We have to admit that the greatest evils which oppress civilized nations are the result of war – not so much of actual wars in the past or present as of the unremitting, indeed ever-increasing preparation for war in the future. All the resources of the state, and all the fruits of its culture which might be used to enhance that culture even further, are devoted to this purpose. Freedom suffers greatly in numerous areas, and the state’s maternal care for its individual members is replaced by demands of implacable harshness (even if this harshness is justified by fear of external threats). But if the constant fear of war did not compel even heads of state to show this respect for humanity, would we still encounter the same culture, or that close association of the social classes within the commonwealth which promotes the well-being of all? Would we still encounter the same population, or even that degree of freedom which is still present in spite of highly restrictive laws?Kant, Immanuel (1786) Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History

It would be understandable for a people to say: ‘There shall be no war between us; for we will form ourselves into a sate, appointing for ourselves a supreme legislative executive and juridical power to resolve our conflicts by peaceful means.’ But if this state says: ‘There shall be no war between myself and other states, although I do not recognize any supreme legislative power which could secure my rights and whose rights I should in turn secure’, it is impossible to understand what justification I can have for placing any confidence in my rights, unless I can rely on some substitute for the union of civil society, i.e. on a free federation. If the concept of international right is to retain any meaning at all, reason must necessarily couple it with a federation of this kind.
The concept of international right becomes meaningless if interpreted as a right to go to war. For this would make it a right to determine what is lawful not by a means of universally valid external laws, but by means of one-sided maxims backed up by physical force. It could be taken to mean that it is perfectly just for men who adopt this attitude to destroy one another, and thus to find perpetual peace in the vast grave where all the horrors and violence and those responsible for them would be buried.Kant, Immanuel (1795) Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch

Each must try to establish his assertions by a transcendental deduction of the grounds of proof employed in his argument, and thus enable us to see in what way the claims of reason may be supported. If an opponent bases his assertions upon subjective grounds, he may be refuted with ease; not, however to the advantage of the dogmatist, who likewise depends upon subjective sources of cognition, and is in like manner driven into a corner by his opponent. But, if parties employ the direct method of procedure, they will soon discover the difficulty, nay, the impossibility of proving their assertions, and will be forced to appeal to prescription and precedence; or they will, by the help of criticism, discover with ease the dogmatical illusions by which they had been mocked, and compel reason to renounce its exaggerated pretensions to speculative insight, and to confine itself within the limits of its proper sphere—that of practical principles.Kant, Immanuel (1781) Critique of Pure Reason

This reference to (material) production is pivotal today, in the context of the ongoing digitalization of our lives. We live in the midst of an arduous revolution in the ‘forces of production’, whose much-publicized tangible effects (new and newer gadgets invading our lives) overshadow its much more far-reaching repercussions. The true question apropos of cyberspace and Virtual Reality is not ‘What happens to our experience of reality?’ but, rather:’How does the interposition of the World Wide Web affect the status of inter subjectivity?’ The true ‘horror’ of cyberspace is not that we are interacting with virtual entities as if they were human – treating virtual non-persons as real persons, but rather, the opposite: in our very interaction with ‘real’ persons, who are more and more accessible only through their stand-ins in cyberspace, we are treating ‘real’ persons are virtual entities that can be harassed and slaughtered with impunity, since we interact with them only in Virtual Reality.Žižek, Slavoj (2001) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

The mistake of melancholy, however, is not simply to assert that something resists symbolic ‘sublation’ but, rather, to locate this resistance in a positively existing, albeit lost, object. In Kant’s terms, the melancholic is guilt of committing a kind of ‘paralogism of the pure capacity to desire’, which lies in the confusion between loss and lack: in so far as the object-cause of desire is originally, in a constitutive way, lacking, melancholy interprets this lack as loss, as if the object lacking were once possessed and then lost. In short, what melancholy obfuscates is the fact that the object is lacking from the very beginning, that its emergence coincides with its lack, that this object is nothing but the positivization of a void/lack, a purely anamorphic entity which does not exist ‘in itself’. The paradox, of course, is that this deceitful translation of lack into loss enables us to assert our possession of the object: what we never possessed can also never be lost, so the melancholic, in his unconditional fixation on the lost object, in a way possesses it in its very loss.Žižek, Slavoj (2001) Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, Verso, pg 143

Despair is the sickness unto death in another and still more definite sense. For there is not the remotest possibility of dying of this sickness in the straightforward sense, or of this sickness ending in physical death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die. Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as though there were hope of life. No, the hopelessness is that even the last hope, death, is gone. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life. But when one learns to know the even more horrifying danger, one hopes for death. When the danger is so great that death has become the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die.Kierkegaard, Søren (1849) The Sickness Unto Death

If light be not given to the senses, we cannot represent to ourselves darkness, and if extended objects are not perceived, we cannot represent space. Neither the negation, nor the mere form of intuition can, without something real, be an object.

[…]

For truth or illusory appearance does not reside in the object, in so far as it is intuited, but in the judgement upon the object, in so far as it is thought. It is therefore quiet correct to say that the senses do not err, not because they always judge correctly, but because they do not judge at all. Hence truth and error, consequently also, illusory appearance as the cause of error, are only to be found in a judgement, that is, in the relation of an object to our understanding.Kant, Immanuel (1781) Critique of Pure Reason

Torture is a dangerous innovation; it would appear that it is an assay not of the truth but of a man’s endurance. The man who can endure it hides the truth: so does he who cannot. For why should pain make me confess what is true rather than force me to say what is not true? And on the contrary if a man who has not done what he is accused of is able to support such torment, why should a man who has done it be unable to support it, when so beautiful a reward as life itself is offered him?
I think that this innovation is founded on the importance of the power of conscience. It would seem that in the case of the guilty man it would weaken him and assist the torture in making him confess his fault, whereas it strengthens the innocent man against the torture. But to speak the truth, it is a method full of danger and uncertainty. What would you not say, what would you not do, to avoid such grievous pain?

Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor.
[Pain compels even the innocent to lie.]

Montaigne, Michel de (1580) Of Conscience

And when feeling or understanding or will has become fantastic, then in the end the whole self can become that, whether in a more active form, where the person plunges headlong into the fantastic, or in a more passive form he is carried off into it, though he is responsible in both cases. […] But to become fantastic in this way, and therefore be in despair, although usually obvious, does not mean that a person may not continue living a fairly good life, to all appearances be someone, employed with temporal matters, get married, beget children, be honoured and esteemed – and one may fail to notice that in a deeper sense he lacks a self. Such things cause little stir in the world; for in the world a self is what one leasts asks after, and the thing it is more dangerous of all to show signs of having. The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.Kierkegaard, Søren (1849) The Sickness Unto Death