Renewing Kant’s vision in this century
“The distinctive feature of our age is that mankind as a whole is on the way to becoming fully conscious of itself” (C.L.R. James).
This essay was first published as “Kant, ‘anthropology’ and the new human universal” (Hart 2010). We need a closer reading of Immanuel Kant’s vision for an anthropology conceived of more as lifelong, practical, and popular education than modern academic specialists have had any use for. Subjective individuals must learn how to combine personal experience with knowledge of an impersonal world in crisis. Emergent world society is the new human universal—not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association.
Previous universals—catholic, white racist, and bourgeois—were imposed by Western expansion over 500 years. They had no room for cultural particulars that are essential to human self-expression. Living in society must be personal and moral under laws made by democratic means. The early modern project (Humanism 1.0) is still mainly reflected in biographies that reduce our common human predicament to personal experience. Great literature and its digital successors lead individuals to discover their own versions of human truth through stories about specific personalities, relations, events, and places.
Academic anthropology based on ethnographic fieldwork reflects this principle, but it was subverted in the last century by becoming a specialist compartment of universities dedicated to meeting the bureaucratic needs of national capitalism. Whatever happens to that system, anthropology for this century must become a self-learning tool for anyone who cares about making a world society fit for all humanity. People everywhere should play their part in building a democratic world society based on freedom of movement, human equality, and social justice. Then students of the sciences—based on human ecology more than cosmology—history, philosophy, literature, ethnography, law, political economy, and religion could join an inter-disciplinary project inspired by the urgent need to build a global civil society. Humanism 2.0 would require each of us to learn how to reconcile the personal and impersonal dimensions of our common human predicament. A neo-Kantian anthropology could be indispensable to this task. See Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (Hart 2022a).
By ‘anthropology’, I refer here not to the academic institution but to human teleology in James’s sense above. We must improve our self-knowledge as people and as a species, especially the relationship between the two. Such a relationship has been mediated by a confusing variety of associations and identities that have been the prime focus of anthropology conceived of as a social science. What interests me and, I believe, a growing portion of humanity is how each of us relates to the whole, and only secondarily how social divisions mediate that relationship.
This version of anthropology has its origin in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s attempt to build democracy on a foundation of systematic knowledge of human nature, of what all human beings have in common, regardless of the arbitrary social inequalities under which most people labored. Its apogee was Immanuel Kant’s late work of the 1780s and 90s, towards the end of which he published Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant 2006 [1798]), the first book on anthropology as a discipline, drawing on university lectures that he had given for over two decades. The state coalitions of his time were bent on wars aiming to partition the world between them. Even so, he asked how humanity might construct a “perpetual peace” beyond state boundaries, based on principles that we all share (Kant 1795).
This “cosmopolitan” society of world citizens was a necessary bridge to the exercise of human reason at the species level. Kant held that humanity’s hardest task was the administration of justice worldwide. In the meantime, anthropology as an empirical human science must explore the cognitive, aesthetic and ethical universals on which such an idea of human unity might be founded. The categorical imperative to be good—in its Christian version, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—provided a moral link between individual persons and this emergent inclusive order.
Immanuel Kant started out as a geography lecturer in the East Prussian Baltic port of Königsberg—now Russian Kaliningrad. He became professor of mathematics, physics and philosophy and taught between 1755 and 1796. He gave courses on Logic 54 times, Metaphysics 49, and Physical Geography 46. Next came Moral Philosophy 28, Anthropology 24, Theoretical Physics 20, and Mathematics 16. Kant taught Natural Rights 12 times, Encyclopedia of Philosophy 11 times and others, including Education, less often (Buchner 2010:13). Kant made an important breakthrough in astronomy, but someone else was credited with it.
He published his first book at the age of 57; it marked his arrival as a philosopher. The three great Critiques of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgment came out between 1781 and 1790. In that period, he wrote a general essay, ‘Idea for a universal history with cosmopolitan purpose’ (1984). In a late burst, he produced Perpetual Peace: A philosophical sketch (1795), The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798); his lecture notes on education (pedagogy) were published shortly before his death (Kant 1803).
