Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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134 CHAPTER FOUR

[Willk¨ur].” (6:27) We are predisposed to personality because we are ca-

pable of acting morally, of treating each other as ends in ourselves and

not merely as means; we are capable, that is, of having a “good character,

and this character, as in general every character of the free power of

choice, is something that can only be acquired” (6:27). Humans are not,

therefore, naturally moral, but are constituted fundamentally with an

ability to develop a character that will strive to act morally. Truly moral

action, for Kant, consists of treating humans as ends in themselves simply

for duty’s sake; that is, for no other reason than that one ought to act in

such a manner toward oneself and every other human, rather than for

personal advantage or gain.

Here I return again to Kant’s theory of freedom and practical reason in

order this time to distinguish more precisely humanity from personality.

In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argued that negative freedom, the

freedom created from not being wholly determined by one’s internal

drives and impulses, consisted of a power of choice (Willk¨ur). This is the

freedom of humanity (as cultural agency) and, as Kant writes in the Reli-

gion, it “is rooted in a reason which is indeed practical, but only as sub-

servient to other incentives”, incentives drawn, that is, from experience

(6:28). A political metaphor that accords with some of Kant’s own moral

language, one used by the Kant scholar Henry Allison, illuminates most

clearly the differences between the conceptions of reason and freedom in

humanity and personality.

Kant’s theory of volition can be understood

as involving legislative and executive functions. For both humanity and

personality, the executive function is Willk¨ur (the power of choice). But

if our power of choosing executes a “law”, from where does the law itself

originate? As we have seen for the conception of humanity as cultural

agency, experience furnishes our power of choice with the materials nec-

essary for a practical choice; this constitutes a form of practical reason (an

executive) whose legislative materials, we might say, are provided by ex-

perience. But in the case of personality, Wille itself (simply reason, or

‘pure reason’) legislates to our executive power, our power of choice. As

Kant explains in the Religion, personality (our capability to know and to

act—for duty’s sake, to the best of our ability—upon the principle that

we should never treat humanity merely as a means, but also always as an

end in itself) “is rooted in reason practical of itself, i.e. in reason legislat-

ing unconditionally.”

(6:28)

Our cultural character or identity, that is, the anthropological fact of

our cultural strivings and activities, gives rise, though obscurely, to the

idea of the moral respect owed to all humans simply as a result of their

being human. But Kant’s discussion of personality brings out another

aspect of this ethic: the explanation of why all humans should respect one

another does not issue from our social reality, but from practical reason

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 135

itself. Many ideas arise from the fact that we, in part, live in social and

cultural worlds of our own making and remaking; this does not, in and of

itself, Kant appears to suggest, make any of them binding upon all hu-

mans in spite of our varied inclinations, life-choices, traditions, and so

forth. A moral norm of such generality, according to Kant, can arise only

from practical reason itself, not from our necessarily plural and partly

incommensurable experience. We can attain at least a vague understand-

ing of such equality from reﬂecting upon ourselves as humans, as the

Conjectures suggests, but such a norm of equal moral worth is authorita-

tive, in Kant’s view, not because of our sentiments, our psychological

self-analysis, or our empirical study of others, but because of practical

reason itself. In short, to use Kant’s language, the idea that we should

respect humanity in our persons is an a priori (reason-based), not an a

posteriori (experientially-based), judgement.

Regardless of the justiﬁcations given for the validity of this argument—

issues that, in this context, would take us far aﬁeld—it is crucial to un-

derstand for what reasons Kant would support such a view (of autonomy

and of moral practical reason) in the ﬁrst place. Recall that in The Meta-

physics of Morals he suggests that a certain kind of practical reason and

freedom exists short of presupposing that humans can be fully autono-

mous; we are not faced, then, with a stark choice between a hetero-

nomous will that is wholly determined by our inclinations and a purely

autonomous will, as the Groundwork had earlier (at least seemingly) im-

plied. Why, then, could not a morally egalitarian view be based on this

less rareﬁed and more common-sensical view of reason and freedom?

