H. S. Reis, editor: Kant: Political Writings. H. B. Nisbet translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Immanuel Kant: “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”
_____. “The Contest of Faculties: A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?'”
_____. “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History.”
By ‘historicism’ I do not mean the scholarly practice of ‘putting things in their historical context.’ I mean the philosophic doctrine that defines ‘history’ not as a literary genre, an inquiry into the course of events, but as the course of events itself, a doctrine that further derives the principles of moral and political right from that course of events (rather than from God or nature, for example). The most comprehensive forms of historicism claim that the ‘history,’ so defined, decisively influences human knowledge and beliefs, that these are ‘relative to the time’ in which a given thought or belief arose and have no necessary validity in some other ‘time’ or epoch. Whereas previous moral and political philosophy had distinguished theory from practice partly by taking theory to provide an account of permanent things—ideas, natural laws—and by taking practical wisdom or prudence to address changing circumstances (‘history’ as latterly defined), historicism made theory, too, relative to circumstances.
By this definition, G. W. F. Hegel unquestionably qualifies as a historicist. Hegel refutes the central idea of Kantian moral thought, the ‘categorical imperative,’ then proposes his own moral system, founded upon the dialectical permutations of ‘the Absolute Spirit,’ which unfolds in a variety of forms over the course of time. For Hegel, ‘history’ is this process of unfolding. Kant himself wrote extensively about history, but is he a historicist? His moral philosophy suggests not, as the categorical imperative seems timeless, held by him to be true in any age, even if he is its discoverer. How does Kant understand history?
He titles his first major essay on the subject Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, published in 1784. Here, “history” means what it had meant traditionally—a narrative of, written after an inquiry into, the course of events. He argues that the manifestations of the human will in the phenomenal world are “determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event.” History offers an account of these phenomena, “allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions,” a “steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original capacities,” a “course intended by nature” whereby individuals and nations are “un consciously promoting an end which, even if they knew what it was, would scarcely arouse their interest.” In writing a universal history, a history of the human species, a philosopher (if he is not a misanthrope) will try “to discover a purpose of nature behind this senseless course of human events.” Philosophy remains, as it has always been, an inquiry into nature. Nature remains teleological, as Aristotle (for example) thinks, but for Kant the teleology may consist not only of nature’s manifestation in individual members of a species, a principle of motion and growth seen in each one, but rather as an overall evolution (to deploy a word Kant does not use) of the species itself. Previous ‘universal histories’ (Bossuet’s being a distinguished example) find God’s providence behind the course of events. Not so, for Kant
Kant sets down nine propositions regarding his “idea” for such a history. The first is Aristotelian: “All the natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end.” This is indeed “the teleological theory of nature.” “If we abandon this basic principle, we are faced not with a law-governed nature, but with an aimless, random process, and the dismal reign of chance replaces the guiding principle of reason.” Teleology classifies the end or purpose of a creature as one of its ’causes,’ its ‘reason for being’ in the sense of its aim. Its telos is rational both in the sense that it ‘makes sense,’ given the material, formal, and ‘efficient’ or triggering causes for its existence and also in the sense that it is rationally discernible. Pure randomness cannot be rationally understood. In a world of pure randomness, rational thought itself would be impossible or, if it were the only exception to the cosmic randomness, it could not understand what it was trying to understand; it could find no ‘rhyme or reason’ to the rest of reality.
Second, “In man (as the only rational creature on earth), those natural capacities which are directed toward the use of his reason are such that they could be fully developed only in the species but not in the individual.” Here Kant departs from Aristotle, who might well concede that no one individual, not even a philosopher, has fully developed his rational capacities, but never suggests that the human species has any such capacity. Kant evidently has in mind something along the lines of what Edmund Burke calls tradition. Reason “requires trial, practice and instruction to enable it to progress gradually from one stage of insight to the next.” Although “every individual man would have to live for a vast length of time if he were to learn how to make complete use of all his natural capacity,” and “it will require a long, perhaps incalculable series of generations, each passing on its enlightenment to the next, before the germs implanted by nature in our species can be developed to that degree which corresponds to nature’s original intentions,” this process has occurred and will continue to occur, “or else [man’s] natural capacities would necessarily appear by and large to be purposeless and wasted.” What Aristotle understands to be the practical wisdom of individuals, organized into political communities or ‘cities,’ Kant understands to be a much grander, as it were collective process, albeit just as much a reflection of human nature. Kant offers no proof of this claim, contenting himself with deploring the alternative possibility.
