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The Philosopher as Legislator: Kant on History

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The Palgrave Kant Handbook

Part of the book series: Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ((PHGI))

Abstract

In several of his essays, Kant appears to be defending a progressive view of history. Both his conception of progress, which consists in the gradual attainment of a just civil society and a cosmopolitan constitution, and the theoretical assumptions that underpin it, such as his use of teleology, have been extensively studied and debated. Deligiorgi’s primary aim in this chapter is to examine Kant’s notion of history as a unified, or, at least, unifiable, whole, as well as to defend Kant’s practical justification of philosophical history.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I say “appears” to avoid conflating Kant’s progressive view with what he calls “eudaimonism” or “chiliasm,” which he explicitly rejects as “untenable” (CF 7:81–82).

  2. 2.

    An extremely valuable collection is Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt, eds., Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For discussion on the nature of progress, see Arnd Pollman, “Der Kummer der Vernunft: Zu Kants Idee einer allgemeinen Geschichtsphilosophie in therapeutischer Absicht,” Kant-Studien 102, no. 1 (April 2011): 69–88; Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Philosophy of History,” in “Toward Perpetual Peace” and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 243–62; and Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant, History, and the Idea of Moral Development,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 16, no. 1 (Jan. 1999): 59–80. On the theoretical assumptions underpinning the claims about progress, see Katerina Deligiorgi, “Actions as Events and Vice Versa: Kant, Hegel and the Concept of History,” in Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus, vol. 10: Geschicte, ed. Jürgen Stolzenberg and Fred Rush (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 175–95; Lea Ypi, “Natura Daedala Rerum? On the Justification of Historical Progress in Kant’s Guarantee of Perpetual Peace,” Kantian Review 14, no. 2 (July 2010): 118–48; David Lindstedt, “Kant: Progress in Universal History as a Postulate of Practical Reason,” Kant-Studien 90, no. 2 (Jan. 1999): 129–47; Pauline Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995); and Pauline Kleingeld, “Nature or Providence? On the Theoretical and Moral Importance of Kant’s Philosophy of History,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 201–19. Classic treatments include Dieter Henrich, “Über den Sinn vernünftigen Handelns im Staat,” in Über Theorie und Praxis, ed. Dieter Henrich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 7–37; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988); and Sidney Axinn, The Logic of Hope: Extensions of Kant’s View of Religion (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994).

  3. 3.

    Kant mentions war frequently in IUH, TP, and CF. It is only in the latter that he refers to “the present war,” though it is not clear which specific war he has in mind. One famous reference to a specific historical event, albeit veiled, is to the French Revolution at CF 7:84.

  4. 4.

    See Dominic Sachsenmaier, “World History as Ecumenical History?” Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (Dec. 2007): 465–89; and Dominic Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.

  5. 5.

    A locus classicus for philosophical criticisms of philosophical universal history is Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). For further references and a critical discussion of Danto, see Deligiorgi “Actions as Events,” 176–77.

  6. 6.

    Although I follow Allen Wood’s Cambridge translation here, the German word that he translates as “aim” is Absicht, purpose. In what follows, this notion will play an important role in conjunction with the notion of “end [Zweck].”

  7. 7.

    Kant reviewed J. G. Herder’s 1784 Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (RH 8:43–66). He discusses Moses Mendelssohn’s views on history when he addresses Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum (1783) in “Theory and Practice” (TP 8:308), and he indirectly confronts Mendelssohn under the label “abderitism” in Conflict of the Faculties (CF 7:81). Mendelssohn was responding to the progressive views expressed by G. E. Lessing, who wrote a very influential essay on The Education of Humanity, which appeared in 1777 in part, and in full posthumously in 1790.

  8. 8.

    Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60–95. Guyer distinguishes between systematicity and completeness, and he argues that the unity of reason is effectively practical and consists in the idea of attainment of maximally consistent system of purposes or “systematic happiness” (94). Although I follow Guyer in my discussion of the Reflexionen, I do not distinguish as sharply between completeness and systematicity, and my argument about the unity of human actions required for philosophical history takes a different direction.

  9. 9.

    See too: “Progress (progressus) in knowledge (qua science in general) begins with the collection of the elements of knowledge, then connects them [in the] manner in which they are to be arranged (systematically). For the division of this enterprise into a doctrine of elements and a doctrine of method constitutes the supreme division; the former presents the concepts, the latter their arrangement in order to found a scientific whole” (OP 21:386).

  10. 10.

    See Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), 11–38. A different approach, by Paul Franks, is to show that Kant offers a deduction from an absolute ground to secure the requisite unity and so answer the Agrippan trilemma. See Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 62–79.

  11. 11.

    Most recently in Kristi E. Sweet, Kant on Practical Life: From Duty to History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  12. 12.

    Cf. the distinction Kant makes between psychological and moral (e.g., An 7:258).

  13. 13.

    The intelligible world is just what Kant calls the ideal world, obtainable by abstracting all spatiotemporal notions. But “for such an intelligible word to be the highest good,” we need God, because this world as a good contains the notion of the law of freedom through which one is able “to determine one’s will” (CPrR 5:132). To these postulates of practical reason, we should add the concept of the “ethical community,” which is introduced in the Religion and designates a union of people under laws of virtue or divine commands, as “people of God” (Rel 6:98).