Coming to terms with this question reveals Kant’s concerns about the

unequal social dynamics of cultural activity and his deep indebtedness to

Rousseau. It also shows us that the idea of humanity as cultural agency,

and the modest conception of practical reason and freedom that are

bound up with it, remains a central component of Kant’s ethical theory—

it is not, in other words, set aside in favour of a more abstract vision of

humanity as personality.

Kant’s Social Criticism: The Vulnerability and

Commodiﬁcation of Cultural Agency

We saw in the Conjectures that Kant describes humanity with reference to

a hypothesized original couple’s use of reason and freedom in the course

of making comparisons with other animals’ behaviour and the objects of

their desire. In discussing humanity in the Religion, Kant focuses as well

on comparative judgements about happiness and self-worth, but in the

context of social relations in which humans observe and judge one an-

136 CHAPTER FOUR

other: “only in comparison with others does one judge oneself happy or

unhappy.” (6:27) Just as he discusses in the Conjectures the rise of hon-

our and some of its beneﬁts (to which I return later), Kant argues in the

Religion that the “self-love” that arises from the predisposition to hu-

manity engenders “the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others,

originally, of course, merely equal worth: not allowing anyone superiority

over oneself” (6:27). The features that constitute humanity, then, give

rise to a sense of worth: self-worth and the equal worth of others. As

Kant asserts in the Conjectures, our cultural agency is an expression—and

psychologically gives rise to the idea—of our fundamental equality, that

we are all equally ends in ourselves worthy of respect. The freedom and

reason associated with humanity are ennobling: “man’s release from the

womb of nature . . . [engenders] a change of status [from animality to

humanity] which undoubtedly does him honour”. But, Kant notes, “it is

fraught with danger” (8:114). The danger consists principally in the ex-

ploitative social practices and beliefs—what, Kant writes, “can also be

named [the] vices of culture”—that emerge from the use of memory,

imagination, practical reason, and freedom of choice.

From the cultural

agency that distinguishes us as beings with humanity “arises gradually an

unjust desire to acquire superiority for oneself over others.” (6:27) The

social reality of humanity’s equal worth is thereby, at best, jeopardized

and, at its all too frequent worst in Kant’s view, debased.

Kant’s social criticism, especially in connection to the concept of cul-

ture, is evident clearly in the second part of the Critique of Judgement

(1790), the “Critique of Teleological Judgement”. In accord with his

previous use of the term, Kant describes culture as “man’s aptitude and

skill for [pursuing] various purposes for which he can use nature (outside

or within him).” (5:430) Kant again differentiates humans from animals

in light of this capacity, and emphasizes both the reasoning and volitional

properties that engender humans’ capacity for culture: “Man is indeed

the only being on earth that has understanding and hence an ability to

set himself purposes of his own choice” (5:431). Kant’s understanding of

culture is thus bound up with freedom—Willk¨ur, the power of choice—

when we consider it conceptually, yet in reality, in modern societies at

least, it often generates social practices and opinions that disempower

humans. To elaborate this criticism, Kant develops the concept of “cul-

ture as skill”, which appears to refer not to the general disposition toward

cultural activities that constitutes humanity as such, but to the highly

differentiated needs, desires, and practices within a complex society.

For

these reasons, Kant sometimes uses the term ‘culture’ to refer to the

cultural activities of settled societies—for the German word Kultur refers

both to the cultivation of our natural capacities and to the cultivation of

lands (agricultural cultivation). As we have seen, however, Kant also de-

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 137

scribes humanity as constitutively cultural—that is, he holds that all hu-

mans per se are cultural agents.

In discussing Kant’s understanding of the reason and freedom that

make possible cultural agency, I argued that the materials that inform

humans’ power of choosing as cultural agents (which are themselves

transformed through their actions) are humans’ natural drives and the

social worlds in which they live. One obvious advantage of life in a mod-

ern society, from this standpoint, is that there are more materials, as it

were, that one could transform and from which one could choose. In

modern societies, then, humans would appear to possess the advantage of

being more skilful and, thus, of having better developed their human

capacities. If humanity refers to the power to set ends in general (not

only ethical ends chosen for their own sake)—one might call this the

general predisposition to skill itself—then modern societies would pre-

sumably offer the best environment within which to develop this in a

particularly robust and perhaps advanced sense.

