Beyond the Ethics of Schuld: Kant, Universal History, and Eco-Catastrophe

This essay assumes that the ethical question, “to what or to whom am I indebted,” is bound up with Kant’s concern about the conditions for the possibility of experience. This links the experience of debt and guilt to the problem of “universal history,” in that what appears to bind human beings across borders is not the idea of “humanity” progressing towards cosmopolitan peace, but rather Kant’s “hell of ills,” in which wage-laborers become debt-peons unwittingly propelled toward eco-catastrophe. Having thus understood Schuld in ways that were previously hidden, several ethico-political formulations in the Kantian canon are radically transformed.