Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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124 CHAPTER FOUR

tively social and cultural agents who diversely reﬂect upon, make choices

according to, and transform the concrete and plural worlds of experience

into which they are born. In the next chapter, I delineate in more detail

the political effects of this philosophical theory of humanity, freedom,

anti-paternalism, and incommensurability, especially with regard to Euro-

pean imperialism. Kant’s understanding of human unity and diversity

forms the basis upon which he condemns imperialism and articulates a

cosmopolitan conception of global diversity, which defends, against the

paternalism of European imperial powers, non-European peoples’ free-

dom to organize their societies and to practise their collective lifestyles in

the manner that they see ﬁt.

This chapter focuses on the variety of meanings of, and roles per-

formed by, the concept of ‘humanity’ in Kant’s thought in general, with

special emphasis placed on his moral and political theory. I begin with an

interpretation of the Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History and

argue that, for Kant, human beings are fundamentally cultural beings,

creatures who constitutively possess what I have called “cultural agency”.

In the second section, I contend that Kant views distinctively human

activities as necessarily plural, contextualized by social experience, and,

from the standpoint of happiness or satisfaction, incommensurable. One

of my key interpretive claims is that Kant moves away from his earlier

contention in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that all non-

moral, nonautonomous willing is simply heteronomous. Thus, instead of

simply contrasting heteronomy and autonomy, Kant begins to develop an

understanding of ‘humanity’, or cultural agency, that ﬁlls the conceptual

space between them. In particular, I show how cultural agency presup-

poses a particular doctrine of practical reason and freedom that I specify

with reference to The Metaphysics of Morals. Further developing this

theme in the third section, I interpret crucial passages in Religion within

the Boundaries of Mere Reason and compare Kant’s accounts of ‘human-

ity’ and ‘personality’, along with their respective accounts of freedom and

reason. In the section on Kant’s social criticism, I argue that Kant’s more

rareﬁed understanding of freedom and controversial account of practical

reason (those associated with ‘personality’) are motivated by his moral

concerns about social inequality and the vulnerability of cultural agency.

Kant’s most abstract presentation of universalism is thus theorized as fun-

damentally an expression of moral egalitarianism and social criticism,

rather than simply an attachment to rationalism per se. I interpret Rous-

seau’s inﬂuence on Kant in this context.

In the ﬁfth section, I elucidate the concept of ‘dignity’ and show how

it is related to a second understanding of humanity: personality concep-

tualized as an ‘intellectual’ or ‘noumenal’ humanity. I then turn in the

next section to the concept of noumenon by examining how and why it

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 125

is deployed in the Critique of Pure Reason. I show that it represents one

of Kant’s conceptual weapons against metaphysics. Human dignity is

thus revealed as both a representation of the ﬁnitude of human reason

and a bulwark against social and political injustice, rather than an afﬁrma-

tion of metaphysical essences or a nonexperiential ‘world’. In the follow-

ing section, I examine Kant’s understanding of an ‘aesthetic humanity’

and its relationship to the cultural activities of modern societies, as well as

to his social and political concerns. In particular, I examine what Kant

sees as the sociable qualities of taste, beauty, and the communicability of

aesthetic judgements, and their political import in cultivating a cosmo-

politan disposition of moral reciprocity. I then explore in the eighth sec-

tion how Kant’s understanding of humanity as cultural agency structures

his political theory and philosophy of history. This provides a means of

responding to the classic, vexed question about the relationship between

Kant’s contractarian (positivist) justiﬁcation of the rule of law as such and

the moral (normative) picture of republicanism and an international fed-

eration of states. I argue that, for Kant, European states are minimally

legitimate because they secure agreements and contracts that constitute

the realm of ‘acquired rights’, and that this can be theorized from a social

contract doctrine, but that they should also be roundly criticized for of-

ten failing to respect the one ‘innate right’ of humanity: freedom, speciﬁ-

cally the cultural agency that constitutes humanity itself. Turning to his

philosophy of history, I contend that Kant’s understanding of progress is

meant to work precisely at the level of cultural humanity, not at the level

of moral principle or of historical prognosis. By drawing upon and at-

tending to human imagination and experience, his philosophy of history

constitutes a narrative that seeks to foster the hope necessary for future

political action and reform. This stands in sharp contrast, I will argue, to

philosophical histories and theories of progress that justify European rule

over non-European peoples in the course of presenting triumphalist ac-

counts of the rise and ultimate superiority of European civilization.