Kant writes accordingly

that “[t]he culture of skill is indeed the foremost subjective condition for

an aptitude to promote [bef¨ordern] purposes generally” (5:431). The

freedom related to cultural agency is itself endangered and weakened,

however, by the oppression unleashed by modern cultural activities. Most

people, Kant argues, are kept in a state of dependence such that they toil

without being able to draw upon and develop their agency in any mean-

ingful way. Kant argues that

[i]t is hard to develop skill in the human species except by means of inequality

among people. The majority take care, mechanically as it were and without

particularly needing art for this, of the necessities of life for others, who thus

have the ease and leisure to work in science and art, the less necessary ingre-

dients in culture. These others keep the majority in a state of oppression, hard

labor, and little enjoyment.... [O]n both sides trouble increases with equal

vigor as culture progresses.... For the lower class the trouble results from

violence from without, for the higher from insatiability within. (5:432)

The majority of people in modern societies are not, of course, animal-

ized, for that would necessitate the very loss of cultural agency itself—

their lives become mechanical “as it were” and the more creative aspects,

the art, of cultural agency is not “particularly” needed in their arduous

lives. By being forced “from violence without” to lead lives that can

strive and desire for little beyond their appointed, menial tasks, the ‘ma-

jority’ of people, then, are used simply as means to others’ ends. Mem-

bers of the leisured class, on the other hand, have only themselves to

blame for their selﬁsh and arrogant attachment to the putatively reﬁned

activities and objects of modern life. “I cannot dispute”, Kant admits

ruefully, “the preponderance of evils that the reﬁnement of our taste to

138 CHAPTER FOUR

the point of its idealization, and even the luxury of sciences as food for

our vanity, shower on us by producing in us so many insatiable inclina-

tions.” (5:433) Rousseau’s strong inﬂuence on Kant becomes obvious in

such passages, and it is worthwhile to consider the egalitarian impulse it

fostered in Kant’s thought by his own admission.

Kant ﬁrst read Rousseau intensively in the early to mid-1760s, roughly

two decades before he would publish the Critique of Pure Reason. In a

now well-known passage from his handwritten notes of this period, he

proclaimed that his previously vain attachment to the life of the mind had

been tempered by reading Rousseau, thereby inspiring an egalitarian

commitment to the equal worth of humanity.

I am an inquirer by inclination. I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge, the

unrest which goes with the desire to progress in it, and satisfaction at every

advance in it. There was a time when I believed this constituted the honor of

humanity, and I despised the people, who know nothing. Rousseau set me

right about this. This binding prejudice disappeared. I learned to honor hu-

manity, and I would ﬁnd myself more useless than the common laborer if I did

not believe that this attitude of mine can give worth to all others in establishing

the rights of humanity.

(20:44)

As a number of scholars have argued recently, the profound impact of

Kant’s reading of Rousseau can be measured by examining the resulting

transformations in his moral thought and the early development of his

critical philosophy and political theory.

Underlying all of these elements

in Kant’s philosophy as a whole, in part because of his reading of Rous-

seau, is a fundamental commitment to egalitarianism and human free-

dom. But the nature of this commitment—in particular, the manner in

which Kant seeks to defend human dignity, on the one hand, and the

precise meaning of his call for the moral respect of our shared humanity,

on the other—requires further examination. In short, how do Kant’s two

rather distinct understandings of humanity that we surveyed thus far (hu-

manity as cultural agency and also as personality) relate to one another?

Humanity as Dignity

Kant’s various discussions of the term “dignity” (W¨urde) illustrate his

concern about our humanity becoming instrumentalized solely for others’

ends. For while it might seem that the duty to respect others’ (and one’s

own) humanity is equivalent to claiming that we should respect human

dignity, he uses the term humanity in two distinct senses. As we have

seen, Kant distinguishes humanity from animality and personality (all

three of which together constitute the human being); as I have called it,

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 139

this is humanity understood as cultural agency. But when he discusses

dignity, he employs a different understanding of humanity, one that cor-

responds solely to “personality”.

