The Geopolitics of Colonial Space: Kant and Mapmaking

The Geopolitics of Colonial Space

Kant holds an ambiguous position in contemporary literary theory—especially postcolonial theory. On the one hand the Enlightenment project has been seen as universalizing force (with a decidedly Western form of the universal). Said, for example, writes that “Cultural experience or indeed every cultural form is radically, quintessentially hybrid, and if it has been the practice in the West since Immanuel Kant to isolate cultural and aesthetic realms from the worldly domain, it is now time to rejoin them” (“Connecting Empire to Secular Interpretation,” CA 58). On the other hand, John Rawls and others find in Kant’s 1795 essay “On Perpetual Peace” grounds for thinking Kant provides an antidote to colonization and an effective vision for order between nations. Is it that Kant has been understood correctly by one side, misunderstood by another? Or is it that Kant’s project contains both sides to the question of nation and imperialism. I’d like to explore these two sides of the Kantian project a little further.

Let’s start with Kant as a proponent of empire. The idea of space is interestingly discussed by Kant. He was, after all, first a professor of geography, a mapper of real space before he moved into the space of the human mind, philosophy. For Kant, the concept of space is an a priori. As he writes in The Critique of Pure Reason, “The representation of space cannot … be empirically obtained from the relations of outer appearance. On the contrary, this outer experience is itself possible at all only through that representation. Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions.” In other words, to be able to perceive objects in a spatial relation to one another, you first have to have the spatial concept, the intuition of space.

This conception of space has certain implications for thinking about imperialism and the concept of the nation in the early modern period. Since Kant places space as an a priori, spatial sciences, such as geography, cartography, and so on, will also be based upon a priori principles. To leap to political science, is the concept of a nation, a geographic space at Kant’s time and still in our own, also the outgrowth of an a priori? If so, the possibility of a nation is not determined only by the relations of outer appearances but is the outgrowth of a representation of a nation.