This detailed view of Kant’s concept of humanity and its various roles

in his moral and political thought provides the conceptual background

for an intensive examination in the next chapter of his account of global

diversity and anti-imperialism.

Humanity as Cultural Agency

The starting point of this chapter consists of a deceptively simple ques-

tion. What precisely is Kant referring to when he uses the term “human-

ity” (Humanit¨at, Menschheit)? More speciﬁcally, when Kant contends

that we should never treat the humanity in our persons simply as a means,

126 CHAPTER FOUR

but always also as an end in itself, what is it that we are being asked never

to abuse and always to respect morally? Understanding Kant’s distinctive

senses of the concept of humanity enables us to appreciate better his

ethical injunction, and in ways that reveal insightfully his concept of cul-

ture, his appropriation of and response to Rousseau, the connection be-

tween his aesthetics and morality, and the cosmopolitan political theory

that weaves these various strands together into a uniﬁed and open-ended

moral vision.

Kant’s ﬁrst signiﬁcant published discussion of humanity’s most salient

and distinctive features takes place in a lively historical essay, The Conjec-

tures on the Beginning of Human History (1786). Kant explicitly pro-

claims the almost wholly conjectural nature of his enterprise. Conjec-

tures, he argues,

should not present themselves as a serious activity but merely as an exercise in

which the imagination, supported by reason, may be allowed to indulge as a

healthy mental recreation. Consequently, they cannot stand comparison with a

historical account which is put forward and accepted as a genuine record of the

same event.... (8:109)

A “journey” taken “on the wings of imagination”, however, would seem

to require an orientation of some kind in order to avoid becoming an

entirely random or frivolous excursion. Kant’s use of the book of Genesis

as a “map” underscores the hypothetical nature of this work; it also illus-

trates a speculative mode of thinking that he elaborates and defends at

the opening of the essay and that he deploys similarly in his reﬂections

about historical progress.

Given Kant’s frequent references to Scripture, it is important to under-

score the metaphorical usage of Genesis, which otherwise could be mis-

leading. In this context, it is worth noting that one of Kant’s contempor-

aries, Georg Forster, believed that one of the key aims of the Conjectures

was to defend the story of human origins in Genesis as the literal truth.

In fact, in using Genesis, Kant was following, but also criticizing, Herder,

who also drew upon Genesis in the course of his own philosophy of

history in the Ideas Toward a Philosophy of History of Humankind. As

John Zammito has argued, the Conjectures as a whole is, in large mea-

sure, a polemic against Herder’s popular Ideas, a work that Kant believed

represented at times the kind of wild metaphysical ﬂights of fancy that he

had done his best to seal off from philosophical discourse in the Critique

of Pure Reason and whose ﬁrst two installments he had recently criticized

in two book reviews in 1785.

Kant’s use of Genesis, then, appears to be

partly a satirical attack on Herder’s more spiritual use of Scripture.

Before describing some of the distinctive features of humanity, Kant

explains that humans are to be understood at the outset of his conjectural

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 127

history as already having developed signiﬁcant physical and social skills.

