Muthu S. Enlightenment against Empire

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174 CHAPTER FIVE

what Kant calls a distinctively “human choice” in the introduction to The

Metaphysics of Morals. I have called this particular kind of freedom “cul-

tural agency”, for it indicates both the freedom and the context from

which such freedom is exercised; moreover, it incorporates Kant’s own

use of the term Kultur in association with the distinctive aspects of rea-

son and freedom that, for him, fundamentally constitute humanity.

Thus, in the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant returns to the concept of human-

ity as cultural agency in the course of describing an ethical duty to perfect

one’s distinctively human powers. He writes that “Natural perfection is

the cultivation of any capacities whatever [aller Verm¨ogen ¨uberhaupt] for

furthering ends set forth by reason.” (6:391) “Reason” in this context

refers to the cognitive ability whereby we choose a multiplicity of ends,

ends that are sometimes antecedently provided by tradition or custom or,

at times, creatively fashioned. In other words, Kant is not referring to the

moral aim of acting out of duty for duty’s sake; he is careful to distin-

guish in this section between moral and natural perfection. That humans

have such cultural capacities or powers and that we make use of them at

least minimally is, for Kant, a brute anthropological fact. Yet, as noted

earlier, either through indolence (see the Groundwork) or, more disturb-

ingly, through the lack of sufﬁcient opportunities because of social in-

equalities and political oppression (see The Metaphysics of Morals), such

human powers can remain woefully underdeveloped. Kant argues else-

where that the latter problems can be mitigated through the abolishment

of serfdom and hereditary nobility, governmental funding for education

and charitable institutions, and private acts of beneﬁcence. Whatever the

prevailing social and political conditions, however, Kant argues in the

Doctrine of Virtue that we should cultivate such capacities in order to

realize, as much as possible, the potential of the humanity (the cultural

agency) in our person:

The capacity to set oneself an end—any end whatsoever—is what characterizes

humanity (as distinguished from animality). Hence there is also bound up with

the end of humanity in our own person the rational will, and so the duty, to

make ourselves worthy of humanity by culture in general, by procuring or pro-

moting the capacity to realize all sorts of possible ends, so far as this [capacity]

is to be found in the human being himself. In other words, the human being

has a duty to cultivate the crude predispositions of his nature, by which the

animal is ﬁrst raised into the human being. (6:392)

As we are now in a position to discern, Kant distills some of his previous

treatments of humanity as cultural agency into this passage: the Conjec-

tures provides a speculative narrative of an animal raising itself “into the

human being” by redescribing Genesis in philosophical anthropological

terms, and the Religion attempts to survey the most fundamental natural

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 175

predispositions of animality and humanity. Kant’s position on natural per-

fection suggests that treating the humanity in our person as an end it

itself involves, in part, the duty to oneself of cultivating this very humanity.

Here we ﬁnd Kant employing a traditional use of the term culture, as he

himself recognizes, for its Latin root, cultura, means simply to tend, nur-

ture, or cultivate. As he writes in the Doctrine of Virtue, a “human being

has a duty to himself to cultivate (cultura) his natural powers (powers of

spirit, mind, and body), as means to all sorts of possible ends.” (6:444)

Kant stresses two crucial features of this duty. First, it is a duty only

toward oneself, not toward others. As I have noted, Kant was concerned

about promoting social and political conditions that would be conducive

to human development or ﬂourishing, but the direct ordering of an-

other’s life choices would violate the independent freedom and attendant

anti-paternalism that are central to his understanding of a digniﬁed, en-

lightened life. To be sure, this involves difﬁcult questions of where one

draws the line between creating conditions for others that are necessary

for their agency and determining one’s own agency directly, but there

does not seem to be any patent inconsistency in being committed both

to eradicating slavishness and poverty, or positively stated, to developing

both an independent character as well as fruitful and just social condi-

tions from which “culture in general” can develop widely. Second, like

many duties of virtue in his thought, the duty of one’s own perfection is

a ‘wide’ or ‘imperfect’ duty. While we are under a general duty to culti-

vate our constitutively human powers, each individual should decide the

kind and the extent of such self-development, for reason itself provides

no universal rule that issues categorically any particular cultural goal or

even the extent to which any one goal should be realized.