Kant’s uses of the term ‘dignity’ often arise in the context of discussing

self-worth. The notion of self-esteem, of properly valuing oneself, appears

partly to motivate his concern about identifying humanity as something

with an absolute worth. One of the key legacies of Kant’s intensive en-

gagement with Rousseau’s thought is the attempt to explain how all hu-

mans are equally of absolute worth, for, following Rousseau, the oppres-

sive social practices and beliefs that seem to reign in modern societies

puts this equality at risk. People do not value themselves as intrinsically

worthy beings, who are both capable of respecting others and who can

demand such moral respect from others, because the social dynamics of

modern life appear to reduce their value to one of exchange.

In the Groundwork, Kant discusses dignity by contrasting it with mere

things that can have a price and can be exchanged, the two examples of

which are items with a “market price” that appeal to our presumed needs

and those with a “fancy price” [Affectionspreis] that appeal to our sense

of taste. Kant then introduces the concept of dignity: “but that which

constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in

itself has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth,

that is, dignity.” (4:434–35) The problem with market-oriented and aes-

thetically based judgements of peoples’ worth consists in the inequalities,

oppression, and instrumentalized relationships they foster. As we have

seen, Kant argues in the Religion that the predispositions to humanity

involve a form of ‘self-love’ that necessarily rests upon comparisons with

others; such comparisons, which generate ideas and social practices that

inculcate a view of humans’ inequality, rest upon pricing humans accord-

ing to the various ways in which they can be used for our purposes. In

particular, “[s]kill and diligence in work have a market price; wit, lively

imagination and humor have a fancy price” (4:435). Our dignity, Kant

asserts, rests in our capacity to be moral, which itself, as we have seen,

depends upon a conception of autonomy: “Hence morality, and human-

ity insofar as it is capable of morality, is that which alone has dignity....

Autonomy is therefore the ground of the dignity of human nature and of

every rational nature.” (4:435–36)

“Humanity insofar as it capable of morality” is not the same as the

concept of humanity understood as cultural agency, then, but rather is

simply personality. Along these lines, it should be noted that in the Reli-

gion, Kant describes personality as “the idea of humanity considered

wholly intellectually”, that is, humanity as an autonomous subject, as

homo noumenon (6:28). Looking upon human beings as intrinsically—

and equally—worthy beings in light of their personality, the condition of

140 CHAPTER FOUR

being subject to the dictates of practical reason (that we should regard

each other as ends in ourselves) and thus their ability to be positively free

(autonomous) itself is an acknowledgment of a digniﬁed, even a holy,

status. “This estimation therefore lets the worth of such a cast of mind be

cognized as dignity and puts it inﬁnitely above all price, with which it

cannot be brought into comparison or competition at all without, as it

were, assaulting its holiness [Heiligkeit].” (4:435) Humanity, considered

as personality, cannot be commodiﬁed or judged inferior—it lies beyond

the pale of social inequalities and oppression and, thus, Kant seems to

hope, reafﬁrms our status as beings who should never be treated solely as

means but always also regarded as ends in ourselves. Kant’s rareﬁed con-

ception of human dignity, therefore, derives not from a penchant for

abstract, metaphysical essences—a view that itself misunderstands the

very concept of noumenon, as I later argue—but arises instead from con-

crete social and political concerns. The concept of dignity is meant to

serve as a bulwark against the commodiﬁcation and brutalization of hu-

mans.

But what, then, is to be protected? What does Kant want morally re-

spected when he states that it is a categorical imperative that we should

treat the humanity in our persons as an end in itself? In this context, he

cannot mean by “humanity” the idea of dignity or what it is rooted in

(namely personality), for personality (our capacity to be conscious of and

act upon the imperative that we morally respect ourselves and others) is

not what is being used merely as a means. Rather, it is our cultural

agency that is abused and so it would seem that that is what ought to be

the object of respect—yet Kant argues that is not our capacity for cul-

tural agency that provides humans with an inner, absolute worth. Kant’s

discussion of servility in the “Doctrine of Virtue” of The Metaphysics of

Morals clariﬁes this crucial issue, the consequences of which are impor-

tant for Kant’s political thought and anti-imperialist arguments.