Drawing upon Genesis, he hypothesizes an original human pair in order

to unfold his arguments. Kant notes that he “imagine[s] them not in

their wholly primitive natural state, but only after they have made signiﬁ-

cant advances in the skilful use of their powers.” Thus, “the ﬁrst human

being” could stand, walk, speak, talk (“speak with the help of coherent

concepts”), and “consequently think.” Kant demurs from speculating

about how humans could possibly have reached this physical and cogni-

tive level. He contends that “the reader might ﬁnd too many conjectures

and too few probabilities if I were to try to ﬁll this gap, which presumably

occupied a considerable interval of time.” (8:110) As we will see, Kant’s

method relies upon a conjectural ability to create a story of origin and

development that can be discerned from current evidence—“the guid-

ance of experience as mediated by reason”—and so the hypotheses made,

while by their very nature always hypothetical, can at least, in Kant’s view,

avoid amounting to thoroughly unfounded speculations. It becomes

clear at this point, therefore, that while Genesis might provide a “map”,

it is the work of our minds (informed both by experience and imagina-

tion) that will do the travelling; the reader can judge, Kant notes,

“whether the route which philosophy follows with the help of concepts

accords with that which the Bible story describes.” (8:110) In addition to

avoiding hypotheses wholly unconnected to what can be at least partly

justiﬁed according to our experiences of human life, Kant also notes

brieﬂy that a wholly primitive description of humanity simply cannot be a

guide for ethical thinking. “I wish merely”, Kant declares, “to consider

the development of human behaviour from the ethical point of view, and

this necessarily presupposes that the skills in question are already pres-

ent.” (8:111) From this claim emerges a key difference between Kant’s

and Rousseau’s approach toward the theorization of human nature, one

that, as I will later discuss, explains much of their political divergences.

There may indeed be an interesting story to tell about the development

of humans’ basic cognitive, physical, and social skills (of the kind Rous-

seau attempts to describe in the early portions of his Discourse on In-

equality), Kant thinks, but such a narrative would have no bearing on our

ethical self-understanding. In what appears to be a consideration of the

state of knowledge in his day, Kant suspects that such stories, like those

attempting to explain the very existence of human beings, would amount

to “wild conjectures” that “cannot be deduce[d] from prior natural

causes”. (8:110) The fundamental point, however, is that they would be

entirely irrelevant to an ethical understanding of humanity. Ethical reﬂec-

tion, for Kant, takes as its starting point a particular set of shared apti-

tudes that lie well beyond Rousseau’s portrait of primitive or original

humanity. Rousseau’s classic complaint against earlier social contrac-

128 CHAPTER FOUR

tarians and their states of nature in the Discourse on Inequality is that

previous thinkers had not gone back far enough to discern humans’ true

nature. But to venture speculatively so far back, Kant implies, is to leave

the human world entirely, and in a manner that could generate nothing

of ethical value for humans today.

Kant delineates four hypothetical moments of human development

that allow him to model what he takes to be the most distinctive and

ethically salient characteristics of humanity. The animal creature he sets

up as a foil to the human being is instinctively driven. The movement

from animality to humanity is one toward freedom and culture. First,

Kant draws metaphorically upon Genesis to describe the human power to

create desires, to imbue a particular thing or activity with value. At ﬁrst,

Kant writes, one can imagine creatures guided solely by instincts that,

among other things, allow them “to sense in advance whether a given

food is suitable for consumption or not.” (8:111) Eventually, however,

humans begin to engage in comparisons that lead them to foods that

only resemble those that they are drawn to by instinct; or, their curiosity

may have been piqued by noticing another animal eating such unfamiliar

foods. Kant notes that “it is a peculiarity of reason that it is able, with the

help of the imagination, to invent desires which not only lack any corre-

sponding natural impulse, but which are even at variance with the lat-

ter.” (8:111) Basic instincts that help us to survive continue to exist, but

alongside a rational and imaginative ability that opens up “an inﬁnite

range of [desirable or valuable] objects”. (8:112) In treating humans as

the creator of values, Kant emphasizes the dangers involved in such “ex-

periments”. The ignorance of the possibly harmful “hidden properties”

of newly desirable objects, the “remote effects” (the contingent, unin-

tended consequences) of acting in ways not brought about immediately

by instinct, and—following Rousseau—the generation of “superﬂuous”

(and potentially enslaving) needs, yield a sense of “anxiety and fear”.

Humans, as creative beings, stand “on the edge of an abyss.” Still, what-

ever the actual or potential harms, this development was “enough to

open man’s eyes”: “He discovered in himself an ability to choose his own

way of life without being tied to any single one like the other animals.”

