Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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144 CHAPTER FOUR

of an unknown something.” According to Kant, we cannot know pre-

cisely how it is that we are conscious of this demand and no purely em-

pirical explanation can be given as to how it motivates our actions. Kant

defends the idea that we are intrinsically worthy beings, then, not by

theorizing a fundamental essence that underlies our experienced selves

and surroundings, but by presuming that an aspect of ourselves that we

cannot understand resists all attempts to turn us into mere things or

commodities.

Oddly, Kant’s afﬁrmation of reason’s ignorance and lim-

ited power is used as the ‘name’ (noumenon) by which the ‘unknown’

feature of ourselves, the power to know and act upon moral duty, is

presumed. In other words, despite its central importance to Kant’s ethical

thought, the very basis of human dignity, the idea of a homo noumenon,

rests upon that which we cannot know. Many of Kant’s contemporaries

recognized the modesty of this defence of the concept of human dignity,

and accordingly of practical reason. Kant’s sceptically minded critique of

theoretical knowledge and his somewhat meagre vindication of practical

reason led a number of his most inﬂuential, self-described followers, such

as Karl Leonard Reinhold and J. G. Fichte, to revive the metaphysical

theorizing that Kant had done his best to destroy.

Aesthetic Humanity: The Opportunities and

Injustices of ‘Civilized’ Sociability

As we saw in the ﬁrst section, “Humanity as Cultural Agency”, Kant

describes humans’ cultural agency as partly aesthetic in character, for it

involves inscribing the world with value and transforming humans’ natu-

ral drives and the objects of their surrounding worlds not only for pur-

poses related to survival, but also to create and to transform a plurality of

increasingly complex idealizations of beauty. Humanity as cultural agency

involves some conception of taste and beauty. But in settled agrarian

societies, in Kant’s view, only a small segment of society partakes of well-

developed aesthetic lifestyles. These lifestyles, values, and practices con-

stitute a narrower use of Kultur in Kant’s thought, one that refers to the

aesthetic features of complex, modern societies. In these contexts, ‘cul-

ture’ refers to sociable practices that are partly aesthetic (they are the

source of “sensible feelings of pleasure or displeasure” about matters of

beauty and taste [6:456]) and that also occur among individuals of set-

tled societies—this, of course, is in keeping with the etymological source

of the term ‘culture’ itself.

Thus, Kant writes about the social transfor-

mations that occur with the early development of agriculture, especially

the “rise” of “culture” (Kultur) and the “beginnings of art” that go

beyond the most basic “cultural developments” that characterize human-

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 145

ity as such (8:119). It is important to keep in mind, then, that just as

Kant moves back and forth between two senses of humanity, he also uses

Kultur in two distinct senses: to denote, ﬁrst, cultural agency (“culture

in general”), the general ability of humans to set ends for themselves in a

manner that draws upon their imagination, memory, values (including

aesthetic values), and surrounding experiences, and, second, the social

practices of the leisured classes in what we might now call ‘modern’ soci-

eties, which for Kant involve, among other things, judgements of taste.

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant’s theory of judgements of taste

depend on two crucial claims, one sociological and the other anthro-

pological and ethical. Kant argues that conceptions of charm and beauty

that arouse “great interest” are possible in what (in the Conjectures) he

describes as hunting or pastoral societies, but that “judgements of taste”

depend crucially upon a sustained network of communication within

which matters of decorum, beauty, and other considerations of taste can

be practised, discussed, and debated. This in turn requires the settled life

of an agrarian society (“civilization”, the sedentary, civil life of the polis)

as well as at least a somewhat leisured existence.

As we will see in the

next section, Kant bemoans the fact that only a fraction of the individuals

living in civil societies partake in the reﬁned communicative activities of a

civil society, and that such practices seem to ﬂourish as a result of the

hard labour of a majority of individuals in any state. The crucial point

here, however, is that communicable judgements of taste, according to

Kant, depend upon social dynamics that only a sedentary life affords.