Kant asserts that humans considered as animals, that is purely as physi-

cal beings with no practical reason, are of “an ordinary value”. Even in

the distinctive sense of a being with understanding—one “who can set

himself ends” (humanity as cultural agency)—our capacities give us

“only an extrinsic value” that is calculated in terms of our “usefulness” to

others.

In elaborating this assertion, Kant’s concerns about injustice and

his egalitarianism come to the fore again: our distinctive qualities as hu-

man beings, what sets us apart from other animals, “gives one man a

higher value than another, that is, a price as of a commodity in exchange

with these animals as things”. Such a system of valuation renders the

worth of human beings even less than the “universal medium of ex-

change”, since humanity’s extrinsic value becomes measured solely in

terms of “money” (6:434). Kant’s response to this grim situation de-

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 141

serves to be quoted at length, for it illuminates most clearly the nuances

of his ethical account of humanity:

But a human being regarded as a person, that is, as the subject of a morally

practical reason, is exalted above any price; for as a person (homo noumenon) he

is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of others or even to his own

ends, but as an end in itself, that is, he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner

worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in

the world. He can measure himself on a footing of equality with them.

Humanity in his person is the object of the respect

which he can demand

from every other human being, but which he must also not forfeit. (6:434–35,

underscoring added)

The object of our moral respect is our humanity, understood as our

cultural agency. This is the aspect of ourselves that is in need of protec-

tion for it is so often, as Kant argues, abused and treated as a mere thing,

as a commodity with a price. But in respecting the humanity in our per-

son, we claim ourselves as autonomous beings who can freely give norms

to ourselves. We put into practice, in Kant’s view, our positive freedom

and the dignity that it provides equally to every human being.

Put dif-

ferently, the humanity that Kant asks us to respect in his categorical im-

perative is humanity as cultural agency; our capacity to understand and to

act upon such an ethical imperative reveals our fundamental equality with

all other humans as persons, or homo noumena.

On the one hand, the object of this moral respect is a ﬁgure amenable

to current understandings of the ‘self’—the socially situated, imaginative,

and value-inscribing cultural agent who lives in a necessarily pluralistic

world. On the other hand, with regard to the subject of the moral law,

Kant’s thought uses language that now often strikes many commentators

as peculiarly rareﬁed, for it seemingly posits an abstractly metaphysical

view of the human being. A brief examination of Kant’s introduction of

the term “noumenon” will help us to ascertain whether Kant’s concep-

tion of humanity as personality promotes the idea of an other-worldly

human essence that is detached from our social and cultural worlds.

Noumenon as the Curtailment of Metaphysics

For many who are familiar with the basic terms of Kant’s thought, the

concept of noumenon invariably conjures up vistas of other-worldly Pla-

tonic realms or free-ﬂoating, unencumbered apparitions. Accordingly, the

noumenal character of Kant’s epistemological and ethical thought is of-

ten described pejoratively as metaphysical.

In order to discern whether

such concerns are justiﬁed, especially in light of Kant’s second sense of

142 CHAPTER FOUR

‘humanity’ as a homo noumenon, we need to understand why and how

Kant himself uses the term. Although it is out of the question in this

chapter to rehearse the epistemological framework within which Kant

makes the phenomenon/noumenon distinction, a brief look at the epis-

temological context within which he ﬁrst uses the term helps to clarify his

strategy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues at length that hu-

man understanding is limited cognitively to what can be known empiri-

cally, as possible objects of experience, although we are far from being

simply passive receptors of what ‘objectively’ lies outside us. Rather, in a

move that Kant himself famously described as his Copernican revolution,

the human mind, through what he describes as its “categories” and

“forms of intuition” (such as space and time), moulds such empirical

sensory perception into a form that we then cognize as being (for exam-

ple) spatial and temporal.

For Kant, the great beneﬁt of such a view is

that it dispelled the entire tradition of metaphysics that attempted to

identify and claimed to know the essences of objects and spiritual worlds.