For most of history, information was scarce, handed down by experts employed by the ruling powers. In my old university, teachers carried scrolls in their gowns’ deep pockets and read them out for payment. Students ended up with a personal copy. The ability to interpret these manuscripts took more effort. The print revolution put the Bible in the hands of vernacular readers. They made their own connection to God. Printing took a line of business away from the hacks with gowns. The emphasis in learning shifted to interpretation and understanding.
Newspapers, novels and pamphlets proliferated in the late eighteenth century. This abundant information posed new problems. Reading now had to be selective. This was dangerous: who knew which powerful person would take offence at being ignored? Immanuel Kant wrote his Critiques in this context. He asked how we get to know the world, achieve our purposes, and make judgments. His Critique of Judgment (1790) was the most influential single work in the nineteenth century.
Kant paved the way for the mass media. The sender/receiver relationship was still unequal, however. Today the internet provides many options for engaging with the world as a producer in one’s own right. It is not surprising that, after millennia of restricted self-expression, interaction between persons broadcasting to the world through social media is until now most unruly and even reduces our ability to make society. Communication, moreover, is hamstrung by the censorship of authoritarian states and by bureaucratic capitalism, with its command-and-control methods and intellectual property regime. The project of achieving democratic means of producing, distributing, and consuming information has barely begun and likely deteriorated in the last century. Human conversation is more reliably advanced by readers and listeners, each of whom brings a unique personal experience and reading history to the interaction. No more than in Kant’s time have we shaken off deference to writers and lecturers who get stuck in a groove and often repeat themselves (Hart 2015).
In his first book, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant’s main discovery was that society may be as much an expression of individual subjectivity as a collective force out there. Copernicus solved the problem of the movement of the heavenly bodies, which appeared to revolve around the spectator, by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest. Kant extended this achievement for physics into metaphysics. In his Preface he wrote: “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects.... but what if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?” (Kant 2008:22).
To understand the world, we must begin not with empirical perception of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our personal experience and in all the judgments each of us has made. That is, society is inside us as much as it is out there. Our task is to unite the two poles as subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge must be personal and moral before it is defined by laws imposed on us from above.
Kant published Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in 1798. It was based on lectures he had given at the university since 1772. His aim was to attract the public to an independent discipline whose name he more than anyone contributed to academic life. Remarkably, histories of anthropology have rarely mentioned this work, perhaps because the discipline has evolved far away from Kant’s original premises, pretending to scientific objectivity when studying society as an impersonal object. It would pay us to take his Anthropology seriously, if only for its resonance with our own times. Work was once conceived of as being performed by collective ‘hands’. In the present context of digital communications, it is to a rapidly growing extent carried out by subjective individuals.
Kant wrote Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch (1795). The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw its own share of ‘globalization’—the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, the rise of British industry, and the international movement to abolish slavery. Kant knew that coalitions of states were gearing up for war, yet he responded to this sense of the world coming closer together by proposing how humanity might form society as world citizens beyond the boundaries of states. He held that “cosmopolitan right”, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, on the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility, even killed, when arriving on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally.
“The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity” (Kant 2003:18).
This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over two centuries ago, can now be seen as the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring—industrial capitalism and the nation-state. Kant’s essay, ‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose’ (1784) included the following propositions:
“1. In man—as the only rational creature on earth—those natural faculties which aim at the use of reason shall be fully developed in the species, not in the individual.
2. The means that nature employs to accomplish the development of all faculties is the antagonism of men in society, since this antagonism becomes, in the end, the cause of a lawful order of this society.
3. The latest problem for mankind, the solution of which nature forces us to seek, is the achievement of a civil society which is capable of administering law universally.
4. This problem is both the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.
5. A philosophical attempt to write a universal world history according to a plan of nature which aims at perfect civic association of mankind should be considered possible and even capable of furthering nature’s purpose” (Kant 1997: 42-45).
In the 1790s, Kant probably had libraries and newspapers in mind, C.L. R. James in the 1960s global political movements and radio. We must learn how to cope with the convergence of phones, television, and computers in the digital revolution, when our national societies have been destroyed by financial imperialism. Our world is much more socially integrated than two centuries ago and its economy is breaking all records for inequality. Histories of the universe we inhabit do seem to be indispensable to the construction of institutions capable of administering justice worldwide. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century is an urgent one and anthropological visions should play their part in that.