Thus, Kant contends that

we judge someone reﬁned if he has the inclination and the skill to communi-

cate his pleasure to others, and if he is not satisﬁed with an object unless he can

feel his liking for it in community with others.... Initially, it is true, only

charms thus become important in society and become connected with great

interest, e.g., the dyes people use to paint themselves (roucou among the

Caribs and cinnabar among the Iroquois), or the ﬂowers, sea shells, beautifully

colored feathers, but eventually also beautiful forms (as in canoes, clothes, etc.)

that involve no gratiﬁcation whatsoever, i.e., no liking of enjoyment. But in the

end, when civilization has reached its peak, it makes this communication al-

most the principal activity of reﬁned inclination, and sensations are valued only

to the extent that they are universally communicable. (5:297)

Kant maintains an ambivalent view about such “civilization” for it in-

volves, in his view, no genuine moral progress, but a great deal of social

reﬁnement, much of which (as Rousseau also thought) is hypocritical and

vain. Moreover, again like Rousseau, Kant is deeply concerned about the

enormous inequality and oppression on which reﬁned or civilized activ-

ities rest, as I discuss further in the next section. Thus, the aesthetic fea-

146 CHAPTER FOUR

tures of ‘civilized’ life in a settled society are not necessarily superior to

those of nonsettled societies. Rather, Kant’s contention is that the kinds

of aesthetic experiences and judgements made in such societies are quali-

tatively distinct. Kant’s opinion, then, is that hunting and pastoral peo-

ples aestheticize aspects of the world around them (for they are humans,

and thus cultural agents, who necessarily inscribe values on to the world),

but that they do not lead the sedentary and leisured existence that is

socially necessary for ﬁxed spheres of communication, and thus for judge-

ments of taste, to be at the centre of their aesthetic experience. For Kant,

judgements of taste involve not simply communication, but the pleasure

we feel from having such views validated, in some sense, by others; thus,

settled patterns of intersubjective communication are crucial, on his view,

for the practice of judgements of taste.

The kind of environment that he

has in mind is what has come to be known as the bourgeois public

sphere: salons, coffeehouses, sociable dinner parties, and other locales

where ‘polite’, interactive discussions (those which Rousseau came to de-

test) could occur relatively freely, even in absolutist states like eighteenth-

century Prussia and prerevolutionary France.

The eighteenth century often gave rise to many writings about such a

social sphere. As Daniel Gordon has shown in his study of the language

of sociability in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French thought,

these attempts at identifying and celebrating a ‘public sphere’ or ‘civil

society’ provided a means of encouraging a society of equals under con-

ditions of absolutist rule.

Located within the extreme poles of revolu-

tionary change, on the one hand, and withdrawal from social life alto-

gether, on the other, the conceptualization of social life as a distinct

phenomenon was a preoccupation of many philosophers of the eigh-

teenth century. As Gordon has suggested, this new mode of intellectual

discourse identiﬁed and legitimized a relatively free and egalitarian space

in an otherwise authoritarian and unequal society; thus, during the eigh-

teenth century, terms like ‘society’, ‘social’, ‘sociability’, and ‘sociable’

proliferated in French intellectual and literary writings.

Kant was pro-

foundly inﬂuenced by such thinking and sought to integrate it into his

thought. But rather than use it as a substitute for an anti-absolutist poli-

tics (as was often the case in the French discourse on sociability), Kant

supplemented his explicit support of republicanism with a social and aes-

thetic theory that emphasized that conditions of moral reciprocity could

be cultivated through such social activities.

As Kant’s second book review of Herder’s Ideas makes clear, Euro-

peans cannot look to their ultimate ends as humans by imitating the

ostensibly natural lives of indigenous peoples. Kant criticizes Herder for

appearing to hold—from the premise that Tahitians achieve their happi-

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 147

ness more easily than Europeans, given the latter’s oppressive and com-

plex social and political institutions—that happiness is extremely difﬁcult

or even impossible to attain in civilized societies. The life that Kant be-

lieved Herder was valourizing, of “happy human beings merely enjoying

themselves”, amounts not to a description of the ends to which the

members of sedentary, agrarian societies should work, but rather resem-

bles the lives of “happy sheep and cattle”.

Kant thus aimed to counter

those who presented the ills of European life as so great that only the

simplest pleasures of faraway lands could give humans true happiness.