Third, “nature has willed that man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should not partake of any other happiness or perfection than that which he has procured for himself without instinct and by his own reason.” That is, although human beings by nature seek the “happiness or perfection” of their nature, they do so freely, unmechanically; Kant numbers among the ‘philosophers of freedom.’ “Nature gave man reason, and freedom of will is based upon reason.” Moreover, “man was not meant to be guided by instinct or equipped and instructed by innate knowledge; on the contrary, he was meant to produce everything out of himself.” Physically weak, the human being has “neither the bull’s horns, the lion’s claws, nor the dog’s teeth, but only his hands.” His greatest natural power to produce what he wants inheres in “his insight and circumspection and the goodness of his will.” In its physical poverty, human nature produces what it needs for survival and pleasure by its theoretical and practical insight, joined to the moral character of a good will. “It seems as if nature had intended that man, once he had finally worked his way up from the uttermost barbarism to the highest degree of skill, to inner perfection in his manner of thought and thence (as far as is possible on earth) to happiness, should be able to take for himself the entire credit for doing so and have only himself to thank for it.” In this, “it seems that nature has worked more with a view to man’s rational self-esteem than to his mere well-being.” The source of man’s rational pride (sharply contrasting with the Biblical humility before a providential God) derives from this naturally governed course of events. “Mortal as individuals but immortal as a species,” this “class of rational beings…was still meant to develop its capacities fully.” Whereas Burkean traditionalism enfolds practical reasoning based upon experience across generations, Kantian naturalism enfolds both theoretical and practical reasoning, along with the refinement of the human will.
Fourth, “the means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order.” Here, Kant brings in a touch of Hobbes, but for un-Hobbesian moral and political purposes. Human nature is neither mutually antagonistic, as in Hobbes, nor primarily social and political, as in Aristotle, but something in-between, a thing of “unsocial sociability.” Kant refers to humans’ “tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up,” a “propensity” that is “obviously rooted in human nature,” which inclines both toward social life and ‘individualism’ or the individual’s tendency “to isolate himself” and more, “the unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas,” a characteristic that leads to “resistance all around.” “It is this very resistance which awakens all man’s powers and induces him to overcome his tendency to laziness.” The human individual seeks honor, power, property “among his fellows, whom he cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave.” Were this not so, human life would be Arcadian—pastoral, peaceful, self-sufficient yet loving, a long afternoon of undogmatic slumber. It would also be non-rational, never in need of thought. “Nature should thus be thanked for fostering social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for possession or even power,” since “without these desires, all man’s excellent natural capacities would never be roused to develop.” These “natural impulses” are not sinful, as the Book of Genesis teaches, not the work of “the hand of a malicious spirit who had meddled in the creator’s glorious work or spoiled it out of envy,” but the source not merely of Machiavellian virtù but of virtue tout court, virtue as understood by the noble non-Machiavellians, virtue both intellectual and moral.
Fifth, and centrally, “the greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.” The political problem is the greatest, the central, problem. If “the highest purpose of nature,” the “development of all natural capacities,” can “be fulfilled for mankind only in society” but by “his own efforts” within that society, then the good society must give scope to “a continual antagonism of its members, but also,” and crucially, within “the most precise specification and preservation of the limits of this freedom in order that it can co-exist with the freedom of others.” That means “freedom under external laws” backed “to the greatest possible extent with irresistible force” under “a perfectly just civil constitution.” This “most stringent of all forms of necessity” must be “imposed by men upon themselves.” By this means, men freely guard their freedom by setting the terms of their coercion. “Right” means “straight.” Even as “trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow beautiful and straight,” so “all the culture and art which adorn mankind and the finest social order man creates are fruits of his unsociability.” The ‘enlightenment’ of Man parallels the ‘enlightenment’ of trees; both grow straighter and taller as they seek the light. Human nature compels itself “to discipline itself, and thus, by enforced art, to develop completely the seeds which nature implanted.” Unlike historicists, who associate historical progress with the conquest of nature, Kant associates progress with nature itself.
