Kant's Question

We need to show how the literature here, although often uncertain, does prefigure our statement that Kant’s essay proposes, not a solution, but a question asked by Kant, Kant’s Challenge. Kant’s essay seems ambiguous. It seems to ask a question, and then produce ‘asocial sociability’ as the answer. But that, surely, is not the point. Kant senses correctly that he is not yet in a position to answer his own question. Thus his question is projected into the future. With the discovery of Sumer, and the Axial Age, the pot begins to boil.

A passage from Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate, might throw light on the question. “The ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmological Plan/intention Point of View’ is only a preliminary essay. Not only are its nine propositions thrown together in a seemingly unsystematic manner, reminiscent of Aristotle’s treatment of the categories, Kant even emphasizes from the very outset that this little essay will be withdrawn in favor of a universal history written by an as yet unknown philosopher of the future. In the footnote added to the title Kant explains that the essay was undertaken on the occasion of certain rumor that happened to make its way into a journal; this rumor ‘forces me to make a clarification, without which it would not make any sense’. Kant needs to show that one of his ideas and indeed a ‘cherished idea’ is not only founded on reason but even bound up with the very point of human rationality. This idea is cherished to the point of eroticism, the issues of priority and succession are thereby implicated in its general movement. Simply stated, the idea invites one to think that a ‘philosophical writer of history’ might one day appear and, after having established himself as a successor to Kant, compose a world-history that, since it is itself based on the ‘final purpose of the human race’, will be able to measure how far we have traveled with respect to our cherished goal. [Footnote below] To justify his remark, therefore, Kant will have to demonstrate that history in its entirety is not without sense, direction, and ultimate destination. Footnote: The remark attributed to Kant that happened to make its way into the Gothaische gelehrete Zeitung runs in part: ‘A cherished idea of Professor Kant is that the ultimate purpose of the human race is to achieve the most perfect state-constitution, and he wishes that a philosophical writer of history might undertake to give us a history of humanity from this point of view, and to shows to what extent humanity in various ages has approached or drawn away from the final purpose and what remains to be done in order to reach it’ ”.[i]

[i] Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate, (Ithaca: Cornell, 1991), p. 85. Note also Fenves’ remarks on the transition from an ‘idea for a universal history’ to ‘idea of a universal history’, at the point where the project of a world history is brought to fruition. Consider also this passage from Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: “There is a certain irony in the fact that the little philosopher—Kant was only five foot tall—who never left Königsberg wrote a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view. It corresponds perfectly, however, with Kant's abstracting mind as well as with the content of his philosophy. History, as he tells us, has to be looked at in its full, universal time sweep, for only in history as a whole is nature's purpose realized. And history has to be considered from a cosmopolitan point of view because its necessary goal is a ‘perfect civic constitution of mankind’, a point which Kant stresses not only in the Idea, but in Eternal Peace, where he defends ‘the idea of a cosmopolitan world law’ against the charge of utopianism. Kant begins the Idea by an assertion that human actions, like any other phenomena, are determined by general laws of nature. What appears accidental in the individual is determinate and predictable in the species. An example is marriage: although a marriage seems freely willed by the individual, yet the annual statistical tables exhibit a consistency which, according to Kant, show that marriages “occur according to stable natural laws”. Such a social phenomenon can be compared the oscillation of the weather: while we cannot predict individual states of affairs, we can rely on a regular support of the growth of plants, the flow of streams, and so forth, ‘at a uniform, uninterrupted pace’. The conclusion is one to warm the heart of Adam Smith. “Individual men,” Kant tells us, “and even whole nations, little think, while they are pursuing their own purposes—each in his own way, and often one in direct opposition to another—that they are unintentionally promoting, as if it were their guide, an end of nature, which is unknown to them.” Nevertheless, since man himself has neither instinct, like the animals, nor a rational plan of his own to guide him to a preconceived end, history, at first glance, seems pointless, like Shakespeare's ‘tale told by an idiot’. Or, as Kant puts it in typical Enlightenment fashion, ‘It is hard to suppress a certain disgust when contemplating men's actions upon the world stage.’

This disgust is relieved only by the discovery that “in this senseless march of human events” nature has a plan and an end. This discovery, however, is the philosopher's task, or rather Kant poses it as a problem for a future Kepler or Newton of the historical world. Kant himself will seek in the Idea only to provide a clue, or a guide, to this happy discovery. The whole point of Kant's attempt, however, is that he assumes from the beginning that man's random and free pursuits are to be considered as if they were subject to nature’s laws--which Kant, as we shall see, equates with an aim or purpose of nature.” Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History (Harper & Row, 1966), p. 103.