Such ethnographic portraits, in Kant’s view, carried with them the risk

that the social interactions of polite society, which were at the heart of

aesthetic humanity, would no longer be valued and nurtured, even though

this was necessary, in his opinion, for any moral and political progress in

civilized societies to take place.

Kant’s concern was that an increasing

number of individuals, overcome with the “falsehood, ingratitude, [and]

injustice” of their sedentary, agrarian societies and the fact that the social

relations in such societies often led humans to do “every conceivable evil

to each other”, tended to celebrate seemingly magical and utopic distant

lands on which one could lead a life free of the cares and injustices of

civilized life (5:276). Kant’s fear, then, is that writings like Herder’s

treatment of Tahiti would further encourage, as he writes in the Critique

of Judgement,

the tendency to withdraw from society, the fantastic wish for an isolated coun-

try seat, or even (in young people) the dream of happiness in being able to pass

their life on an island unknown to the rest of the world with a small family,

which the novelists or poets who write Robinsonades [writings in the style of

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe] know so well how to exploit. (5:276)

Such dreams, however, take individuals away from the aesthetic activities

in social settings that could at their best develop the dispositions of reci-

procity and sympathy, and indirectly help to combat the very injustices of

civilized societies. Like Diderot, then, Kant did not believe that versions

of what Diderot satirized as the “myth of Tahiti” could be used to solve

Europe’s grave injustices. As we will see in the following chapter, Kant

defends the right of peoples to order their collective lives as they see ﬁt,

and thus he explicitly defends the rationality and freedom (the cultural

agency, and thus the fundamental humanity) of nomadic and pastoral

peoples in the course of attacking European imperialism, but he also be-

lieves that the means of civilized societies could be used to alleviate their

tremendous injustices. Ultimately, Kant’s defence of aesthetic humanity

and sociability, I will now argue, was a response to Rousseau’s second

Discourse and the pessimistic conclusion that might follow from it: that

148 CHAPTER FOUR

civilized societies and the forms of sociability within them were irremedi-

ably unjust and, hence, could not serve as the basis for the eventual cre-

ation of a less unjust society.

Kant connects aesthetic determinations of taste with one fundamental

aspect of what it means to be a human being: social living. He asserts

that since the urge toward social living is a natural propensity of all hu-

man beings, the sociability that is engendered by judgements of taste

relate to this constitutive feature of humankind. The sociability and com-

municative practices of the leisured classes of Kant’s day develop what he

describes as “aesthetic humanity”. These practices, in other words, per-

tain to “culture” as understood in a narrow sense, in distinction to “cul-

ture in general”, which characterizes humanity as such. In addition to

increased sociability, the reﬁned practices of leisured townspeople foster

bonds of sympathy and moral reciprocity. In part, as I have said, Kant

held these views because of the French tradition of theorizing sociability,

which he inherited and appropriated, but he framed this understanding

in a unique manner, I argue, to provide a defence against Rousseau’s

objections of some of the beneﬁts of sociably aesthetic practices.

Determinations of taste in modern societies, according to Kant, are

intrinsically social in character for they involve the communication of our

ideas of beauty and taste to others, as well as the nurturing of sympathy

as individuals attempt to understand the aesthetic judgements of their

interlocutors. In the Critique of Judgement, therefore, Kant argues that,

from an aesthetic viewpoint,

humanity [Humanit¨at] means both the universal feeling of sympathy, and the

ability to engage universally in very intimate communication. When these two

qualities are combined, they constitute the sociability that beﬁts [our] human-

ity [Menschheit] and distinguishes it from the limitation [characteristic] of ani-

mals. (5:355)

