The Excesses of Earth in Kant’s Philosophy of Property

In his most widely read essay, “Perpetual Peace” (1795), Kant proposes that the Third Definitive article of Perpetual Peace is based on the right to hospitality (hospitalitätsrecht), which is “the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory” (105, 8:357). This hospitality or “hospitableness” (Wirtbarkeit) is not the right to be a guest (Gastrecht) because that requires entertaining the foreigner and taking him into one’s own house; rather, Kant describes it as the right to visit (Besuchrecht) in order to present oneself to society for the sake of establishing commerce. Anyone has the right to visit any other territory to try to seek or attempt commercial relations with its inhabitants, but that is the limit of the right of hospitality (8:358). In other words, the “native inhabitants” are obligated only to listen to the proposal of the foreigner before they evict him from their territory.

What Kant means by hospitality, then, is akin to that provided by the Dutch Innkeeper with whom he begins the essay; namely, to accept all visitors as a business transaction. Indeed, the word that he uses most frequently, and which is translated as hospitality or hospitableness, is Wirtbarkeit (cf. Unwirtbarkeit or Unwirtbarste translated as inhospitable), whose root Wirt means Innkeeper or landlord, and which has much stronger associations with the hospitality of a landlord than the English word hospitality suggests; perhaps it is helpful to think of it in terms of how the word is used today in the locution “the hospitality industry.” The connections between hospitality, landlords, and property are significant not only because the right of hospitality works to guarantee the possibility of commerce between nation-states but also because the “common possession of the earth’s surface” around which this right revolves is a pivotal aspect of Kant’s Doctrine of Right or civil law, particularly property law, in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) (106, 8:358).

The right to hospitality may facilitate commerce, but for Kant its source is an a priori principle of practical reason based on the limited surface of the earth. The right of hospitality is grounded on not only the spherical shape of the earth, but also human dependence on the earth, which is not only logically and chronologically prior to commerce, but also necessary for it. And while Kant entertains his reader with speculations about the physical, empirical and historical chronology of relations between nations—commercial relations—his goal is to establish the metaphysical—or we might say logical—conditions of possibility for those relations. In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant bases both the right to hospitality and the right to private property (and arguably all of public right) on two facts: namely, that the earth is a sphere or a globe, and that all human beings live on this same planet. Thus, we are compelled to ask: What does Kant mean by “earth”? And, what is the human being’s relationship to it? Which leads us to ask, what does Kant mean by “human being”? These questions point to the ways in which the earth and our relationship to it are in excess of Kant’s theory of property.¹

Kant argues that the right of hospitality as (what we might call in Star Trek jargon) the right of ‘first contact’ is necessary so that “distant parts of the world can enter peaceably into relations with one another, which can eventually become publically lawful and so finally bring the human race ever closer to a cosmopolitan constitution” (329, 8:358). Only through a cosmopolitan constitution that unites all nation-states under one universal international law can we achieve peace, which, Kant maintains, is the goal of reason itself: “establishing universal and lasting peace constitutes not merely a part of the doctrine of right but rather the entire final end of the doctrine of right within the limits of mere reason” (491, 6:355). Why? Because “the condition of peace is the only state in which the property [what is mine and what is yours] of a...