Immanuel Kant
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 298th anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 to 12 February 1804), who was born on this date in 1724.
Kant always makes the short list of the greatest philosophers in the western tradition, and deservedly so, as his work changed the direction of philosophy, and his concepts continue to be employed to this day. While Kant’s focus was on metaphysics and ethics, he wrote widely, including a significant body of work on the philosophy of history.
Kant’s philosophy is usually divided into two periods, his early pre-critical period and his later critical period. In this periodization of Kant’s thought, “critical” refers to the mature period of his thought, marked by three books that were called critiques — Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment. As these works are critiques, the philosophy associated with them is called “critical philosophy.”
One of Kant’s works on history dates from his early pre-critical period, and this is his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, 1755). While this is not a work of philosophy of history, it does bring philosophical reflection to the task of natural history, and in writing this big picture natural history, which combines expositions of terrestrial history with cosmological history, Kant, though an idealist, provided a naturalistic framework for the known universe of his time (and Kant was right in his conjectures on many matters on which the science of his time was not settled), which in turn provided a naturalistic framework for terrestrial (i.e., human) history. In the following passage from this work Kant is explicit in including humanity in the natural order of things:
“…we must not lament the destruction of a cosmic structure as a real loss for nature. It demonstrates its richness with a kind of dissipation which, while a few parts pay tribute to mortality, maintains it undamaged in the full extent of nature’s perfection with numberless new productions. What a countless number of flowers and insects a single cold day destroys. But how little we miss them, regardless of the fact that they are beautifully natural works of art and proofs of Divine Omnipotence! In another place, this death will be made up once again with excess. Humanity, which appears to be the masterpiece of creation, is itself no exception to this principle. Nature shows that it is just as rich and just as inexhaustible in the production of the most excellent of creatures as it is of the most insignificant and that even their destruction is a necessary shadow amid the multiplicity of its suns, because producing humanity cost nature nothing. The harmful effects of infected air, earthquakes, and inundations wipe out entire peoples from the surface of the earth, but it does not appear that nature has suffered any damage because of this.”
If humanity merely one of nature’s many productions, then human history is a part of natural history, and in this book Kant places natural history in a cosmological context, which makes Kant, for all practical purposes, a big historian (in the contemporary sense of “big history”).
Kant’s 1786 essay “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht” (“Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective”) argues for nine explicitly formulated theses:
FIRST PROPOSITION All of a creature’s natural predispositions are destined eventually to develop fully and in accordance with their purpose.
SECOND PROPOSITION In the human being (as the only rational creature on earth), those natural predispositions aimed at the use of its reason are to be developed in full only in the species, but not in the individual.
THIRD PROPOSITION Nature has willed that human beings produce everything that extends beyond the mechanical organization of their animal existence completely on their own, and that they shall not partake in any happiness or perfection other than that which they attain free of instinct and by means of their own reason.
FOURTH PROPOSITION The means that nature employs in order to bring about the development of all of the predispositions of humans is their antagonism in society, insofar as this antagonism ultimately becomes the cause of a law-governed organization of society.
FIFTH PROPOSITION The greatest problem for the human species to which nature compels it to seek a solution is the achievement of a civil society which administers right universally.
SIXTH PROPOSITION This problem is both the most difficult and also the last to be solved by the human species.
SEVENTH PROPOSITION The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is dependent upon the problem of a law-governed external relation between states and cannot be solved without having first solved the latter.
EIGHTH PROPOSITION One can regard the history of the human species at large as the realization of a concealed plan of nature, meant to bring into being an internally and, to this end, externally perfect state constitution, as the only condition in which nature can fully develop all of its predispositions in humankind.
NINTH PROPOSITION A philosophical attempt to describe the universal history of the world according to a plan of nature that aims at the perfect civic union of the human species must be considered to be possible and even to promote this intention of nature.
This is a fascinating window into the Enlightenment conception of human nature. Much of this sounds Spinozist (though I don’t know how much Kant read of Spinoza), as well as stating themes that would be further developed in Kant’s better know essay Perpetual Peace (“Zum ewigen Frieden,” 1795). In Galston’s classic study, Kant and the Problem of History, Galston comments on Kant’s political conception of history, which is apparent in the above theses:
“For Kant, philosophy of history emerges as the necessary completion of politics, the only possible (or permissible) means for the actualization of the just political order. The direction of the movement of history (hence its very nature) can only be understood with reference to the just order. This order purports to be deduced from the character of morality. The core of Kantian morality consists in the radical rejection of any natural guidance and of the orientation toward happiness and in the assertion that morality or the good can only be understood as internal freedom. We may say that Kant begins from Rousseau’s antithesis between happiness and the moral life and from Rousseau’s characterization of the moral as the free; but he resolutely rejects Rousseau’s inability t o choose unambiguously between morality and happiness. We are necessarily and irretrievably human, as Rousseau virtually admits; but according to his own premise, the core of humanity or human dignity is freedom. Insofar as happiness is irrelevant to freedom we must ignore it; insofar as it endangers freedom we must resist it. It may be tolerated as a thoroughly subordinated wish but cannot be the guiding object of moral desire. In fact, morality must be understood as altogether unrelated to desire.”