  14. 14.

    For a detailed treatment of these passages, see Lea Ypi, “Practical Agency, Teleology and System in Kant’s Architectonic of Pure Reason,” in Politics and Metaphysics in Kant, ed. Sorin Baiasu, Sami Pihlström, and Howard Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 134–51.

  15. 15.

    For an excellent account of the early modern discussion of final causes, see Jeffrey K. McDonough, “The Heyday of Teleology and Early Modern Philosophy,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 35, no. 1 (Dec. 2011): 179–204.

  16. 16.

    On the normative conception of form, see Hannah Ginsborg, “Kant’s Biological Teleology and Its Philosophical Significance,” in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 455–70; and Marcel Quarfood, “Kant on Biological Teleology: Towards a Two-Level Interpretation,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 735–47. For a more Aristotelian view and contemporary discussion, see Mark Bedau, “Where’s the Good in Teleology?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, no. 4 (Dec. 1992): 781–806. Kant’s discussion of the legitimate use of teleology is part of his solution to the antinomy of teleological judgment, which is presented as an antinomy between mechanism and final causes (CJ 5:386–89 [§§70–71]). In what exactly the antinomy consists is a matter of ongoing controversy; see Angela Breitenbach, “Kant on Causal Knowledge: Causality, Mechanism, and Reflective Judgment,” in Causation and Modern Philosophy, ed. Keith Allen and Tom Stoneham (New York: Routledge, 2011), 201–19.

  17. 17.

    See Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 208. For a different view that still acknowledges, as I do here, that human beings are also natural beings, see Karl Ameriks, “The Purposive Development of Human Capacities,” in Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” 46–67.

  18. 18.

    The discussion of this “thread” belongs to an argument about chance and the prospect of barbarism, which forms the rhetorical context for the questions: “whether it is indeed rational to assume purposiveness [Zweckmäßigkeit] in the arrangement of nature in the parts and yet purposelessness [Zwecklosigkeit] in the whole” (IUH 8:25). See also Kleingeld, “Kant, History, and the Idea of Moral Development.”

  19. 19.

    There is a parallel and a contrast here with cognitive needs relating to what Kant calls “delimitation” and “outline” that arise with respect to natural phenomena. In the Opus postumum, Kant defends the need for a metaphysical foundation of natural science in relation to physics, because “without the former, [it] would be merely an aggregate (farrago) of observations of nature that would permit no secure delimitation or outline” (OP 21:477–78; see also 183). The metaphysical foundations mentioned here give the basic dynamic theory of matter that I attributed to Kant earlier. See also Michael Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the “Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 221–22. In history we seek an outline of a dynamic whole composed of actions that does not, however, determine actions a priori.

  20. 20.

    Earlier interpreters (e.g., Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History) tend toward the “dogmatic but necessary” view, whereas more recent interpreters (Kleingeld, Fortschritt und Vernunft; Kleingeld, “Nature or Providence?”; and Henry E. Allison “Teleology and History in Kant: The Critical Foundations of Kant’s Philosophy of History,” in Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” 24–45) find a greater range of theoretical resources in Kant’s thought for dealing with history and progress.

  21. 21.

    See, for example, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 130–31; and Katerina Deligiorgi, “The Role of the ‘Plan of Nature’ in Kant’s Account of History from a Philosophical Perspective,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14, no. 3 (March 2006): 451–68.

  22. 22.

    In later essays, as well as in the third Critique (esp. CJ 5:430–33), Kant makes much more of the sociability aspect. He gives a highly differentiated concept, “culture,” as the matrix for the development of human talents not just individually but also across generations.

  23. 23.

    It does not matter for Kant’s argument whether individual agents have the establishment of such a constitution as their end. In fact, the ends of individual agents may be “directly opposed” to such an end (TP 8:312). Still, Kant claims, progress is an attainable end in the long run; or, as he puts it in “Theory and Practice,” progress may “be interrupted from time to time but will never be broken off” (TP 8:309).

  24. 24.

    Dieter Henrich, “The Moral Image of the World,” in Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 3–28.

  25. 25.

    Henrich, “Moral Image of the World,” 14.

  26. 26.

    In line with the overall purpose of his essay, Henrich associates the moral image with the belief that “it is possible to promote a state of the world in which happiness and merit coincide” (Henrich, “Moral Image of the World,” 25).

  27. 27.

    Henrich, “Moral Image of the World,” 24.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., 25.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 13.

  30. 30.

    Ibid.

  31. 31.

    G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, rev. ed., ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 270.

  32. 32.

    See here the illuminating discussion of the publication context of IUH in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt, introduction to Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” 4–5. The bonum-through-malum expression is from Odo Marquard, “Unburdenings: Theodicy Motives in Modern Philosophy,” in In Defense of the Accidental: Philosophical Studies, trans. Robert M. Wallace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 22. See also William Rasch, “The Public of the Intellectuals – from Kant to Lyotard,” in The Impact of German Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. 2: Historical, Social and Political Thought, ed. John Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 26–50.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Sussex, Sussex, UK

    Katerina Deligiorgi

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Correspondence to Katerina Deligiorgi .

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  1. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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Deligiorgi, K. (2017). The Philosopher as Legislator: Kant on History. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_30

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