No rational principle prescribes speciﬁcally [bestimmt] how far one should go in

cultivating one’s capacities (in enlarging or correcting one’s capacity for under-

standing, i.e., in acquiring knowledge or skill [Kunstf¨ahigkeit]).... With re-

gard to natural perfection, accordingly, there is no law of reason for actions.

(6:392)

Moreover, the kinds of self-development that individuals pursue will vary

widely according to the differing contexts within which they live. As he

notes,

the different situations in which human beings may ﬁnd themselves make a

human being’s choice [Wahl] of the occupation for which he should cultivate

his talents very much a matter for him to decide as he chooses [sehr will-

k¨urlich]. (6:392)

Here again one ﬁnds Kant defending a form of freedom, or self-deter-

mination, not as a radical conception of autonomy that abstracts from

176 CHAPTER FIVE

social contexts, but precisely in light of the situated circumstances of

actual human beings. In addition, the diversity of human choice that

Kant recommends follows from his recognition of the diversity of con-

texts within which humans lead their lives. In his view, this is a diversity

that must be incorporated, not eviscerated, by any proper account of

ethical life.

Kant outlines three broad powers that he takes all humans to have, but

that each human will develop in different proportions; the speciﬁc bal-

ance of developed powers will vary among individuals because of their

differing backgrounds and, ideally, their own judgements as to whether

they are capable of cultivating different balances of these powers to the

extent necessary for engaging in various pursuits. “Powers of spirit”, Kant

writes, refer to the creative rational abilities that are required, for in-

stance, in logic and mathematics. “Powers of soul [Seelenkr¨afte]”, which

Kant also calls the powers of mind, refer to capabilities that are dis-

tinctively human and that he believes are the “highest” of the human

faculties, presumably because they best represent what is truly human and

enable a wide variety of human thought and action.

Such powers are

those which are at the disposal of understanding and the rule it uses to fulﬁll

whatever purposes one might have, and because of this experience is their

guide. They include memory, imagination and the like, on which can be built

learning, taste (internal and external embellishment) and so forth, which fur-

nish instruments for a variety of purposes. (6:445)

Finally, Kant writes, “cultivating the powers of the body . . . is looking

after the basic stuff (the matter) in a human being, without which he

could not realize his ends. Hence the continuing and purposive invigora-

tion of the animal in him is an end of a human being that is a duty to

himself.” (6:445) Kant takes the body to be an integral part of the

human being that has great value and should therefore be cultivated.

Hence, he argues elsewhere on the topic of ethical asceticism that the

body should not be punished by those attempting to lead a pure moral

life—morality, in short, should not involve harshly disciplining the body.

Rather, a proper understanding of morality, in Kant’s view, demands that

we cultivate the body, although the kind and extent of such cultivation is

a matter for each individual to decide.

Again, the anti-paternalism of Kant’s view must be underscored. In

discussing ends that are also duties, Kant lists two kinds: promoting one’s

own (not others’) perfection, in the manner that we have discussed, and

the happiness of others, for instance, by improving social and political

conditions or through individual acts of kindness and beneﬁcence. Im-

portantly, Kant argues that it cannot be a duty either to perfect others or

to make oneself happy.

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 177

Perfection and happiness cannot be interchanged here, so that one’s own happi-

ness and the perfection of others would be made ends that would be in them-

selves duties of the same person. For his own happiness is an end that every

human being has (by virtue of the impulses of his nature), but this end can

never without self-contradiction be regarded as a duty. What everyone already

wants unavoidably, of his own accord, does not come under the concept of

duty.... So too, it is a contradiction for me to make another’s perfection my

end and consider myself under obligation to promote this. For the perfection of

another human being, as a person, consists just in this: that he himself is able

[verm¨ogen ist] to set his end in accordance with his own concepts of duty; and

it is self-contradictory to require that I do (make it my duty to do) something

that only the other himself can do. (6:386)

Thus, it seems clear why Kant’s theory of human perfection ﬁts within

the category of imperfect duties, duties that allow a wide latitude within

which individuals themselves can determine the precise judgements nec-

essary to lead their lives. Kant, then, argues that individuals should bal-

ance and perfect the three natural human powers as they see ﬁt.