Sixth, the problem of attaining a just civil society “is both the most difficult and the last to be solved by the human race.” Since man is an animal who “certainly abuses his freedom,” he is “an animal who needs a master,” one “misled by his self-seeking animal inclinations into exempting himself from the law where he can.” Accordingly, he “requires a master, to break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will under which everyone can be free,” as Rousseau had urged in his famous mot. Since man can have no master on earth other than another man, and “this man will also be an animal who needs a master,” “nothing straight can be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of.” Further, only “great experience” can bring man even to conceive of a sound political constitution, which is why this problem is not only the most difficult but also the last to be solved. Human beings may grow straighter and taller, over time, but they will remain far from perfectly straight or very tall.
While the sixth proposition lines up with the trends of modern political philosophy, the seventh represents a departure not only from the ‘moderns’ but from the ‘ancients.’ “The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved.” No previous political thinker of any consequence had made this claim; all had centered politics on the question of the regime, and many had scanted the question of ‘international relations’ almost entirely. Kant’s seventh proposition shows why he concerns himself with “universal” or ‘world’ history.
“The same unsociability which forced men” into civil societies “gives rise in turn to a situation whereby each commonwealth, in its external relations…is in a position of unrestricted freedom.” The resulting “wars, tense and unremitting military preparations, and the resultant distress which every state must eventually feel within itself, even in the midst of peace—these are the means by which nature drives nations to make initially imperfect attempts, but finally, after many devastations, upheavals and complete inner exhaustion of their powers, to take the step which reason would have suggested to them even without so many sad experiences—that of abandoning a lawless state of savagery and entering a federation of peoples in which every state, even the smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not from its own power or its own legal judgment, but solely from this great federation, from a united power and the law-governed decisions of a united will.” Kant judges this “the inevitable outcome of the distress in which men involve one another,” suggesting that he is a fatalist with regard to the course of events—basing this fatalism, however, not finally upon the concatenation of events themselves but upon the nature of the beings who concatenate. “Finally, partly by an optimal internal arrangement of the civil constitution, and partly by common external agreement and legislation, a state of affairs is created which, like a civil commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.” Two interlocking master-machines composed of laws, one internal to each regime, one shared by each, externally, will keep the peace by moderating the unsociable aspects of human unsocial sociability.
Kant recognizes that some will find this optimistic vision too good to be true. He lists three possibilities for the human species: that states are like atoms, colliding randomly but finally falling into a sustainable formation; that nature develops man’s natural capacities by a regular, rationally discernible process; or that no order will result, and the human species will fall into “a hell of evils.” “These three possibilities boil down to the question of whether it is rational to assume that the order of nature is purposive in its parts but purposeless as a whole.” Kant finds this assumption irrational. International anarchy and its attendant evils “compel our species to discover a law of equilibrium to regulate the essentially healthy hostility which prevails among the states and is produced by their freedom,” a law beyond the unstable ‘balance of power,’ instituting “a system of united power, hence a cosmopolitan system of general political security.” While this international system should not be “completely free from danger, lest human energies should lapse into inactivity,” it does need “a principle of equality governing the actions and counter-actions of these energies, lest they should destroy one another.” In a sense, this amounts to the discovery of a political equivalent to the centerpiece of Kant’s moral philosophy, the categorical imperative, whereby the maxim of one’s action must be universalizable if it is to be acknowledged to be moral.
Eighth, “the history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an internally—and for this purpose also externally—perfect political constitution as the only possible state within which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely.” This is an atheistic millenarianism, one of the earliest of a series of such, including the Hegelian and Marxist versions of ‘the end of History.’ “Philosophy too can have its chiliastic expectations,” expectations that “can be hastened, if only indirectly, by a knowledge of the idea they are based on”—again, an anticipation of the ‘historical consciousness’ that takes an indispensable role in the historicist doctrines to come. “It appears that we might by our own rational projects accelerate the coming of this period which will be so welcome to our descendants.”
Kant’s confidence in the priority of external relations among states to their internal regimes evidently derives from the course of European events whereby modern states prevailed over feudal communities. “The mutual relationships between states are already so sophisticated that none of them can neglect its internal culture without losing power and influence in relation to the others.” Initially, this meant that once one European monarch had imposed the centralized, regularized features of modern statism upon his political community, the other monarchs quickly needed to imitate him. The modern state simply raises revenues and armies more efficiently than communities organized by feudal institutions do. Feudalism requires the monarch to win the consent of the aristocrats for any common venture; modern states can enforce the edicts of monarchs (or those of any other regime) far more surely and rapidly. Once the modern state was established, other necessities of “internal culture” became apparent: the civil freedom necessary for the commercial dynamism that inter-state competition demands; the religious freedom that prevents states from the ruination caused by intractable civil wars based upon religious disputes; and education in a common language and literature that promote internal cohesion, along with an education in the modern sciences that master nature for the relief of man’s estate by fostering technological advancement. In a word, modern states need the Enlightenment.
