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The Palgrave Kant Handbook pp 705–727Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Becoming Human: Kant’s Philosophy of Education and Human Nature

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

Abstract

Louden argues that, appearances to the contrary, philosophy of education is of central importance to Kant’s overall philosophical program. Its chief importance stems largely from the commanding position that education holds within his theory of human nature. In Kant’s view, education is fundamentally about the effort to realize our humanity. As he proclaims near the beginning of the Lectures on Pedagogy: “The human being can only become human through education. He is nothing except what education makes out of him” (LP 9:443).

The final destiny of the human race is moral perfection, so far as it is accomplished through human freedom, whereby the human being, in that case, is capable of the greatest happiness.…How, then, are we to seek this perfection, and from which point is it to be hoped for? From nowhere else but education.

– Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (LE 27:470, 471, translation modified)

This essay borrows a few points from my “Becoming Human: Kant and the Philosophy of Education,” in Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136–49; an earlier version of which appears under the title of “Afterword” in Philosophy of Education: The Essential Texts, ed. Steven M. Cahn (New York: Routledge, 2009), 281–92.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For further discussion of the background of Kant’s pedagogy course, see Karl Vorländer, Immanuel Kant: Der Mann und das Werk, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Meiner, 1924), 2:226–27; www.manchester.edu/kant/lectures/lecturesListDiscipline.htm#pedagogy; and LP 9:439–40.

  2. 2.

    Manfred Kuehn, “Kant on Education, Anthropology, and Ethics,” in Kant and Education: Interpretations and Commentary, ed. Klas Roth and Chris W. Suprenant (New York: Routledge, 2012), 55.

  3. 3.

    John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, 15 vols., ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 9:338.

  4. 4.

    Kant is not a progressive voice on the topic of women’s education. But in one unpublished note, he does at least assert: “Both sexes must be educated” (Ak 15:558 [R1265]).

  5. 5.

    For further discussion and references, see Robert B. Louden, The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the Enlightenment Still Elude Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 15–25.

  6. 6.

    Paul Guyer, “The Dialectic of Disinterestedness: II. Kant and Schiller on Interest in Disinterestedness,” in Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 96.

  7. 7.

    Although this is not quite the “cult of nature” later associated with Romanticism (Howard E. Hugo, ed., The Portable Romantic Reader [New York: Viking, 1957], 379ff.], many Enlightenment authors nevertheless did appeal to nature as a positive norm for human conduct. Kant may be borrowing here from Rousseau and/or Basedow, but it is not merely Enlightenment educational theorists who praised nature. Leopold Mozart, for instance, in his famous treatise on the principles of violin playing, continually advises his readers to follow “nature herself” in determining how best to play their instrument (Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule [Augsburg: published by the author, 1756], 193; cf. 238).

  8. 8.

    Ludwig Ernst Borowski, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kants (1804), in Immanuel Kant: Sein Leben in Darstellungen von Zeitgenossen; Die Biographen von L. E. Borowski, R. B. Jachmann und A. Ch. Wasianski, ed. Felix Groß (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1912), 32.

  9. 9.

    See Plato, Theatetus, 149a–151d.

  10. 10.

    Kuehn, “Kant on Education, Anthropology, and Ethics,” 57.

  11. 11.

    Lewis White Beck, “Kant on Education,” in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 197.

  12. 12.

    Kuehn, “Kant on Education, Anthropology, and Ethics,” 67n10. English translations of some of this material are available in Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Allen W. Wood and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  13. 13.

    Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark, “Einleitung,” in Vorlesungen zur Anthropologie by Immanuel Kant, ed. Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), liii.

  14. 14.

    Thomas Sturm, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Paderborn: Mentis, 2009), 355.

  15. 15.

    One anthology that conveniently gathers together most of the above-discussed texts is Immanuel Kant, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Pädagogik und ihrer Begründung, 2nd ed., ed. Hans-Hermann Groothoff (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1982).

  16. 16.

    Geraint Parry, “Education,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Knud Haakonssen, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1:608.

  17. 17.

    John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education and of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), §1.

  18. 18.

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile; or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic, 1979), 107; cf. 79, 90, 92. For general discussion of Enlightenment views about education, see Louden, World We Want, 27–50.

  19. 19.

    Johann Bernhard Basedow, Inusitata et optima honestioris iuventutis erudiendae methodus [On the best, but previously unused, method of instructing the children of the upper classes], Magister thesis, University of Kiel, 1752. For discussion, see Hugo Göring, “Basedow als Privaterzieher,” in J. B. Basedow’s Ausgewählte Schriften by Johann Bernhard Basedow, ed. Hugo Göring (Langensalza: Beyer & Söhne, 1880), xxx–xxxiii.

  20. 20.

    Albert Reble lists 108 different works in his bibliography of Basedow’s writings, while noting that Basedow’s publications contain “frequent repetitions.” See Johann Bernhard Basedow, Ausgewählte pädagogische Schriften, ed. Albert Reble (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1965), 253, 267–74.

  21. 21.

    Johann Bernhard Basedow, Das in Dessau errichtete Philanthropinum, eine Schule der Menschenfreundshaft (Leipzig: Crusius, 1774); reprinted in Basedow, Ausgewählte pädagogische Schriften, 220.

  22. 22.

    For further discussion of Kant and Basedow, see Robert B. Louden, “‘Not a Slow Reform, but a Swift Revolution’: Kant and Basedow on the Need to Transform Education,” in Kant and Education, 39–54.

  23. 23.

    Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit; quoted in Basedow, Ausgewählte pädagogosiche Schriften, 239, 240.

  24. 24.

    Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, 6 vols., ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1957), 3:236, 251.

  25. 25.

    Johann Bernhard Basedow, Etwas aus dem Archiv der Basedowischen Lebensbeschreibung von ihm selbst (Leipzig: Crusius, 1783); quoted in Auguste Pinloche, Geschichte der Philanthropinismus (Leipzig: Brandstetter, 1896), 157n1.

  26. 26.

    Frederick Hertz, The Development of the German Public Mind: A Social History of German Political Sentiments, Aspirations, and Ideas, vol. 2: The Age of Enlightenment (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), 385.

  27. 27.

    Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son education, 2 vols. (London: Société Typographique, 1773), 2:334.

  28. 28.

    Georg Cavallar, “Sources of Kant’s Cosmopolitanism: Basedow, Rousseau, and Cosmopolitan Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 33, no. 4 (July 2014): 374.

  29. 29.

    Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37. Cf. Cavallar, “Sources of Kant’s Cosmopolitanism,” 375.

  30. 30.

    Basedow, Das Methodenbuch, in Ausgewählte pädagogische Schriften, 119. Cf. Proverbs 1:7, 9:10; Psalms 111:10.

  31. 31.

    Cavallar, “Sources of Kant’s Cosmopolitanism,” 374.

  32. 32.

    In this section I have borrowed a few points from my “Cosmopolitical Unity: The Final Destiny of the Human Species,” in Kant’s “Lectures on Anthropology”: A Critical Guide, ed. Alix Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 211–29.

  33. 33.

    Kuehn, “Kant on Education, Anthropology, and Ethics,” 56.

  34. 34.

    Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Cleveland: Meridian, 1956), 290–91. “Even in Kant,” Sartre notes correctly, “Man possesses a human nature” (290). I am borrowing a few points here from my discussion of the rudiments of Kant’s theory of human nature in the introduction to Kant’s Human Being, xvii–xxviii.

  35. 35.

    Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973), 387. Foucault’s critique of the human sciences is in part an outgrowth of his early work on Kant’s anthropology. See Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology,” ed. Roberto Nigro, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008). For discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of Kant’s anthropology, see Robert B. Louden, “El Kant de Foucault,” Estudos Kantianos 1, no. 1 (Jan./June 2013): 163–80.

  36. 36.

    Aristotle, Physics II.3, 194b32; cf. Aristotle, Parts of Animals I.1, 639b12–21.

  37. 37.

    “I consider the customary search for final causes to be totally useless in physics: there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the <impenetrable> purposes of God” (René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 39.

  38. 38.

    Reinhard Brandt, Die Bestimmung des Menschen bei Kant (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007), 7.

  39. 39.

    But what about extraterrestrial rational beings? As Peter Szendy notes, Kant “regularly summoned inhabitants of other planets, inviting them over and over again into his discourse” throughout his writing career (Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions, trans. Will Bishop [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 45). See also my review of Szendy’s book in Philosophy in Review 34, no. 6 (Dec. 2014): 339–41. Like many Enlightenment intellectuals, Kant clearly believes in the existence of extraterrestrial rational beings, but – at least in his mature works – his evident extraterrestrial enthusiasms stop short of speculations concerning the specific Bestimmungen of other types of rational beings. (See UNH 1:351–67 for some pre-critical speculations on this theme.)

  40. 40.

    See, e.g., A. Whiten et al., “Cultures in Chimpanzees,” Nature 399 (17 June 1999): 682–85; Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist (New York: Basic, 2001); and C. K. Catchpole and P. J. B. Slater, Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  41. 41.

    The bad seeds and predispositions (e.g., within the human species, selfishness) need to be restrained and controlled.

  42. 42.

    G. W. Leibniz, “Preface to the New Essays,” in Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 294.

  43. 43.

    Johann Bernhard Basedow, Vorstellung an Menschenfreunde (Hamburg: s.n., 1768); in Basedow, Ausgewählte pädagogische Schriften, 28.

  44. 44.

    In this section I borrow a few points from my essay “‘Total Transformation’: Why Kant Did Not Give Up on Education,” Kantian Review 21, no. 3 (Nov. 2016): 393–413.

  45. 45.

    Brandt, Bestimmung des Menschen, 85.

  46. 46.

    Immanuel Kant, Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie, ed. Werner Stark (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), 366n242.

  47. 47.

    Kuehn, “Kant on Education, Anthropology, and Ethics,” 63.

  48. 48.

    At one point in the Lectures, Kant asks: “to what extent might private education have an advantage over public education or vice versa? In general, it appears that public education is more advantageous than domestic, not only as regards skillfulness but also with respect to the character of a citizen. Quite often, domestic education not only frequently brings forth family mistakes but also reproduces them” (LP 9:453). But this seems to be primarily an argument against homeschooling.

  49. 49.

    Friedrich Paulsen, German Education, Past and Present, trans. T. Lorenz (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), 136.

  50. 50.

    See, e.g., Alexander Kaufman, Welfare in the Kantian State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); and Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988). As both van der Linden and Kaufman emphasize, important earlier German scholars such as Hermann Cohen and Karl Vorländer also read Kant’s political thought in this manner.

  51. 51.

    An earlier version of this essay was presented as a keynote address at the 3rd International Conference in Kantian Studies (“Kant and Education”), held at Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, in May 2016. I would like to thank James Scott Johnston for the invitation to present some of my work in Newfoundland, and audience members for their insightful questions and comments following my presentation.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, Portland, USA

    Robert B. Louden

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Correspondence to Robert B. Louden .

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  1. Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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Louden, R.B. (2017). Becoming Human: Kant’s Philosophy of Education and Human Nature. 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_31

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