Which of these natural perfections should take precedence, and in what propor-

tion one against the other it may be a human being’s duty to himself to make

these natural perfections his end, are matters left for him to choose in accor-

dance with his own rational reﬂection about what sort of life he would like to

lead and whether he has the powers necessary for it.... (6:445)

We will see later that, when applied to groups of humans, Kant’s argu-

ment against attempting to perfect others and the wide latitude that he

recommends individuals should have to determine their own lives will

inform some of his anti-imperialist arguments.

From Kant’s perspective, even if humans lead their lives simply within

the range that their natural powers themselves afford, and thus only to

satisfy their most basic needs, they are still not purely natural or instinc-

tually determined creatures, but rather humans who have decided by

means of their free faculties not to engage in any further development of

their capacities. “Even supposing”, Kant argues, that a human being

could be satisﬁed with the innate scope of his capacities for his natural needs,

his reason must ﬁrst show him, by principles, that this meagre scope of his

capacities is satisfactory; for, as a being capable [f¨ahig] of ends (of making

objects his ends), he must owe the use of his powers not merely to natural

instinct but rather to the freedom by which he determines their scope.

(6:444)

Such a hypothetical case suggests not a determined being, stripped of all

culture and freedom, but a cultural agent who expresses through his life-

style a self-conscious desire not to engage in self-cultivation beyond de-

veloping the abilities that are necessary to make effectual his most basic,

178 CHAPTER FIVE

life-sustaining activities. Thus, cultural agency runs to the very core of

what it is to be human—it runs, as it were, all the way down and, hence,

if stripped away from humans through a Rousseauian counter-factual

mental exercise, nothing that could be described meaningfully as funda-

mentally human would remain.

Bound up with Kant’s view of humanity and human ﬂourishing is an

account of the wide latitude that humans have (and, increasingly, should

have, given felicitous social and political reforms) in making their deter-

minations of value, beauty, work, and other forms of cultural life. Cul-

tural agency necessarily involves acts of freedom, a freedom that is guided

not by categorical or absolute judgements, but by relative or comparative

judgements about what will satisfy us or make us happy.

This sphere of

thought and action involves subjective preferences that are not thor-

oughly determined by our physiological (or ‘animal’) impulses, and that

are not taken simply because we place ourselves under a moral duty. In

light of what, then, are these preferences made? For any human being,

judging and choosing in light of experience involves, according to Kant,

“instruction . . . from observing himself and his animal nature [our most

basic instincts and needs] or from perceiving the ways of the world, what

happens and how we behave”. As Kant himself notes, his stringent use of

the words “moral” or “morality” differs from the common meaning of

these terms in his day, which correspond more to the conditions of cul-

tural humanity than to moral personality: “the German word Sitten, like

the Latin mores, means only manners and customs” (6:216). It is the

popular understanding of morality that Kant acknowledges with his theo-

rization of humanity, given his emphasis on customs, manners, the ways

of the world, and our determinations of how those around us behave. In

short, the latitude of human choice contains within it the rich complexity

and plurality of human life as well as the relativity and partiality of so

many of our judgements.

For Kant, these are the resources, then, that inform human choice,

choice that is constitutively human in contrast to a more abstract and

rational choice (an a priori, nonexperientially based choice). Emphasizing

the relativity of such human choices, Kant writes that

the preference of one state of determination of the will to another is merely [or

simply] an act of freedom (res merae facultatis, as jurists say), in regard to

which no account at all is taken of whether this (determination of the will) is

good or evil in itself, and is thus indifferent with respect to both. (8:282)

Such preferences, of course, might be oppressive and cruel; they might,

in Kant’s terms, use others simply as means for one’s own ends. Accord-

ingly, Kant reiterates his argument that our choices need to be checked

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 179

by the regulative idea of “a categorically commanding law of free choice

[der freien Willk¨ur] (i.e., of [moral] duty)”, in order to prohibit actions

in which oneself or others are used as mere things (8:282).