All of this conduces to more peaceful international dealings. Given modern technology and the overall power of modern states, war “becomes “a very dubious risk to take,” given the uncertainty of its immediate outcome and its effect on the national debt, win or lose. Revenues are further diminished by interruption of international trade. For these reasons, “a feeling is beginning to stir” among all modern states that each one “has an interest in maintaining the whole,” opening the real possibility of “a universal cosmopolitan existence” in the future.
This leads to the ninth and final proposition, that “a philosophical attempt to work out a universal history of the world in accordance with a plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind, must be regarded as possible and even as capable of furthering the purpose of nature itself,” even if “we are too short-sighted to perceive the hidden mechanism of nature’s scheme.” Evidence of this purpose may be seen not in the Bible but first in Greek history, as ‘Classical’ Greece emerged from the Archaic period, the Archaic period from the ‘Iron Age’ of the Trojan War. Once conquered by the Romans, the Greeks set about the shaping and misshaping of the body politic of Rome, which in turn influenced the “Barbarians” who conquered it. In this, “we shall discover a regular process of improvement in the political constitutions of our continent.” Europe in turn “will probably legislate eventually for all other continents,” as in many respects it has done. Such a philosophic history would justify nature, “or rather perhaps…providence.” Nature, revealing itself in the course of events narrated by a philosopher-historian, behaves in a providential manner, urged on, hastened, by the publication of the envisioned “universal history” itself.
Kant had been disappointed by the attempt at a universal history by his former student, Johann Gottfried Herder, who published his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind in 1784. Simply put, Kant found Herder’s philosophy insufficiently philosophic—too religious-transcendental (Herder was a Lutheran clergyman), too literary-poetic, too romantic-emotional-imaginative, too organicist-materialist-vitalistic, too nationalistic. Rightly considered, the Sturm und drang admired by Herder and the young Goethe, Herder’s mentee, belonged strictly in subordination to rationally discernible natural progress, deserving no esteem in and of itself. Philosophy should proceed by rational critique (as indeed Kant does, in his critiques of “pure reason” and of “practical judgment”), not imaginative speculation. “The flow of his eloquence…involve[s] him here and there in contradictions.” [1] Herder is at once too materialist, focusing his attention on human anatomy, the supposed uprightness of the human body as the progenitor of human reason, and too airy. Progress can only be understood philosophically in the consideration of “human actions, in which the human character is revealed.” One should not stray “from the path of nature and rational knowledge.”
Envisioning such a history, or any “providential” history, “is possible if the prophet himself occasions and produces the events he predicts.” Such is the argument of Kant’s 1798 essay, The Contest of Faculties: A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Constantly Improving?’ For example, “the Jewish prophets” foretold the decline of Israel because “they themselves were the architect of their fate,” having “loaded their constitution with so many ecclesiastical (and thence also civil) burdens that their state became completely unfit to exist in its own right, particularly in its relations with neighboring nations.” Our modern politicians, “so far as their influence extends, behave in exactly the same way,” bringing on such disasters as the French Revolution by their own “unjust coercion” and “treacherous designs.” And so do the priests, who “complain of the irreligion which they themselves created” by their failure “to impress on the hearts of their congregation which would directly lead to an improvement,” instead “see[ing] observances and historical beliefs as the essential duties,” enforcing a “mechanical conformity” to those supposed duties “within a civil constitution”. One needs no “special gift of prophecy” to anticipate the failure to “produce conformity in moral attitudes” with such self-defeating methods. One needs no gift of prophecy, evidently, because in Kant’s estimation the putative kingdoms of God on earth act exactly as other regimes do, even if their claims to rule, to legitimacy, may differ from those regimes.
