What is the Human Being?:
Kant’s Theory of Human
Nature
As should
be obvious, this is an extremely rough proposal/chapter outline. The overall
structure of the book is presently in flux, but this reflects my plans as of
January, 2009.
“The greatest concern of the human being is to know how to properly
fulfill his station in creation and to rightly understand what one must do in
order to be a human being.” (Immanuel Kant, from a set of handwritten notes
written in 1764 in his personal copy of Observations
on the Beautiful and Sublime, Ak. 20:41[1])
“The field of philosophy . . . can be
reduced to the following questions: What
can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is the human being? Metaphysics answers the first question,
morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally,
however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology.” (from Kant’s logic lectures, as compiled by
his student Jäsche in 1800, Ak. 9: 25)
1. Statement of aims
My proposal is to
write a monograph that answers
the question “What is the Human Being?” from a Kantian perspective, in active
dialogue with both historical and contemporary criticisms of and alternatives
to Kant. The book will be divided into three parts: the first will summarize
Kant’s answer to this question; the second will focus on criticisms of Kant’s
answer; and the last will defend a modified version of Kant’s answer in the
context of the some important contemporary ways of answering the question. The
overall goal of the book is twofold. First, it will offer a stimulating
introduction to Kant's thought through answering the question that he
considered to encompass his philosophy as a whole. My goal here is do justice
to both the rigorous and systematic Kant who developed the Critical
philosophy for which he is famous today and the Kant who was enormously popular with his students, the Kant
who helped develop the disciplines that have become the “human sciences,” a
Kant attuned to the uniqueness of the human condition. Second, the book will
show importance of Kant's question for philosophy today by interacting with
alternative accounts of human nature to develop the kind of broadly Kantian
theory that can play a significant role in contemporary discussions of human
nature. The ultimate objective is a book that is informative and provocative
not only for Kant scholars, but for anyone interested in human nature, even
those with no prior exposure to Kant, whether they be other professional
philosophers, students, scholars and practitioners of the human sciences, or
sophisticated members of the general public.
The book will seek to balance
scholarly rigor and creativity with popular accessibility. Although I plan to write the book at a
sufficiently high level that it may not be readily accessible to those without any philosophy background, I will not
depend upon prior exposure to Kant nor upon extensive philosophical training.
At the same time, I to plan to write a work that will be challenging and
informative to Kant specialists. Kant’s theory of human nature has only
recently undergone systematic study, and this will be the first book-length
study to provide a overall account of Kant’s answer to the question “What is
the Human Being?”, a question that has impact on all of Kant’s more widely
studied philosophical claims. By situating issues of metaphysics, epistemology,
ethics, aesthetics, and history in the context of this broader question, I aim
to challenge contemporary treatments of Kant in all of those areas, while at
the same time pushing forward in a significant way the recent interest in Kant
as philosophical anthropologist.
2. Table of contents/chapter synopsis
Chapter 1: Introduction. In addition to a brief account of Kant’s
life, works, and times, the introduction will focus on the importance of the
question “What is the Human Being?” both for our own contemporary context and
for Kant. In this context I will define the question more precisely and briefly
sketch some of the dominant approaches to human nature today. In particular, I
argue that what gives this question urgency is its connection to both empirical
science and practical life. Include a
brief survey of human nature before Kant. 4,000 WORDS
Part One: Kant’s Answer
Chapter
2: Kant’s ‘Critical’ Account of the Human Being. Chapter 3 covers the “big picture” of Kant’s
account of human nature: the importance of freedom in Kant’s ethics, the nature
of human “science,” and how Kant’s transcendental idealism makes it possible
both to describe human beings empirically and to make sense of human freedom. (Here
I draw primarily from Kant’s three Critiques
and related smaller works, such as the Prolegomena
and the Groundwork.) 11,000 WORDS
Chapter
3: Observing the Human Being. After a brief discussion of the
problems that Kant identifies with a science of human nature and even with
trying to observe human beings, this chapter focuses on Kant’s empirical
account of human beings. Here I draw primarily from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Anthropology, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, historical essays,
and lectures on empirical psychology, anthropology, ethics, and (applied)
logic. In addition to providing a
general overview of the structure of Kant’s empirical account of general human
faculties and predispositions, I also specifically discuss the status of
anthropology as an empirical discipline (but not a “science” in the strict
sense). 11,000 WORDS
Chapter 4: Human Evil and Human
History. This chapter
discusses Kant’s approach to humans'
“radical evil.” I argue that this account is fundamentally an empirical one
(contra Henry Allison) and thus that it belongs within Kant’s anthropology, but
I also show the way in which Kant’s account of the nature and moral importance
of radical evil depends upon his Critical account of the human being. Finally, I show why Kant’s distinctive
approach to radical evil is important for his moral philosophy, as well as how
it fits into his philosophy of history. 8,000 WORDS
Chapter 5: Human
Diversity. This chapter takes
up Kant’s accounts of variations among individuals,
races, and sexes, including discussions of their historical context. In this
chapter, I also address the issue of the extent to which Kant’s claims about
human diversity are compatible with the rest of his anthropology and with his
universalist ethics. 6,000 WORDS
Chapter 6: Pragmatic
Anthropology. This chapter shows
how Kant pulls together transcendental-moral and empirical dimensions of human
nature into a new sort of human science, a popular “pragmatic anthropology”
that aims at “the investigation of what [the human being] as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of
himself” (7:119). 6,000 WORDS
Part two: Responses to Kant
Chapter 7: From Kant to German
Idealism
7,000 WORDS
Chapter 8: German Idealism to the 20th Century 7,000 WORDS
Chapter 8’: Key Criticisms of
Kant’s Account of Human Nature 7,000 WORDS (or cut altogether?)