The second feature of human distinctiveness also concerns the creative

use of imagination and reason. Using the symbol of the apple, Kant

moves from instincts of preservation, most notably for food, to sexual

instincts “by which nature ensures the survival of each species”. The ﬁg

leaf metaphorically represents reason and imagination moulding a given

instinct such that it is “withdrawn from the senses”. While the “sexual

stimulus” for animals is sharp, transient, and satisﬁed quickly, humans

have imaginatively transformed sexual desire into a more moderate but

also a more “prolonged and even increased” desire. Kant argues that

rendering “an inclination more intense and lasting by withdrawing its

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 129

object from the senses already displays a consciousness of some rational

control over the impulses” (8:113). By proscribing the immediate arousal

of sexual instinct, humans transform it creatively into a complex, aesthet-

icized desire. “Refusal”, Kant writes, “was the device which invested

purely sensuous stimuli with an ideal quality”, and hence marks the trans-

formation of sexual appetite “from a feeling for the merely agreeable to a

taste for beauty”. Related to this transformation are the dynamics of so-

cial relationships that Kant views as central for ethical life. The increasing

interaction among individuals who confer value not only upon nonhu-

man objects, but also upon each other, fosters a “sense of decency”, a

concern about being able to inspire respect from others and avoiding

others’ contempt. What Rousseau had castigated as the development of

amour propre, the vanity that corrupts the inherently good nature of aso-

cial, natural individuals, is described by Kant as “the ﬁrst incentive for

man’s development as a moral being”. Kant’s discussion in the Conjec-

tures makes clear that humans’ creative powers and sociability are by no

means necessarily productive of ethical ends. Rather, as I later show, Kant

appropriates much of Rousseau’s pessimism about modern society while

maintaining concomitantly that the human potential for more freedom

and less injustice lies in the very sociability that has tended to enslave us.

It is the sense of decency that is found among social beings, even if only

ﬂeetingly and for vain ends, that constitutes “the proper foundation of all

true sociability”. Accordingly, Kant concludes that, from an ethical per-

spective, in spite of the social ills and the harm to individuals that this

development unleashes, it “is more important than the whole endless

series of subsequent cultural developments.”

Anticipation of the future constitutes the third differentiating aspect of

humanity. On the one hand, this allows humans to plan for the future,

“for remote objectives”, but it also serves as “the most inexhaustible

source of cares and worries which an uncertain future evokes, and from

which all animals are exempt”. Though Kant here goes on to discuss the

fear of death itself, his more general concern (later in the Conjectures and

in his other philosophical-historical writings) is that the use of our

powers of memory and imagination can lead to a withdrawal from active,

public life. In moments of despair arising from thoughts of continued

hardship and the ills of modern life in particular, Kant feared that individ-

uals would often grudgingly accept a future of living under oppressive

social and political conditions and view them as unchangeable or natural

features that are intrinsic to human life. As I later argue, the primary aim

of Kant’s philosophy of history is to present another conjectural story in

order to foster the hope—and, from the standpoint of moral psychology,

the empowerment—needed for individuals themselves to bring about so-

cial and political reform.

The fourth development describes the “obscure” realization that since

130 CHAPTER FOUR

human beings are constitutively cultural beings, each human can then

“claim to be an end in himself, to be accepted as such by all others, and

not to be used by anyone else simply as a means to other ends.” (8:114)

Morality, as properly understood in Kant’s view, arises from the gradual

understanding of this basic anthropological fact. Kant speculates that

the moral egalitarianism of viewing not only oneself, but all humans, as

equally endowed with the capacity for cultural agency may have origi-

nally arisen because of a sense of difference from, and superiority over,

other animals (8:114). In any case, it is the awareness of our “equality

with all rational beings, whatever their rank” that engenders what we

might now call a humanitarian moral sensibility.

As we have seen, a being with culture is one who can create desires,

values, and ideals, a being who can inscribe meanings and idealizations of

beauty on to the world, and one who can anticipate the future. The

Conjectures models a fundamental idea in Kant’s thought that is not of-

ten appreciated: that “humanity”, as a set of distinguishing and constitu-

tive capabilities and powers, consists of cultural agency. In Kant’s view,

human beings are fundamentally cultural beings. But what underlies

these distinctively human features? What about them imbues humanity

with a worth that, as a matter of moral principle, should never be abro-

gated? Answering this requires a precise delineation of the particular

kinds of freedom and reason that Kant associates with cultural agency.