Prophesy concerning the modern world might consist of “moral terrorism,” the claim that humanity regresses or deteriorates over time, “eudaimonism” or it might consist of “chiliasm,” the claim that humanity continually progresses and improves, or “abderitism,” the claim that humanity has reached “a permanent standstill.” Since “a genuine standstill is impossible in human affairs is impossible” in “moral affairs,” we are left with the alternative of regress or progress. Paradoxically, it is the disastrous French Revolution, an “experiment” that “no right-thinking man would ever decide” to repeat “at such a price,” that has nonetheless had the excellent consequence of having “aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger.” One would not wish to undergo such a cataclysm, but the empathetic spectator can draw inspiration from it because it “suggest[s] that man has the quality or power of being the cause and (since his actions are supposed to be those of a being endowed with freedom) the author of his own improvement.” Absent the providential God of the Bible, discredited by Enlightenment rationalism, Man can become his own providential deliverer, even if in his initial effort, in France, he botched the job.
What the Revolution upheld that remains valid is its “moral cause,” consisting of two elements. The first is “the right of every people to give itself a civil constitution of the kind that it sees fit, without interference from other powers” (what might be called the moral and political vindication of the Peace of Westphalia). Second, having “accepted that the only intrinsically rightful and morally good constitution which a people can have is by its very nature disposed to avoid wars of aggression”—the republican regime which, Montesquieu teaches, conduces to peace with others of its kind—Europeans must therefore move toward the aim, the duty, of “submitting to those conditions by which war, the source of all evils and moral corruption, can be prevented.” The rights of man must be “exalted above all utilitarian values” as Europeans cultivate the “true enthusiasm” that “is always directed exclusively toward s the ideal, particularly towards that which is purely moral,” uncoupled from “selfish interests.” This “concept of right,” accompanied by such sentiments, would generate “zeal”—the passion of religious men—and “greatness of soul”—the aristocratic virtue Aristotle commends—along with “the old military aristocracy’s concept of honor.” And all of these affects would be fundamentally democratized or ‘republicanized’ under the conditions of the modern state, now animated not by the pride of the few but “the universal and disinterested sympathy” of the people. None of this need entail violence, the brutal error of the French revolutionaries. Not revolution but “the evolution of a constitution governed by natural right” is needed. That constitution might be formally republican or even a monarchy animated by the “universal principles of right.”
Why does Kant find this plausible? Because “a phenomenon of this kind,” the rights-upholding French Revolution—can “never be forgotten, since it has revealed”—prophecy-like—in “human nature,” not divine providence or God’s ‘nature’—an “aptitude and power for improvement of a kind which no politician could have thought up by examining the course of events in the past.” “Only nature and freedom, combined within mankind in accordance with principles of right, have enabled us to forecast,” even if “the precise time at which it will occur must remain indefinite and dependent upon chance.” All that is really needed is “popular enlightenment,” the “public instruction of the people upon their duties and rights towards the state to which they belong,” along with minimally prudent philosophers, ones who avoid being “decried as a menace to the state” by “address[ing] themselves in familiar tones to the people” (who otherwise ignore them) and “in respectful tones to the state,” imploring it “to take the rightful needs of the people to heart.” Such a much more careful advancement of the Enlightenment project should persuade the state not to ban public petitions regarding its grievances on the basis of “the claim for natural rights.”
“We accordingly think of the commonwealth in terms of pure reason,” a commonwealth that “may be called a Platonic ideal,” which, Kant insists, “is not an empty figment of the imagination, but the eternal norm for all civil constitutions whatsoever, and a means of ending all wars.” This is the new ‘Republic,’ the new rule of philosopher-kings, no longer directly (as in Plato’s Socrates’ version) but indirectly, via the modern natural rights teaching, now that Machiavellianism has been moralized. Monarchs, the moralized-Machiavellian princes, “should treat the people in accordance with principles akin in spirit to the laws of freedom which a people of mature rational powers would prescribe for itself, even if the people is not literally asked for its consent.” In this, one sees the nucleus of what would become ‘vanguardism’ in Marxist-Leninist thought, after doctrines of historicist materialism had superseded Kantian ‘idealism.’ Just as the Kantian prophet, the universal historian, accelerates natural progress by the very act of writing history, so the Marxist vanguard would accelerate historical progress with violent deeds and propagandistic words. It is no wonder that Wilson and Lenin detested one another, even if both were cut from the same progressive-historicist cloth.
Kant himself has a ‘realist’ side. He does not anticipate any moral progress in humanity, which will remain unsocially social, its “basic moral capacity” unincreased, but rather a progress in law, improvements that will channel men into “an increasing number of actions governed by duty.” This progress may come from civil society or from ‘enlightened despotism. But, given the necessary evolution of human nature and especially its improved capacity to reason, pushed ahead by stern necessity, it will come.