Part three: What is the Human Being Today?
Chapter 9: Human Sciences and Naturalism:
Brains, Genes, xxx . Here I
will focus on three central accounts of the human being. First, I will look at
broadly Darwinist accounts, including
Second, I’ll look at some
philosophy of the human sciences to situate Kant’s account of the nature of
human sciences vis a vis contemporary approaches to the philosophy of the human
sciences. In particular, I’ll look at
alternatives to Kant’s claim that anthropology cannot be scientific but should
be both empirical and pragmatic. ALSO DO FOR PHIL BIOLOGY. 8,000 WORDS
Chapter 10: Historicism and Existentialism.
Kuhn, Foucault, Heidegger,
Sartre. 8,000 WORDS
Chapter 11: Getting normative. Basically, new attempts to work through the transcendental perspective on human beings. Classic: phenomenology in Husserl—Heidegger and Logic/Linguistic turn in Frege, Wittgenstein, etc.
Recent:
Chapter 12: Radical Evil in a Post-Holocaust World. This chapter will look at radical evil in the 21st century from two perspectives. First, I argue that much mainstream work in both (moral) philosophy and the human sciences ignores even the possibility of radical evil in Kant’s sense, as a universal, individual, and deeply rooted source of moral evil in human life. Second, I look at recent work on evil, much of which is heavily influenced by reflections on the Holocaust. Here I am interested at least three basic alternatives to Kant. One, reflected in work like Blanchot’s Writing the Disaster (but no doubt better elsewhere; I need to track this down), emphasizes the inscrutability of evil to a degree that goes far beyond what Kant would have allowed. A second, encapsulated in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (but also interestingly represented in Derrida and even Levinas), emphasizes the banality of evil (and even a sort of compatibility between evil and dutifulness in a quasi-kantian sense). A third alternative insists on the possibility of what Kant calls “diabolical evil,” that is, a sort of doing of evil for its own sake. 6,000 WORDS
Chapter 13: Human Nature and Human Diversity. In this chapter, I’ll briefly lay out some of the central philosophical issues related to dealing with racial, ethnic, sex, and gender difference, as well as individual difference and then differences to which Kant did not give much attention (class, sexual orientation, disability, etc). (I should note that I’m putting chapter 16 here for symmetry with the rest of the book. Ideally, I’d prefer to end this Part with radical evil, since it seems a more important chapter. I can’t quite figure out which order will work better overall.) 6,000 WORDS or just cut altogether? (Perhaps collapse into chapter 10?)
Conclusion
Chapter 14: “The Greatest Concern of the Human Being”. Discussing why Kant’s overall approach to the human being is so important, how it can inform how we live our lives (“fulfill our station in creation”), how Kant’s approach can help us use but not abuse the insights of biology and social sciences, how Kant’s approach – both re: the science of anthropology, the critical approach, and the universalist ethics – can help re: issues of human diversity, why recognizing radical evil is so important for fulfilling our station and for a realistic approach to the world, etc. End with a focus on pragmatic anthropology as a need that bridge the gap between philosophy and the recent new human sciences xxx. Talk here about ameliorative psychology vs. pragmatic anthropology, xxx. 4,000 WORDS
[1] Throughout, references to Kant’s works
are to volume and page number in the Akademie Edition of Kant’s works.