The problem remains, however, that we can abstractly think of the

possibility of an objective knowledge of the world, of how it might ‘actu-

ally’ be or what its properties ‘really’ are behind what we can discern

from our experience; we might also begin to think that we have knowl-

edge (or could have knowledge) about what we have never experienced.

From the standpoint of a “critical” philosophy, Kant argues, one should

learn that we can never have any such knowledge.

Nevertheless, the

yearning to move beyond the range of experience, the impetus for meta-

physical speculation and its ostensible knowledge, is part of humans’ ba-

sic desire to know themselves and their surrounding world. The problem

is clearly stated at the very outset of the ﬁrst edition of the Critique:

Human reason has a peculiar fate in one kind of its cognitions [Erken-

ntnisse]: it is troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, because they are

posed to it by the nature of reason itself, but that it also cannot answer, be-

cause they surpass human reason’s every ability.

Our reason falls into this perplexity through no fault of its own. Reason

starts from principles [Grunds¨atze] that it cannot avoid using in the course of

experience, and that this experience at the same time sufﬁciently justiﬁes it in

using. By means of these principles our reason (as indeed its nature requires it

to do) ascends even higher, to more remote conditions.... By doing this,

however, human reason plunges into darkness and contradictions; and al-

though it can indeed gather from these that they must be based on errors lying

hidden somewhere, it is unable to discover these errors. For the principles that

it employs go beyond the boundary of all experience and hence no longer

acknowledge any touchstone of experience. The combat arena of these endless

conﬂicts is what we call metaphysics. (A vii–viii)

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 143

Kant introduces the concepts of phenomena and noumena in order (1)

to explain this process by which we are led beyond what we can possibly

know and (2) to attempt to contain this process—that is, to eliminate

the traditional practice of metaphysics itself.

This striving for knowledge that we can never have (but about which

we are capable of speculating) is best represented for Kant by “the con-

cept of a noumenon, i.e., of a thing that is not to be thought at all as an

object of the senses but is to be thought (solely through a pure under-

standing) as a thing in itself” (A 254/B 310). Kant stresses repeatedly

that although we can speculate about such alleged knowledge,

in the end, we can have no insight at all into the possibility of such noumena,

and the range outside the sphere of appearances is (for us) empty. I.e., we have

an understanding that problematically extends further than this sphere; but we

have no intuition—indeed, not even the concept of a possible intuition—

through which objects can be given to us outside the realm of sensibility....

The concept of noumenon is, therefore, only a boundary concept serving to

limit the pretension of sensibility, and hence is only of negative use. But it is

nonetheless not arbitrarily invented; rather, it coheres with the limitation of

sensibility, yet without being able to posit anything positive outside sensibility’s

range. (A 255/B 310–11)

The idea that noumenon is a “boundary concept” is often undermined

by Kant’s own language in describing noumena; in part, the difﬁculty

arises in discussing noumena (which are outside the bounds of space and

time) in terms that are not themselves spatial and temporal. This, of

course, is impossible, so Kant tends to rely upon metaphors (e.g., that we

may want to think of noumena and phenomena as two different “worlds”),

which are often deeply misleading because they appear to imply that

“noumenon” is a metaphysical realm or essence when, in fact, the con-

cept of noumenon is itself introduced in order to deny our knowledge of

anything metaphysical.

This is emphasized most lucidly and succinctly

by Kant himself: through the concept of a noumenon, one “acknowl-

edges not cognizing things in themselves through any categories, and

hence only thinking them under the name of an unknown something.”

(A 256/B 312)

The ‘digniﬁed’ view of humanity—one defended by Kant, as I have

argued, because of his egalitarian social and political concerns—is based

on the ﬁnitude of our self-understanding and our knowledge of the sur-

rounding world, not on a positive afﬁrmation and cognition of anything

outside the realm of experience. When we think of ourselves as moral

persons, persons who equally possess an absolute worth that demands

(categorically, without exception) our moral respect (that is, as homo

noumenon), we are therefore only thinking of ourselves “under the name