Anthropology as humanist education
Contents; Kant's Anthropology (1798); The new human universal.
Contents
Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (1798)
The new human universal is world society
Historical origins of our world’s current impasse
Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795)
The relevance of Kant’s cosmopolitan politics today
Renewing Kant’s vision in this century
References
Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)
Immanuel Kant summarized “philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word” as four questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is a human being? The first question is answered in metaphysics, the second in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in anthropology (Kant 2006: xii). But the first three questions “relate to anthropology”, he said, and might be subsumed under it.
Kant conceived of anthropology as an empirical discipline, but also as a means of moral and cultural improvement. It was thus both an investigation into human nature and, more especially, into how to modify it, as a way of providing students with practical guidance and knowledge of the world. He intended his lectures to be popular and of value in later life. Above all, his book was intended to contribute to the progressive political task of uniting world citizens by identifying the source of their ‘cosmopolitan bonds’. The book thus moves between vivid anecdotes and Kant’s most sublime vision as a bridge from the everyday to horizon thinking.
If for Kant the main divisions of anthropology were physiological and pragmatic, he preferred to concentrate on the latter – “what the human being as a free actor can and should make of himself.” This should be based primarily on observation, but it also involves the construction of moral rules. The book has two parts, the first and longer being on empirical psychology and divided into sections on cognition, aesthetics, and ethics. Part Two is concerned with the character of human beings at every level from the individual to the species, seen from both inside and outside.
Anthropology is the practical arm of moral philosophy. It does not explain the metaphysics of morals which are categorical and transcendent; but it is indispensable to any interaction involving human agents. It is thus ‘pragmatic’ in several senses: it is “everything that pertains to the practical”, popular as opposed to academic, and moral in that it is concerned with what people should do, with their motives for action.
Kant acknowledges that anthropological science has some way to go methodologically. People act self-consciously when they are being observed and it is often hard to distinguish between self-conscious action and habit. For this reason, he recommends as aids “world history, biographies and even plays and novels”. The latter, while being admittedly inventions, are often based on close observation of real life and add to our knowledge of human beings. He thought that the main value of his book lay in its systematic organization, so that readers could incorporate their experience into it and develop new themes appropriate to their own lives.
Modern intellectual historians and philosophers are divided between finding the book marginal to Kant’s important works or just muddled and banal. Anthropologists have ignored it altogether. In a rare acknowledgement, Daniel Miller prefers to see Kant as the general inspiration for a focus on morality that he claims comes to anthropology via Durkheim and Boas:
“It is perhaps unfortunate that Kant wrote a book called Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. This book, his most popular works in the day, may be considered as somewhat trite and amongst his least effective philosophical endeavors. The claim that Kant had a major influence upon the discipline comes from elsewhere in his corpus—for example, the Critique of Pure Reason. It is Kant’s and more generally the enlightenment’s understanding of morality as based on reason that became central to anthropological work” (Miller 2010:415).
While this may be true of academic anthropology in the last century—at least in the heyday of British social anthropology between the wars—it need not be so in the century to come. As Miller points out, Kant’s Anthropology was a best-seller for its time—the first print run of 2,000 copies sold out in a couple of years. A more constructive reading of his book might help us to move beyond the framework of national capitalism (Hart 2024) to embrace a vision of anthropology more suited to participation in the embryonic world society of our day.
The new human universal is world society
Contemporary academic anthropologists are not well-equipped to inform participation in historical processes like these, mainly because their cultural relativism reflects the nation-state structures of the last century. How then might each of us find a more secure foundation for self-knowledge as individual persons and as a species? Kant held that the political project of building a just world society was necessary for human development in the long run. His version of anthropology, however, reflects more closely his vision of individual subjectivity as a means to that end, a branch of humanist education in other words. This requires us to transcend the barriers erected by twentieth-century civilization between each of us as a subjective personality and society as an impersonal object. After all, what room did the last century’s anonymous institutions—state bureaucracy, capitalist markets, scientific expertise—leave for personal agency, beyond the right to spend whatever bits of money we could lay our hands on?
The world must be reduced in scale and our subjectivity expanded, for a meaningful link to be established between the two (Hart 2021). Once people achieved this by praying to God and many still do. Works of fiction—plays, novels, and movies—fill the gap for those of us who do not pray. We need to feel more at home in the world, to resist alienation, and that means connecting with the world by living in several places at once, rather than being fixed in one place.
Each of us embarks on a journey outward into the world and inward into the self. Society is mysterious to us because we have lived there, and it now dwells inside us at a level that is not ordinarily visible from the perspective of everyday life. All the places we have lived in are sources of introspection concerning our relationship to society; and one method for understanding the world is to make an ongoing practice of trying to synthesize these varied experiences. If a person would have an identity—would be one thing, oneself—this requires trying to make out of fragmented social experience a more coherent whole, a world in other words as singular as the self.
Emergent world society is the new human universal—not an idea, but the fact of eight billion people who share occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. By this I mean making a world where all people can live together, not the imposition of principles that suit some powerful interests at the expense of the rest. The next universal will be unlike its predecessors—the catholic, white racist, and bourgeois economic versions through which the West sought to dominate or replace the cultural particulars that organize people’s lives everywhere. The main precedent for discovering our common humanity is great literature which achieves universality through going deeply into specific personalities, relations, events and places. Ethnography does the same in its own more objectivized way. The new universal will not just tolerate cultural particulars, but will be founded on knowing that true human community can only be realized through them.