Nonetheless,

there is a signiﬁcant cultural space, as one might call it, that lies outside

the bounds of what is absolutely prohibited and that remains, from the

standpoint of a categorical morality, “morally permissible” or “morally

indifferent”. This does not entail that we have no standards at all to

guide us within this cultural space; rather, this domain of action and

deliberation is indeed subject to rules, values, and judgements, although

they vary enormously over time and place (and even for the same individ-

ual), and are thus not universal in scope. As we saw in the last chapter, by

induction from one’s varied experiences, Kant argues that it might be

possible for an individual to form generalities to make choices within this

wide sphere of morally permissible actions and judgements, but these

generalities would be merely rules of thumb, not universal principles.

Such standards are incommensurable, since there is no shared standard

that exists to adjudicate decisively among them. As cultural agents, then,

humans exercise what Kant describes as acts of freedom that are informed

by our experience: res merae facultatis.

An action that is neither commanded nor prohibited is merely permitted, since

there is no [universal] law limiting one’s freedom (one’s authorization) with

regard to it and so too no [moral] duty. Such an action is called morally indif-

ferent (indifferens, adiaphoron, res merae facultatis). (6:223)

The latitude of morally permissible cultural activity and choice is wide;

the room it affords to make diverse judgements and choices stems from

Kant’s limited account of universal morality, one that concerns itself only

with what is good in itself and, especially, what is wrong in itself.

Even

moral duties, as we have seen, while categorical in nature (e.g., every

human should help others in need, all humans should cultivate their own

capacities), often involve crucial judgements of kind and degree (whom

to help and how, which powers to develop and to what extent) that are

not prescribed by reason alone and that amount to much more than the

easy application of a universal norm. Thus, even a morally conscientious

human life, in Kant’s own account, requires the use of this experientially

informed and pluralistic freedom, or cultural agency. Fundamental ques-

tions of value, therefore, arise in our distinctively human (our cultural)

lives, but they are not about universal goods or evils, nor do they neces-

sarily concern the promotion of unselﬁsh incentives, for they are not de-

cisions made simply from duty, but are instead (as Kant calls them) “hu-

man choices” that are made according to partial and varying experiences.

Such choices are individual; they may be, and often are, informed by

social experience, but the ultimate judgements ought to be one’s own.

180 CHAPTER FIVE

This is bound up, in Kant’s thought, with the idea of enlightenment it-

self—sapere aude, or ‘daring to know’, entails a life of thinking and act-

ing for oneself, not wholly apart from the world or entirely autonomously

(as I have suggested, in Kant’s own view, this would be inhuman), but in

a manner that recognizes and respects the capacities that each of us, as

individuals, possesses. For Kant, then, acting and thinking for oneself

reciprocally implies respecting others’ actions and judgements—an anti-

paternalistic concept of enlightenment and a respect for a robust plural-

ism of attitudes and practices go hand in hand. Kant’s concept of enlight-

enment is often understood more narrowly as simply a call for individual

freedom, but it is also an invocation for what would follow from a grad-

ual liberation of such creative energies: a plurality of life-choices, as op-

posed to the stiﬂing uniformity of paternalistic authorities. But does Kant

defend this kind of cultural freedom for groups of humans as well, in

particular for non-European peoples? As I will show, Kant was just as

troubled by the paternalism that European imperial powers exhibited to-

ward non-European peoples as he was by the paternalism of political and

ecclesiastical authorities that disciplined and infantilized individuals

within European nations. But before I explore this question in depth, in

order to show how Kant’s accounts of humanity, pluralism, and anti-

paternalism apply to human groups, we must ﬁrst understand how Kant

categorizes the variety of peoples on the earth.