In his 1786 article, Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, Kant explicitly differentiates his nature-based evolutionary progressivism from the teachings of the Bible. “If the beginning is a product of nature, it may be discoverable by conjectural means,” not invented or imagined by “deduced from experience” on “the analogy of nature.” Beginning, necessarily “with something human reason cannot deduce from prior natural causes,” namely, the existence of fully developed human beings, male and female, in a single family (otherwise war would “break out at once, as would happen if the people in question were close to one another yet strangers”), Kant posits human beings capable of standing, walking, speaking, and thinking. “These are all skills which [Man] had to acquire for himself (for if they were innate, they would also be inherited, which does not tally with experience).” At this stage, Man “must have been guided solely by instinct, that voice of God which all animals obey,” along with the evidence of the senses—an “ability, which is still in evidence today, to sense in advance whether a given food is suitable for consumption or not.” Obviously, Kant follows the account of Genesis but ‘naturalizes’ it.
And he continues. The Biblical Serpent arrives in the form of reason. Reason “soon made its presence felt and sought to extend [Man’s] knowledge of foodstuffs beyond the bounds of instinct” by “comparing his usual diet with anything which a sense other than that to which his instinct was tied”—sight, for example—represented “as similar in character.” Reason uniquely can cooperate with imagination “to invent desires which not only lack any corresponding natural impulse, but which are even at variance with the latter,” desires such as lasciviousness (i.e., consciousness of nakedness) and luxuriousness (i.e., the desire for clothing). Kant straight-facedly intones, “the outcome of that experiment whereby man became conscious of his reason as a faculty which can extend beyond the limits to which all animals are confined was of great importance, and it influenced his way of life decisively”; indeed, he may have followed “the example of an animal to which such food was naturally congenial, although it had an opposite and harmful effect on human beings.” This “first experiment in free choice…probably did not turn out as expected.” While thereby “discover[ing] in himself an ability to choose his own way of life without being tied to any single one like the other animals,” the “momentary gratification which this realization of his superiority may have afforded him was inevitably followed at once by anxiety and fear.” “He stood, as it were, on the edge of an abyss,” but “now that he had tasted this state of freedom, it was impossible for him to return to a state of servitude under the rule of instinct.”
Reason thus augmented Man’s desire for food. It had the same effect on “the sexual instinct,” since a “sexual stimulus” could now “be prolonged and even increased by means of the imagination.” The fig-leaf betokened a strong “assertion of reason,” inasmuch as “to render an inclination more intense and lasting by withdrawing its object from the senses already displays a consciousness of some rational control over the impulses.” More “the first incentive for man’s development as a moral being came from his sense of decency, his inclination to inspire respect in others by good manners (i.e., by concealing all that might invite contempt) as the proper foundation of all true sociability.”
In Genesis, God expels Adam and Eve from their so-to-speak timeless existence in the Garden of Eden. In Kant’s version, reason enables human beings to anticipate the future, “not just to enjoy the present moment of life but also to visualize what is yet to come,” a motive to plan but also an “inexhaustible source of cares and worries…from which all animals are exempt.” This is the rationalist’s equivalent of God’s curse; to prepare for the future, Man must work, Woman must foresee “the hardships to which nature had subjected her sex, as well as those which the more powerful man would inflict upon her.” Both could now foresee “the fate which must befall all animals but which causes them no concern, namely death.”
Finally, reason caused man to begin to realize “that he is the true end of nature,” the animal entitled to use the other animals to provide him with food and clothing, “no longer regard[ing] them as fellow creatures, but as means and instruments to be used at will for the attainment of whatever ends he pleased.” Reason also began to show Man that he ought to regard other members of his own species as “having an equal share in the gifts of nature”—a “distant preparation for those restrictions which reason would in future impose on man’s will in relation to his fellows, a preparation which is much more essential for the establishment of society than is inclination or love.” In Kant’s estimation, after all, the categorical imperative is a distinct improvement over the command to love God and neighbor. Kant thus endorses the Serpent’s claim that knowledge of good and evil puts Man in “a position of equality with all rational creatures” as “an end in himself.” You shall be as gods. By dint of reason, man wins “release from the womb of nature,” having been expelled “from the harmless and secure condition of a protected childhood—from a garden, as it were, which provided for him without any effort on his part,” now governed by “restless reason,” which “does not allow him to return to the state of rude simplicity.” The ‘expulsion from Eden’ symbolizes the dawning of human Enlightenment, the transition from a life ruled by instinct to one ruled by reason, progress of the species even if bad for individuals. In his essay on Enlightenment, Kant selects for its motto, “Dare to know!”