Cultural Freedom and Embedded Reason

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the second of Kant’s

three descriptions of the categorical imperative runs as follows: “So act

that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of

any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

(4:429) Kant speciﬁes what an end in itself refers to—that is, what con-

stitutes humanity—only very brieﬂy: “rational nature exists as an end in

itself.” (4:428–29) So in respecting the humanity in a person we are

respecting “rational nature”, and, by implication, the kind of freedom

that is linked to rational nature. This, of course, is not much help in

specifying more precisely what it is that should be respected, and, in

addition, why we ought to respect it. In an introductory section of The

Metaphysics of Morals (1797) entitled “On the Relation of the Faculties of

the Human Mind to Moral Laws”, Kant ﬁnally disaggregates the concept

of freedom (and, accordingly, the concept of practical reason) that he had

deﬁned in the Groundwork (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason

(1788) in the most general terms.

Under the overarching concept of the faculty of desire, Kant elaborates

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 131

the speciﬁc kind of freedom of which cultural activity is the manifesta-

tion. The faculty of desire itself is simply “the faculty to be, by means of

one’s representations, the cause of the objects of these representations.”

(6:211) To the extent that our desires can be understood as related

to human faculties—and not simply, for instance, to physiological im-

pulses—we ourselves are the sources of such desires.

In very general

terms, then, what Kant refers to as culture (as a constitutive trait or con-

dition) is possible because humans possess the faculty of desire. Kant

then analyzes this faculty more closely in a manner that speciﬁes the par-

ticular aspect of this faculty, and the accompanying understanding of

freedom, that gives rise to culture:

The faculty of desire in accordance with concepts, insofar as the ground deter-

mining it to action lies within itself and not in its object, is called a faculty to do

or to refrain from doing as one pleases [nach Belieben]. Insofar as it is joined

with one’s consciousness of the ability [or capacity, des Verm¨ogens] to bring

about its object by one’s action it is called choice [Willk¨ur]; if it is not joined

with this consciousness its act is called a wish. (6:213)

In wishing or in choosing to do or to have something, we engage in a

form of practical reasoning that determines the objects of our actions (or

wishes), of what we think will please us. As with the Conjectures, Kant

describes a purely determined animal and the character of its choices

against which he conceptualizes human choice: “[t]hat which can be de-

termined only by inclination (sensible impulse, stimulus) would be animal

choice (arbitrium brutum). Human choice, however, is a choice that can

indeed be affected but not determined by impulses” (6:213). This is a

crucial point, for it indicates a form of freedom—distinctively human

freedom—that is neither wholly heteronomous nor autonomous.

Rather,

human choice is inﬂuenced by instinct and one’s surroundings, but given

our human freedom not entirely so. Kant then notes that “[f]reedom of

choice is this independence from being determined by sensible impulses;

this is the negative concept of freedom.” (6:213) Again, the kind of free-

dom that issues in cultural values and activities is thus inﬂuenced by our

basic instincts and impulses without being guided entirely by them. More-

over, as I discuss below, it is a freedom that is necessarily inﬂuenced

(though not wholly determined) by our particular experiences. It is thus

a social and cultural freedom, one that is, by implication, also socially and

culturally embedded in the sense that our experiential surroundings pro-

vide the resources for these decisions.

Given that the freedom underlying cultural activity is negative in char-

acter (that is, it consists of the open space, as it were, that otherwise

would be determined largely by our biological instincts), with what mate-

rials do we make such decisions as to how to live, what to desire, and

132 CHAPTER FOUR

how to achieve particular ends or goals? Kant provides a contextualized

and pluralistic account of the sources from which humans make decisions

of value that is worth quoting at length:

Only experience can teach us what brings us joy. Only the natural drives for

food, sex, rest, and movement, and (as our natural predispositions develop) for

honor, for enlarging our cognition and so forth, can tell each of us, and each

only in his particular way, in what he will ﬁnd those joys; and, in the same way,

only experience can teach him the means by which to seek them. All apparently

a priori reasoning about this comes down to nothing but experience raised by

induction to generality, a generality (secundum principia generalis, non univer-

salis) still so tenuous that everyone must be allowed countless exceptions in

order to adapt his choice [Wahl] of a way of life to his particular inclinations

and his susceptibility to satisfaction and still, in the end, to become prudent

only from his own or others’ misfortunes. (6:215–16)

Experience, not practical reason itself, Kant argues, furnishes the materials

from which we reﬂect about our possible choices, reject or accept such

choices, or fashion new alternatives. In part, humanity consists in con-

sciously reﬂecting upon the experience that is given to us through our

most basic instincts, from which we can determine how in particular we

will control, transform, and satisfy such natural drives. Moreover, as our

predispositions to social life and culture develop in the course of our

lives, we draw upon the enlarged experiences of our surrounding worlds,

including the humanly transformed worlds into which we are born.

Even

in the stark world that Kant describes in the Conjectures, where we can-

not draw upon the experience of a human world rich with values and

desires of our making and remaking (since all desires that are not wholly

instinctual in this hypothetical world must be created from scratch), the

examples that Kant provides are those of experience that the original

couple draws from their natural surroundings: drawing analogies to what

they have seen other creatures doing, or noting the similarity of myste-

rious items to foods that they are drawn to by instinct. As cultural agents,

our practical reason itself prescribes no speciﬁc values, desires, or ways of

living, let alone those that might guarantee happiness or satisfaction.

For however plausible it may sound to say that reason, even before experience,

could see the means for achieving a lasting enjoyment of the true joys of life,

yet everything that is taught a priori on this subject is either tautological or

assumed without any [objective] basis. (6:215)

The most fundamental sense of Kant’s concept of humanity, then, de-

notes cultural agency, and bound up with this is a form of a posteriori

(experientially based) practical reason—which he delineates in The Meta-

physics of Morals—an aspect of volition that enables humans to make

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 133

choices about their values and ways of life based upon the subjective

understanding of their varied experiences. The role of practical reason in

its cultural mode is to choose (or to wish) among materials that are given

in the world of experience, but that are understood, imagined, and val-

ued differently by each individual, thereby engendering new combina-

tions of materials, or as it were, new cultural possibilities for wishing and

acting, as Kant’s discussion of the conscious development of desires in

the Conjectures makes clear.

From Humanity to Personality

The distinctive qualities of humanity, as well as its relationship to our

capacity to be moral (to treat each other with the respect we deserve as

persons with humanity), can be explained further by examining Kant’s

discussion of such issues in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

(1793). In the Religion, Kant discusses some key predispositions that

characterize “the human being”. These predispositions are “original”, he

explains, because “they belong to the possibility of human nature” as

such; that is, “they belong with necessity to the possibility of this being”.

Kant also notes that while these predispositions can be isolated for con-

ceptual purposes, humans are constituted by the various combinations

and interrelationships among these features. Moreover, Kant asserts that

his discussion is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather he attempts to

identify only those predispositions that “relate immediately to the faculty

of desire and the exercise of the power of choice [Willk¨ur].” (6:28)

Kant outlines predispositions to animality, humanity, and personality,

which refer respectively to our status as living beings, living and rational

beings, and responsible beings. By living beings, Kant refers to the physi-

cal and mechanical drives of humans: “self-preservation”, “the propaga-

tion of the species, through the sexual drive” (including the care of the

resulting offspring), and “community with other human beings, i.e., the

social drive” (6:26). Kant makes explicit in the Religion, therefore, what

was assumed in the Conjectures, that social relations among humans are

related to very idea of human beings.

Humanity is both living and ratio-

nal in that it involves a form of practical reasoning that is bound up with

the values, desires, and ideas of satisfaction and happiness of our lived

experience. Thus, from this perspective, Kant believes that humans are

situated in particular worlds and are made up of internal physiological

drives, which inform humans’ practical reasoning about their desires,

values, and goals.

The predisposition to personality “is the susceptibility to respect for

the moral law as of itself a sufﬁcient incentive to the power of choice