In stark contrast to such a view is Rousseau’s passionately argued conten-

tion that the social aspects of life in ‘civilized’ societies are thoroughly

vain and hypocritical. I have argued in this chapter that the egalitarian

impulse that lies behind such a view inﬂuenced Kant enormously. But

Kant did not appropriate wholesale Rousseau’s dark assessments of the

depravities and fundamental artiﬁciality of social life itself. Given that

Rousseau saw humans’ sociability as thoroughly unnatural, his attempts

to remedy the corruption engendered by social life either seek to remake

human nature (the work of a great legislator) and to situate humans in a

utopic society that appears communal (given the ideal of the ‘general

will’) but that oddly eschews any reciprocal social deliberation, or places

a more select group or individual in the hands of a wise educator (Rous-

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 149

seau himself) who, for instance, raises Emile by sheltering him from the

ravages of social life. In the Anthropology, Kant writes,

[A]s for Rousseau’s hypochondriac (gloomy) portrayal of the human species

when it ventures out of the state of nature, we need not take this as a recom-

mendation to re-enter the state of nature and return to the woods. What he

really wants to do is to show the difﬁculty that reaching our destiny by way of

continually approximating to it involves for our species.... Rousseau did not

really want man to go back to the state of nature, but rather to look back at it

from the step where he now stands.

(7:326)

Kant interprets Rousseau, therefore, as being acutely aware of the chal-

lenges of improving humanity’s moral situation. But the condition that

we are to look back upon for Kant is rather different than the original

state of nature that Rousseau describes. As I have discussed, Kant asserts

that a social drive, a predisposition toward communal relations, is consti-

tutive of humanity. And in the Doctrine of Right, Kant’s hypothetical

description of a state of nature (a condition without the public rule of

law) is not asocial: “a state of nature is not opposed to a social but to a

civil condition, since there can certainly be society in a state of nature,

but no civil society (which secures what is mine or yours by public

laws).”

(6:242) Since the social aspects of human life are not, for Kant,

at bottom unnatural, he is willing to craft a more sympathetic view of the

potential beneﬁts of the social dynamics within modern societies than

Rousseau could have theorized.

Although Kant does not criticize Rousseau explicitly on this issue (per-

haps, one suspects, because he held him in such high regard), his argu-

ment in the Anthropology against Swift’s caustic remarks about human

virtues could well apply to Rousseau:

All the human virtue in circulation is small change: one would have to be a

child to take it for real gold.—But we are better off having small change in

circulation than no money at all; and it can eventually be converted into genu-

ine gold, though at a considerable loss [i.e., with much extra effort]. It is high

treason against humanity to issue these coins as mere counters having no value

at all, to say with the sarcastic Swift: “Honor is a pair of shoes that have been

worn out in the mud....” (7:152–53)

The “small change” that might not compensate for the oppression un-

leashed by modern societies, but that at least provides some productive

energies that could coalesce into genuine social and moral reform, rests

in part upon conceptions of honour and decency, beauty and taste, and in

general upon the sociability that accompanies these social practices,

norms, and judgements.

For instance, conceptions of taste (in music,

150 CHAPTER FOUR

painting, sculpture, architecture, horticulture, rhetoric, poetry, and so

forth) rely upon social communication and so foster interconnections

among individuals that encourage at the very least relatively humane,

if not intentionally moral, behaviour.

Kant argues accordingly that

“[m]aking a man well-mannered as a social being falls short of forming a

morally good man, but it still prepares him for it by the effort he makes,

in society, to please others (to make them love or admire him).—In this

way we could call taste morality in one’s outward appearance” (7:244).

Rousseau’s amour propre is thus transformed by Kant into a potentially

beneﬁcial characteristic.

Kant believes that the vocation of humanity itself is to work toward,

however slowly and hesitantly (and, thus, in a manner that gradually ap-

proximates), an ideal form of sociability, a cosmopolitan condition in

which humans can interact with one another peacefully and nonexploita-

tively both within and among their respective societies.

The reﬁned ac-

tivities and norms of social life in civilized societies, Kant hopes, might

contribute modestly to this long-term cosmopolitan goal. In The Meta-

physics of Morals, Kant describes such social interaction as a “duty of vir-

tue” in a remarkable passage that encapsulates the recurring theme of

“aesthetic humanity” in his writings:

[O]ne ought to regard . . . [the] circle drawn around one as also forming part

of an all-inclusive circle of those who, in their disposition, are citizens of the

world—not exactly in order to promote as the end what is best for the world

[das Weltbeste] but only to cultivate what leads indirectly to this end: to culti-

vate a disposition of reciprocity—agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and re-

spect (affability and propriety, humanitas aesthetica et decorum

) and so to asso-

ciate the graces with virtue....