There are two prerequisites for being human. We must each learn to be self-reliant to a high degree and to belong to others, merging our identities in a bewildering variety of social relation and categories. Much of modern ideology emphasizes how problematic it is to be both self-interested and mutual—we might say to be economic as well as social. When culture is set up to expect a conflict between the two, it is hard to be both. Yet the two sides are often inseparable in practice, and some societies, by encouraging private and public interests to coincide, have managed to integrate them more effectively than our own. One premise of the new human universal will thus be the unity of self and society. If learning to be two-sided in this way is the means of becoming human, then the lesson is apparently hard to learn.
We cannot assume that identification of anthropology with the academy in the last century will continue in this one. It is now harder for self-designated guilds to control access to useful knowledge. People have other ways of finding out for themselves, rather than submit to academic hierarchy. And there are many agencies out there competing to give them what they want, whether through journalism, tourism, or all the self-learning possibilities afforded by the internet. Popular resistance to the power of experts is essentially moral, in that people insist on restoring a personal dimension to human knowledge. Anthropologists’ current dependence on academic bureaucracy leaves us vulnerable to such developments.
Anthropology in some form, perhaps renamed the human sciences indispensable to the formation of world society in the coming century. The current academic discipline could play a part in that; but the prospects are not good, given its narrow localism, rejection of world history, and aversion to universalism. A neo-Kantian anthropology would focus on whatever we need to know about humanity to build a world society fit for everyone. Many disciplines might contribute without being exclusively devoted to the project. The idea of ‘development’ played a similar role after the Second World War and the collapse of colonial empire.
Kant attempted to address the emergence of world society directly—see also Hart (2003). He thought of anthropology primarily as a form of humanist education; and this contrasts starkly with the emphasis on scientific research outputs in today’s universities. We could also emulate his pragmatic approach, a personal program of lifetime learning with the aim of developing practical knowledge of the world. Kant recommended, apart from systematic observation of life around us, that we study “world history, biographies, and even plays and novels”. He sought a method for integrating individual subjectivity with the moral construction of world society. World history, as practiced by Jack Goody (1976) and Eric Wolf (1982), is indispensable to any anthropology worthy of the name today. The method of biography (Mintz 1960) is particularly well-suited to the study of self and society; and I suspect that it will become more commonplace in future. My own writing has lately taken that turn.
The rapid development of global communications contains within its movement a far-reaching transformation of world society. Anthropology can draw on an intellectual tradition better suited than most to make sense of it (Tett 2022). A Financial Times journalist trained as an anthropologist, Gillian Tett (2009) made a publishing breakthrough with her devastating exposés of the root causes of Japan’s “lost decade” and the Lehman crash of 2008 (Tett 2003, 2009). Since then, she has assiduously promoted a humanist anthropological education and perspective that shares much with the neo-Kantian take of this essay. See also her critique of its professional negation, The Silo Effect (Tett 2016). Her message plays down for now the role of corporate universities’ adaptation to national capitalism in undermining anthropology’s promise a century ago. But Wall Street greed is featured as prominently in these books as in an earlier generation of financial exposés (Lewis 1989, Portnoy 1999). Gillian’s method is profoundly dialectical; but, like Kant’s aesthetic—good company, food, and conversation—it comes across more strongly in oral social interaction than in print: see her in conversation with economists at the IMF.
With some notable exceptions like Tett, the academic seclusion of the discipline, its passive acquiescence to bureaucracy, is the chief obstacle preventing anthropologists from grasping this historical opportunity. We cling to our revolutionary commitment to joining the people where they live, but have forgotten what it was for and what else is needed if humanity is to succeed in building a universal society. The internet offers a wonderful chance to open the flow of knowledge and information.
Rather than obsessing over how we can control access to what we write individually— it means cutting off the mass of humanity from our efforts—we need to figure out new interactive forms of engagement that span the globe and make the results of our work available everywhere. Ever since the internet went public and the World Wide Web was invented in the early 1990s, I have made online self-publishing and social interaction the core of my anthropological practice (Hart 2009). The Open Anthropology Cooperative (2009-2019) at its peak had 22,000 members from around the world, half as many again as the American Anthropological Association (Barone and Hart 2015).
I have learned a lot from liv4ing in France, South Africa,* and the world since leaving Cambridge in 1998. But when I ask what the concrete results of this education have been, getting to know Marcel Mauss much better comes first (Hart 2022b). I could not make much sense of The Gift as an undergraduate nor of Marx’s Capital; I tried reading each several times. At Yale in my mid-30s I finally cracked Capital Volume 1 (1867), then read The Essay on the Gift (1925) the next weekend, and made 25 pages of notes on it. Marx and Mauss have been joined at the hip in my memory and imagination ever since (Hart 2012, 2022b). Together, they are my bridge to Immanuel Kant, economic anthropology, and the idea of a human economy (Hart 2008).
It matters less that an academic guild should retain its monopoly of access to knowledge than that ‘anthropology; should be taken up by a broad intellectual coalition for whom the realization of a new human universal—a world society fit for humanity as a whole—is a matter of urgent personal concern.