Anthropological Diversity: From Race

to Collective Freedom

In his mature or late writings, Kant deploys a tripartite sociological dis-

tinction among hunting, pastoral (nomadic herders), and agricultural

(sedentary) peoples that had been used in earlier eighteenth-century clas-

siﬁcations of peoples to differentiate the wide array of human groups.

Montesquieu, for instance, relies upon a similar division of peoples in The

Spirit of the Laws (1748):

One difference between savage peoples and barbarian peoples is that the former

are small scattered nations which, for certain particular reasons, cannot unite,

whereas barbarians are ordinarily small nations that can unite together. The

former are usually hunting peoples; the latter, pastoral peoples.

Montesquieu contrasts such peoples to those who cultivate their lands,

use money, and are ruled by civil laws: nations polic´ees, or civilized na-

tions. In addition, while Rousseau often contrasts simply “primitive” and

“civilized” peoples in the Discourse on Inequality, we know that he in-

tended to write a History of Morals [Moeurs (customary moralities)], the

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 181

table of contents of which indicates a distinction among savage, barbaric,

civilized (polic´es), working, and virtuous peoples; this system of classiﬁca-

tion in part seems to have been inﬂuenced by Montesquieu.

As we have

seen, Diderot also emphasizes the importance of peoples’ differing land-

use practices. And perhaps most famously, Scottish Enlightenment writ-

ings often employed a similar system of classiﬁcation—the so-called four-

stage theory of social development—that analyzed hunting, pastoral,

agricultural, and commercial societies.

As one would expect, Kant’s view of humanity as cultural agency inﬂu-

ences his conceptualization of human diversity as well. The most salient

differences among groups of humans and, more broadly, among nations

turn not upon biological or environmental differences, but simply upon

the different uses of the situated reason and freedom—the cultural agency—

that deﬁne us as creatures with humanity. Kant, in his delineation of

global human diversity, identiﬁes peoples exclusively by their activities as

cultural agents. This stands in contrast to two other strategies of coming

to terms with the diversity of peoples that eighteenth-century ethnogra-

phy presented: (1) dividing up the world’s peoples according to a theory

of biological or intrinsic ability (as race theorists would do en masse in

the nineteenth century, building upon the early development of the con-

cept of race in the eighteenth century, to which Kant himself contrib-

uted); and (2) focusing on environmentally induced characteristics (sloth,

industriousness, and so forth) that were said to be engendered by various

climates. Kant’s account of humanity as cultural agency leads him to treat

the most socially fundamental human activities, those around which en-

tire societies are organized and shaped, as central to an understanding of

the diversity of peoples. Accordingly, Kant presents hunting, pastoralist,

and agrarian pursuits as rationally chosen or sustained activities, not as

biologically (i.e., instinctually or racially) or climatically determined prac-

tices. A crucial consequence of this view is that nomadic peoples do not

lead the ‘natural’ lives of noble (or ignoble) savages, as opposed to the

‘artiﬁcial’ lives of the Chinese, the Europeans, or other agriculturalists.

Rather, they lead lives as humans, as cultural agents, and thus they con-

sciously continue to lead and to transform their lives as a result of dis-

tinctively human judgements, which are often, in his view, incommensur-

able and, thus, are not often amenable to universal moral censure. Kant’s

account of human diversity attends to the plurality of distinctively human

judgements—“culture in general”—that individuals and groups make

differently, and for which there often exists no objectively valid, universal

measure of superiority, moral goodness, or excellence.

Although this is not much noted, it is clear that Kant’s categorization

of the diversity of peoples underwent a transformation in his published

writings from the mid-1780s onward. The manner in which he concep-

182 CHAPTER FIVE

tualizes the plurality of humankind moves from an almost exclusive re-

liance upon the biological and hereditary concept of ‘race’ to the socio-

logical and activity-based concept of how peoples freely use the land on

which they live, which I sketched earlier and which I will later examine in

more detail. In his precritical period, and to a lesser extent in the early

years of his critical period (by convention, the years immediately follow-

ing the 1781 publication of the Critique of Pure Reason), Kant devel-

oped a theory of race in order to account for the diversity of mores and,

especially, for differences in skin colour and physiognomy both in pub-

lished essays and in his lectures on anthropology and physical geography.