The Scots philosopher, David Hume, once paid Kant a visit and asked him why, as a cosmopolitan philosopher, he never left home. “People come to Königsberg”, was the reply, “you came to Königsberg”. He interviewed Portuguese and Dutch sailors in the harbor to find out how they maintained order at sea beyond the reach of states. His aesthetic principle was common sense in its double forms, mental and material—as good company, good food and good conversation (Wardle 1995). Sometimes, it seems, the spectator may be at rest while the heavens turn. Immanuel Kant died at the age of 80 in 1804, the year of Haiti’s independence after the only successful slave revolution in world history (James 1938).
References
Barone, F. and K. Hart. 2015. The Open Anthropology Cooperative: Towards an online public anthropology, Chapter 9 in S. Pink and S. Abram, Media, Anthropology and Public Engagement. Oxford: Berghahn.
Buchner, E. 2010 [1904]. The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant. Whitefish MT: Ketteridge.
Burke, P. 1985. Vico. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Childe, V.G. 1954. Man Makes Himself. London: Moonraker.
De Tocqueville. A. 2003 [1840]. American Democracy. London: Penguin.
Fustel de Coulanges, N.D. 2017 [1864]. The Ancient City: A study on the religion, laws and institutions of Greece and Rome. Online: Create Space Platform.
Goody, J. 1976. Production and Reproduction: A comparative study of the domestic domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graeber, D. 2010. Debt: The first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.
Hart, K. 2002. World society as an old regime. In S. Nugent and C. Shore eds. Elite Cultures: Anthropological perspectives. London: Routledge, 22-36.
-----. 2003. Studying world society as a vocation, Goldsmiths Papers in Anthropology No. 9.
-----. 2008 The human economy. ASAOnline 01.1.
-----. 2009. An anthropologist in the world revolution, Anthropology Today 25/6: 24-25.
-----. 2010. Kant, ‘anthropology’ and the new human universal, Social Anthropology 18: 441–447.
-----. 2012. Anthropology, in B. Fine and A. Saad-Filho (eds) The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 22-27.
-----. 2015. Cultural critique, anthropological, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition: 382–387.
-----. 2021. Scale the world down, scale up the self, bridge the gap.
-----. 2022a. Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
-----. 2022b. On Marcel Mauss: How to engage with humanity, including your own. MAUSS International Digital Journal No. 2: 492-514.
-----. 2024. The rise and fall of national capitalism. Article and forum discussion, Economic Anthropology (January).
James, C.L.R. 1980 [1948]. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. London: Allison & Busby.
-----. 1989 [1938]. Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution. New York: Vintage Books.
Kant, I. 1987 [1790]. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett Classics.
-----. 1997 [1784]. Idea for a universal history with cosmopolitan purpose, in Kant: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 41-51.
-----. 2003 [1795]. Perpetual Peace: A philosophical sketch. Indianapolis: Hackett.
-----. 2006 [1978]. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-----. 2008 [1781]. Critique of Pure Reason (Norman Kemp Smith). Google Books.
-----. 2012 [1803]. On Education, (Ann Churton). New York: Dover.
-----. 2016 [1797]. The Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, M. 2010 (1989). Liar’s Poker: Rising through the wreckage of Wall Street. New York: Norton.
Marx, K. 1970 (1867). Capital: The Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Miller, D. 2010. Anthropology in blue jeans, American Ethnologist 37.3: 415-428.
Mintz, S. 1960. Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican life history. New York: W.W. Norton.
Portnoy, F. I999. FIASCO: The inside story of a Wall Street trader. New York: Penguin.
Tett, G. 2003. Saving the Sun: A Wall Street gamble to rescue Japan from its trillion-dollar meltdown. New York: Random House.
-----. 2009. Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. Florence MA: Free Press.
-----. 2016. The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers. New York: Simon & Schuster.
-----. 2022. Anthro-vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life. New York: Simon & Schuster (Avid Reader Press).
Thom, M. 1995. Republicans, Nations and Tribes. London: Verso.
Vico, G. 1999 [1725]. New Science. London: Penguin.
Wardle, H. 1995. Kingston, Kant and common sense, Cambridge Anthropology, 18.3: 40-55.
Weisweiler, J. Editor. 2022. Debt in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Credit, Money, and Social Obligation. New York: Oxford University Press.