Kant has in mind not only Genesis but Rousseau’s counter-Genesis, his ‘State of Nature.’ Nature fixes the time of human maturity at sixteen or seventeen years. But the “civilized state” which reason devises introduces such complexity as only can be mastered by the age of twenty-six, on average. But the natural growth and development of human beings remains the same. “As a result, the effect of social customs on the end of nature—and vice-versa—is inevitably prejudicial.” This is Kant’s version of Rousseau’s complaint that the invention of property and other civilizational customs have corrupted man; for Kant, it isn’t so much a matter of corruption as mismatch. Similarly, art is long, life short: could a genius live two or three centuries, he surely would accomplish much more, but now that it is “evident that nature has fixed the end of human life with a view to ends other than that of the advancement of the sciences,” we must live with this realization. And finally, although “in terms of universal human rights” nature has endowed us equally, the inequality of “natural gifts or good bestowed on them by nature,” an inequality “inseparable from culture,” man must struggle both to rise “above the barbarism of his natural abilities, but to care not to contravene them even as he rises above them.”
Whereas in the Book of Genesis, Cain the agriculturist, the property owner, is the murderous villain, pastoral Abel, the innocent peaceful one, Kant finds in the need to defend property the origin of political society, including mutual exchange, the “rise to culture and the beginnings of art,” along with the need “to establish a civil constitution and the public administration of justice.” Insofar as this enabled “human aptitudes” to develop, “the most beneficial of these being sociability and civil security,” this also mean “the beginning of human inequality, that abundant source of so much evil but also of everything good.” It also meant the beginning of antagonism between property-holding city dwellers and the outlying nomadic herdsmen, “who recognize only God as their master.” Here we see the beginning of Hobbes’s world, two antagonists “continually at war, or at least at constant risk of war.” It is the risk of war that “keeps despotism in check, because a state must now have wealth before it can be powerful, and there can be no wealth-producing activity without freedom.” This is precisely what makes Hobbesian monarchy a form of liberalism.
In this conflict, the cities have the edge, but not owing to any superiority in technology or military organization. No, it is “the seductive arts in which the women of the towns surpassed the unkempt wenches of the wilderness,” which “must have been a powerful temptation to the herdsmen to enter into relations with them and to let themselves be drawn into the glittering misery of the towns,” relieving the danger of war at the expense of “put[ting] an end to freedom” at the hands of “powerful tyrants,” “soulless extravagance,” and “abject slavery.” This “irresistibly deflected” the human race from “the course marked out for it by nature, namely, the progressive cultivation of its capacities for goodness.”
Civilization thus fosters its discontents. War and the fear of war has the double-edged effect of making us miserable while forcing “even heads of state” to show some modicum of that “respect for humanity” required for the degree of social cohesion needed to fight their enemies. Powerful, peaceful China, with no real enemies, accordingly “has been stripped of every vestige of freedom,” descending into “irremediable corruption” and denied “all further cultural progress.” The shortness of human life, resulting from the glittering misery of urban life, is now good for the species, lest humanity’s vices accumulate, needing a cleansing Flood to eradicate them. And we are now tantalized by the vision of a golden age, a return to Eden, utopianism, which would however be bad if achievable, bringing all humanity to Chinafication.
Kant enumerates lessons learned from his “conjectural history.” We should not blame providence for the evils which oppress us, nor are we entitled to blame our ancestors for an “original crime” which got us into this predicament. Rather, each of us “should hold himself wholly responsible for all the evils which spring from the misuse of his reason,” inasmuch as we would have done no better, had we been the first humans. Reason quarrels with nature, by nature. In so doing, it improves the human condition, if by means of bouleversements. Human history “does not begin with good and then proceed to evil,” as the Bible teaches, “but develops rather from the worse to the better; and each individual is for his own part called upon by nature itself to contribute towards this progress to the best of his ability.”
Note
- Kant: “Review of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, Part II.” In H. S. Reis, editor: Kant: Political Writings.
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