While the nineteenth century constitutes the preeminent age of race-

based classiﬁcations, during which the language of race gained an explic-

itly political currency among many European thinkers, it is also the case

that the roots of race theory lie in a number of writings of the eighteenth

century, especially those by natural historians such as Buffon and Blumen-

bach, but also by late-eighteenth-century philosophers such as Kant.

Kant’s intellectual interest in the concept of race seems to have been

motivated by the need to explain biological inheritance, especially what

he viewed as the intriguing fact that skin colour passes from one genera-

tion to the next. In addition, as I mentioned in the last chapter, like

Buffon, Kant argues that the great variety of human beings, despite their

remarkable physical differences, all derive from a common source. Thus,

Kant vigorously opposed the multiple-origin theory that some of his con-

temporaries, such as Georg Forster, had defended and which suggested

that black Africans, for instance, were, strictly speaking, a different species

than white Europeans. Kant relied on the concept of climate to explain

the ultimate origins of physical differences, such as skin colour, among

humans; after many generations, he contends, such differences become

hereditary. In his 1775 essay, On the Different Races of Man (Von den

verschiedenen Racen der Menschen), Kant concludes that his theories

at least are substantial enough to be a counterweight to those other commen-

taries that ﬁnd the differences in the human genus so impossible to reconcile

that they prefer to assume discrete local creations.... Precisely because of

Nature’s propensity to adapt to the soil everywhere over long generations, the

human form must now everywhere be supplied with local modiﬁcations.

From a humanitarian perspective, the great danger of any race- and

climate-based theory is that predetermined characteristics (those arguably

determined by climate and/or by biological inheritance) might include

(and in race theories often do include) not simply physical features but

also intellectual capacities that, in turn, presumably affect the kinds of

mores, social practices, and political organizations of various peoples. Be-

fore Kant published any writings on the concept of race, he had already

KANT’S ANTI-IMPERIALISM 183

made such a judgement under the inﬂuence of David Hume’s notorious

suggestion about nonwhite peoples (or in his language, nonwhite “spe-

cies”). In a footnote to his essay “Of National Characters” (1748),

Hume airs the following suspicion:

I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men

(for there are four or ﬁve different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.

There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor

even any individual eminent either in action or speculations. No ingenious

manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most

rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient germans, the present

tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of

government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference

could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an

original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies,

there are negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discov-

ered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start

up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession.

Kant may have awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by reading Hume,

as the story goes, but in this case, he simply appropriated Hume’s preju-

dicial dogma. In the early work Observations on the Feeling of the Beauti-

ful and Sublime (1764), during the course of paraphrasing Hume’s con-

tention (though Kant limits his statement to “Negroes”), Kant concludes

that the mental capacities of black and white races may be fundamentally

different.

The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the triﬂing.

Mr Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has

shown talents.... So fundamental is the difference between these two races of

man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour.

Kant asserts that he will not inquire whether the differences among peo-

ples “are contingent and depend upon the times and the type of govern-

ment, or are bound by a certain necessity to the climate”, although in the

case above he clearly leans toward the latter.

His lectures on physical

geography clearly underscore a climate-based account of race and point

to the “certain necessity” of differences among humans, most notably of

their cognitive abilities.

In these early lectures, Kant gave a climatologi-

cal explanation for what he took to be the greater perfection of those in

temperate zones as well as for historical conquests of Europeans and cen-

tral Asians over the less temperate parts of the world.

In Kant’s later years, when he developed his theory of humanity as

cultural agency and his anti-imperialist political thought, the hierarchical

and biological concept of race disappears in his published writings.

Race