cannot know or influence the thing-in-itself through magical manipulations, but one can approach its understanding by following the logic of universals that reveal themselves to our perception in the transformations of the thing-for-us. In other words, the longer and more attentively we study and examine something in accordance with the universal laws of the universe, the more likely previously unknown aspects of it will be revealed to us.

Altruism, in Kant’s view, is not an emotion or “kind disposition” but the result of the operation of the moral law within a rational being. The only thing that makes an action moral is the motive to act out of duty: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law of nature.”

If I act not out of interest, nor sympathy, but because the moral law demands it, then I am obligated to respect the freedom and dignity of another. This is altruism as a demand of reason rather than of feeling—a logical consequence of moral autonomy. If I recognize myself as a bearer of the moral law, I cannot but recognize the other as equal to me, even if I feel no sympathy toward them.

Kant emphasized the importance of free will in moral choice, for every act of volition demonstrates the autonomy of the individual and their ability to independently determine their actions based on moral values.

Did Kant recognize that a person might disregard the moral law?

Yes, he did. Since a person is endowed with free will, they may choose to ignore it. In such cases, the person does not cease to be human, but becomes a slave to animal impulses and a socially destructive element.

Kantian universality of moral principles directs all human action toward the common good.

The movement toward "Perpetual Peace" presupposes the active participation of all members of society in its life. Interpreting Kant’s reasoning in a modern vein, we might say that volunteers are agents of social responsibility, for they consciously and freely assume obligations to care for the lives of others and for the needs of society as a whole.

From the founding of the European Union until quite recently, its liberal and inclusive order could rightly be called Kantian. Unfortunately, the Kantian understanding of social relations and the conditions of personal existence in the world does not exhaust the short intellectual history of Europe.

Perpetual Slavery

A younger contemporary of Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—speaking from the lofty heights of Absolute Reason, accompanied by his sidekick the World Spirit—developed the dialectic of master and slave. Within Hegel’s dialectical system, freedom is possible only through the existence of slavery, and it is the slave, through rebellion and eventual subjugation of the master, who can attain it.

During this thrilling and seemingly eternal process, the slave acquires experience, useful skills, and forges a hardened character—so that at the right moment, prompted by the World Spirit under the guidance of Absolute Reason, he may socially bring down his master. However, this can only happen if the master has long subjected the slave to all manner of humiliation and abuse—otherwise, there is no dialectical payoff.

So what is the result of this prolonged head-butting between master and slave?

According to Hegel, we get the noumenon—the essence of the phenomenon—that becomes accessible to perception through dialectical transformation.

For comparison, in Kant, the noumenon—the thing-in-itself—is inaccessible to perception; only phenomena, things given in sensory experience, can be known. And even to know them, one must work incredibly hard for a long time.

But behold: Hegelian dialectics works a miracle. From social conflict, we leap to a higher level of historical development. The master-thesis oppresses the slave-antithesis, the latter strikes back—and voilà, we have societal progress-synthesis!

And so it continues—the contradictions of the previous era are resolved (only to make way for new ones), quantity transforms into quality, thought and being waltz toward each other in dialectical self-movement, evolution from the simple to the complex gathers momentum, and negation negates negation so completely that only fluff and feathers remain of the latter.

The automatism and all-encompassing pretensions of Hegel’s absolute idealism turn his system into a convenient blueprint for totalitarian concepts, ranging from esotericism to crudely mechanistic ideologies. A core feature of such ideologies is the denial of individual free will and the predetermination of natural processes. It is no coincidence that the most inhumane regimes of the 20th century eagerly borrowed from Hegel’s postulates.

One such borrowing is Karl Heinrich Marx’s totalitarian doctrine of class struggle. There is nothing even remotely individual here. Puppets from the exploited class fight for better conditions of existence with puppets from the exploiting class under the command of a biblically remote and, as always, unforgiving economic Jehovah.

Having borrowed Hegel’s dialectics, Marx inverted its central thesis: “spirit creates matter through logic” became “matter creates spirit through labor.” And perhaps he took his own joke a bit too seriously—so seriously, in fact, that he turned it into a subversive ideology with “economic” justification.

“The ideal is the material,” “history is a material process unfolding through contradictions between productive forces and relations,” “the proletariat is the social class bearing the universal interest through which history cancels itself”—all these grotesque theses were meant to justify the destruction of the bourgeoisie, the triumph of the proletariat, and the birth of a “new man” from the womb of class struggle. Master and Slave, is it not?

Marx, without hesitation, crosses out all the foundations of global anthropology, for he is dealing with a “new human,” whose “human nature” is altogether different from that of the rest of humanity.

So how can we recognize the proletarian, according to Marx?

For the proletarian, there is no moral law—no laws at all, really—for capital has destroyed morality through the structure of productive relations. His class makes choices on his behalf.

The proletarian cannot possess free will, for in a class-based society, freedom is merely an “illusion and a form of alienation.”

The proletarian has no need to think or be tempted by bourgeois ideas, for all ideas are products of material relations, and therefore there is no universal morality—only ideology serving a particular class.

As for individual social action by the proletarian, it is groundless—for social activity is, by definition, manifested by the proletariat as a mass, inspired by a single goal in a revolutionary impulse to break its chains. And only afterward, when “we build our new life: those who were nothing will become everything,” will come the voluntary labor days, the labor camps, and all the other horrific forms of communist “volunteering”…

Thus, the proletarian is the man of the future. But what of the class traits of the representatives of capital—the “bourgeoisie”?

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels acknowledge the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in overthrowing feudalism, enabling scientific and technological progress, and constructing the global economic market—all driven by class interest and a purely limitless lust for profit.

Having triumphed in economic (and other) battles over the previously dominant class, the bourgeoisie immediately becomes reactionary. From that moment, its existential task is to defend itself against the proletariat—the new revolutionary force that capital itself has begotten.

This new class messiah brings his own testament, denying the last. As is known, in the Abrahamic tradition, each successive messiah reinterprets the moth-eaten heritage of predecessors, having received a mandate from Jehovah.

And since capital consciously hinders historical progress in its effort to preserve the wealth it plundered through proletarian labor, it must be punished for its anti-historical stubbornness… And so the cycle repeats.

The next step in our exploration of the anthropology of volunteering from a philosophical point of view shall be the 20th century—with its darkness and its rays of light.

Artur Vsevolozhskyi