This is also a useful observation to highlight some of the profound differences internal to the Enlightenment. The United States was established, at least in part, to ensure the possibility of the pursuit of happiness, but Kant tells us that happiness is to be ignored or avoided or, at best tolerated.
In his “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” Kant offers what we would today call a rational reconstruction of what we would (again) call today prehistory. The Enlightenment thinkers felt the gap between the Biblical creation story and the beginning of recorded history, and in an attempt to fill this gap Kant interpolated a speculative account:
“If one is not to be overenthusiastic in one’s speculations, then one must begin with that which cannot be derived by human reason from preceding causes of nature: the existence of the human being. One must begin with the human being, to be precise, as a fully developed adult, since he must do without maternal assistance; one must begin with a couple, so that the species is propagated; and one must begin with a single couple, so that war does not immediately break out when human beings live in close proximity and yet are foreign to one another, and also so that nature is not accused of having neglected, by permitting such diversity in ancestry, to provide in the most appropriate way for sociability in the species, as the greatest end of human destiny. The common descent of all human beings from a single family was without doubt the best arrangement for this. I shall place this couple in a place that is secure against the aggression of predators and that is abundantly supplied by nature with all the means of sustenance, in a garden, as it were, in a perpetually mild climate. What is more, I shall consider the human being only after it has made substantial progress in honing it skills in using its naturally given powers, and not begin with the human being in its complete brutishness, for to endeavor to fill the gap between these two points, which would presumably extend across quite a lengthy span of time, could lead for the reader to far too many speculations and far too few probabilities.”
This is, essentially, a grand exercise of what Collingwood called the “a priori historical imagination,” which fills in gaps in the historical record between known events, but Kant pushes this idea far beyond what Collingwood envisaged.
Sidney Pollard, in his The Idea of Progress: History and Society, discusses Kant in Chapter Two, rightly drawing attention to Kant’s teleological interest in humanity converging upon the perfect civil constitution, and quoting Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” (though he quotes a different translation) to the effect of, “…steady and continuous, though slow, development of certain great dispositions in our nature,” as presenting Kant’s conception of progress. However, there are other threads of Kant’s thought that suggest a less-than-complete embrace of the Enlightenment conception of progress. At the opposite end of human history from that presented in “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” Kant’s essay on eschatology, “The End of All Things,” is clearly at odds with the idea of the infinite perfectibility of man, even arguing that it is rather an infinite series of ills that characterizes human life:
“Even assuming a person’s moral-physical state here in life at its best — namely as a constant progression and approach to the highest good (marked out for him as a goal) — , he still (even with a consciousness of the unalterability of his disposition) cannot combine it with the prospect of satisfaction in an eternally enduring alteration of his state (the moral as well as the physical). For the state in which he now is will always remain an ill compared with a better one which he always stands ready to enter; and the representation of an infinite progression toward the final end is nevertheless at the same time a prospect on an infinite series of ills which, even though they may be outweighed by a greater good, do not allow for the possibility of contentment; for he can think that only by supposing that the final end will at sometime be attained.”
I have often said that, while Kant himself did not write a treatise on the philosophy of history comparable to his three critiques, he left enough materials that a Kantian philosophy of history in a thoroughly Kantian idiom could be assembled on the scale of any of the critiques. With his “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” Kant gives us the beginning, with “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and Perpetual Peace we have the central content, with “The End of All Things” we have the ending, and Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens is the over-arching context in which the previous beginning, middle, and end can find their place.
Michael Desplaned opens his Kant on History and Religion with the claim, “Kant’s philosophy of history wrestles with the idea of progress and with the notion of development of the human race.” If Kant had written, say, a Critique of Historical Reason (which Dilthey did, in fact write, but this was not the book that Kant did not write), he would have had to wrestle with the teleological and naturalistic themes that run through his thought, and this would have come to a head in any discussion of progress and human development: whether it is possible, how it is possible, and how it could be realized. From the materials that Kant left to us on history, we cannot know how he would have attempted to overcome the traps and the challenges his own thought had laid out.
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
https://archive.org/details/kantproblemofhis0000gals
https://archive.org/details/onhistory0000kant
https://archive.org/details/universalnatural0000kant
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Kant%2C+Immanuel%2C+1724-1804%22