These are, indeed, only externals or by-products (parerga), which give a

beautiful illusion resembling virtue that is also not deceptive since everyone

knows how it must be taken . . . [they] are, indeed, only tokens; yet they

promote the feeling for virtue itself by a striving to bring this illusion as near as

possible to the truth. By all of these, which are merely the manners one is

obliged to show in social intercourse, one binds others too; and so they still

promote a virtuous disposition by at least making virtue fashionable. (6:473–

74, underscoring added)

Kant’s consideration of sociability and its moral dimension should,

along with so many other aspects of his thought, dispel the still common

view that he ignores or slights the role of emotions, passion, and feeling

in moral judgement and activity. In fact, although he clearly believes that

engaging in behaviour that is undertaken simply out of principle is alone

worthy of any real moral merit, he also contends that it is both impossi-

ble to tell when this is done and, in any case, unlikely to occur given the

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 151

complexity of humans’ moral psychology. Thus, the bonds of love, sym-

pathy, sociability, the moral dimensions of beauty, and the impact of nar-

ratives (see the ﬁnal section) upon the human imagination all play signiﬁ-

cant roles in his understanding of ethical life. Kant attempts to identify a

variety of nonmoral motivations and contexts that help humans to lead a

life that at least conforms outwardly to attitudes and actions that respect

others as ends in themselves, even if not from principled motives. Thus,

one must work with, and not wholly against (as with Rousseau), aesthetic

humanity (by cultivating sociability and a compassionate character) to

create a “disposition of reciprocity” and a concern for others that, at least

on the surface, accords with moral behaviour.

It is important to note that all of these efforts are on the level of cul-

tural humanity, of cultural agency, for they depend, in varying degrees,

upon the powers of memory, imagination, and beauty and thus attend to

the experiences that contextualize and inform human practices and judge-

ments, not simply upon rational calculations. Elaborating his earlier

claims about aesthetic humanity, Kant argues in the Doctrine of Virtue

that there is a duty—of a conditional or indirect kind, given that it is not

a duty from moral principle—to attempt to make oneself susceptible to

the emotional (or “aesthetic”) feelings that help bring about outwardly

moral judgements and acts.

Kant explains that this works at the level of

humanity because it concerns humans as reasonable beings who are also

structured by the stirrings of care and affection that one can ﬁnd in ani-

mals as well, rather than referring to humans as purely rational beings (or

persons).

Sympathetic joy and sadness (sympathia moralis) are sensible feelings of pleasure

or displeasure (which are therefore to be called “aesthetic”) at another’s state

of joy or pain (shared feeling, sympathetic feeling). Nature has already im-

planted in human beings receptivity to these feelings. But to use this as a means

to promoting active and rational benevolence is still a particular, though only a

conditional, duty. It is called the duty of humanity (humanitas) because a hu-

man being is regarded here not merely as a rational being but also as an animal

endowed with reason. Now, humanity can be located either in the capacity

[Verm ¨ogen] and the will to share in others’ feelings (humanitas practica) or

merely in the receptivity, given by nature itself, to the feeling of joy and sadness

in common with others (humanitas aesthetica). (6:456)

We have a duty, according to Kant, to help engender active sympathy by

making ourselves open to the emotional receptivity to the pain or joy of

others—an indirect duty, in Kant’s terms, to help realize our practical

humanity by cultivating our aesthetic humanity. As we have seen in this

section, one way to satisfy this duty, for those who can, is to enter the

sociable world of communicative sites to develop, in a parochial fashion,

152 CHAPTER FOUR

a character that can resemble a humane citizen of the world. Kant further

elaborates the moral psychology presupposed by such duties in the fol-

lowing signiﬁcant passage:

[W]hile it is not in itself a duty to share the sufferings (as well as the joys) of

others, it is a duty to sympathize actively in their fate; and to this end it is

therefore an indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic [¨as-

thetische]) feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympa-

thy based on moral principles and the feeling appropriate to them.—It is there-

fore a duty not to avoid the places where the poor who lack the most basic

necessities are to be found but rather to seek them out, and not to shun sick-

rooms or debtors’ prisons and so forth in order to avoid sharing painful feelings

one may not be able to resist. For this is still one of the impulses that nature has

implanted in us to do what the representation of duty alone might not accomplish.

