Kissinger’s Shadow by Greg Grandin Page B

during Kant’s life that promoted the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the interests of the individual. Kant was especially appealing to arch–Cold Warriors like Elliott, who saw Soviet Communism as a vast, monstrous application of instrumental morality.
    Kissinger was very familiar with Kant, having grappled, in his 1950 undergraduate thesis, with the paradox that is at the heart of Kantian philosophy: human beings are entirely free and history is inevitably advancing according to God’s divine plan toward a world of perpetual peace. Kissinger accepted Kant’s idea of freedom but, as a child of the Holocaust and an observer of the Gulag, couldn’t accept Kant’s theology, especially the belief that existence had a transcendent purpose. For Kissinger, the past was nothing but “a series of meaningless incidents.” History had no significance in itself. Whatever “meaning” human beings might assign to past events came not from the working out of a higher, external and objective moral plan, Kissinger argued, but subjectively, from within: “The realm of freedom and necessity can not be reconciled except by an inward experience.” 1
    Kissinger, as a diplomat, is often described as amoral, as believing that values such as universal human rights have no role to play in the implementation of foreign policy. He reportedly once said, paraphrasing Goethe, that if he “had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other,” he would “always choose the latter.” 2 This vision, though, isn’t amoral. Rather, contrary to Elliott’s injunction, it suggests a utilitarian, or relative, moralism: a greater good can be achieved for the greatest number of people when great powers do what they need to do to create an orderly, stable, and peaceful interstate system, which, in turn, might nurture whatever fragile justice human beings are capable of achieving.
    Kissinger’s embrace of a relative, rather than an absolute, morality is suggested in another story from his graduate school days at Harvard. In 1953, during a seminar, Elliott pushed Kissinger to acknowledge that “reality,” and hence ethics, must exist. 3 “Well, now wait a minute, Henry,” the professor said, in reaction to Kissinger’s lengthy exposition that argued that there was no such thing as truth. “There must be a metaphysical structure of reality which is the true structure.”
    Kissinger’s response effectively used Kantian existentialism (the idea that human beings are radically free) to undermine Kantian morality. “We can hardly insist,” he said, “on both our freedom and on the necessity of our values.” We can’t, in other words, be both radically free and subject to a fixed moral requirement. Kissinger admitted that some people might find such a position a “counsel of despair,” since it rejects the possibility of any foundational truth. But, he said, it was actually liberating since it allowed men to escape, however fleetingly, the misery of existence: “Our values are indeed necessary, but not because of an order of nature; rather, they are made necessary by the act of commitment to the metaphysics of a system. This may be the ultimate meaning of personality, of the loneliness of man, and also of his ability to transcend the inevitability of his existence,” Kissinger said.
    Then, a bit later in the discussion, Kissinger quoted Kant’s moral imperative back to Elliott, with an addendum: “What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.” *
    Elliott didn’t seem to quite grasp the radical existentialism of Kissinger’s position. When you talk about “contingent values,” he