Contents
Preface
1. Immanuel Kant offers us food for thought today
2. Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (1798)
3. Anthropology and the new human universal
4. Historical origins of our world’s current impasse
5. Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795)
Concluding remarks
References
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Preface
“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 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).