(6:457, emphasis added)

Aesthetic humanity, then, is a particular instantiation of humanity as cul-

tural agency, one that could produce inequalities and injustices, but

which could also, at its best, foster the social conditions for moral

reciprocity.

The idea that duty itself might not accomplish much on its own leads

Kant to question both the efﬁcacy of moral principle alone and of a cos-

mopolitan disposition. While Kant is frequently portrayed as slighting the

role of emotions and local commitments in building a moral life, passages

like the one above and, in general, his defence of some forms of polite or

sociable activity, suggest that he was sceptical that humans would (even

though they could) act upon humanitarian moral principles alone. In a

late essay, The End Of All Things (1794), Kant argues that love, despite

its potentially parochial and prejudicial character, is nevertheless indis-

pensable for a moral life, even though such a life can ultimately be de-

fended morally according to how much respect is given to human beings

as such (whether or not they are “one’s own”). As a matter of moral

psychology and of moral practice, Kant argues that there must be a mu-

tually reinforcing sense of local and universal affections.

Respect is without doubt what is primary, because without it no true love can

occur, even though one can harbor great respect for a person without love. But

if it is a matter not merely of the representation of duty but also of following

duty, if one asks about the subjective ground of actions from which, if one may

presuppose it, the ﬁrst thing we may expect is what a person will do—and not a

matter merely of the objective ground of what he ought to do—then love, as a

free assumption of the will of another into one’s maxims, is an indispensable

complement to the imperfection of human nature (of having to be necessitated

to that which reason prescribes through the law). For what one does not do

KANT ON HUMANITY AND CULTURE 153

with liking [gern] he does in such a niggardly fashion—also probably with

sophistical evasions from the command of duty—that the latter [moral duty] as

an incentive, without the contribution of the former [love], is not very much to

be counted on. (8:337–38)

In contemporary debates about patriotism versus cosmopolitanism,

Kant is often viewed understandably as the historical standard bearer of

the cosmopolitan camp.

What many have failed to note, however, is

that Kant himself believed that while every individual should be a “friend

of human beings as such (i.e., of the whole race)” (6:472), such cosmo-

politan sentiments in his view are usually too thin to motivate humane

behaviour. As he notes in the Doctrine of Virtue,

Now the benevolence present in love for all human beings is indeed the great-

est in its extent, but the smallest in its degree; and when I say that I take an

interest in this human being’s well-being only out of my love for all human

beings, the interest I take is as slight as an interest can be. I am only not

indifferent with regard to him. (6:451)

In his lectures on ethics from 1793, Kant expresses similar concerns in a

discussion about “patriotism”, “love for a particular group”, and “cos-

mopolitanism”.

He argues that group loyalty (“love for a particular

group, or common obligation under a particular rule, to which there

arises by custom a distinctive appearance”) and cosmopolitanism (“a gen-

eral love . . . for the entire human race”) are both fraught with dangers.

In considering “the love for societies, for orders of freemasonry, for the

station one belongs to, and for sects such as the Herrenhuter [the Mora-

vian brotherhood who in North America became known as the Hut-

terites]”, Kant worries that such attachments “could be detrimental to

the propensity for a general love of mankind” because, from the stand-

point of any one member, “the class of men with whom he stands in no

connection seems to become indifferent”. Given the cosmopolitan un-

derstanding that many have of Kant’s ethics, this should come as no

surprise, but he then turns his sceptical eye toward the cosmopolitan:

“the friend of humanity, on the other hand, seems equally open to cen-

sure, since he cannot fail to dissipate his inclination through its excessive

generality, and quite loses any adherence to individual persons”. (27:673)

As in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant’s concern is that in loving everyone

generally, the cosmopolitan loves no one in particular. Kant suggests that

the kind of loyalty that might avoid such pitfalls would be that of the

“cosmopolite” who possesses “a moral sense with dutiful global and local

patriotism” and who “in fealty to his country must have an inclination to

promote the well-being of the entire world.” (27:673–74) This would

stand in contrast, Kant argues, with the “error that the Greeks displayed,