Abstract:
Although Kant’s philosophy of history remains an object of enduring interest to political theorists and scholars of the Enlightenment, its roots in his pre-critical thought and its core influences remain largely unexplored. In this paper, I propose to excavate the philosophical background to Kant’s conceptions of history and historical progress that emerges in two phases over the period 1755 to 1765/6. The unifying theme of this era is Kant’s quest to formulate a rational purpose or end of human nature able to overcome objections to the providence of creation raised by the problem of evil.
In the first phase, which runs from 1755 to 1759, Kant is a conventional proponent of Enlightenment optimism in the mold of Leibniz’s Theodicy and Pope’s Essay on Man. Like Leibniz and Pope, Kant seeks to justify reason’s ability to assign a providential aim to human existence in response to skeptical doubts generated by the problem of evil. This skeptical tendency is exemplified above all by Bayle, but it finds later echoes in Voltaire, Hume, Hamann, and Abbt. At this stage, Kant’s defense of the underlying goodness and rationality of the universe and the distinctive position of humanity within it is chiefly theoretical and dogmatic. Accordingly, he would later express embarrassment about his work on this topic from the 1750s.
In the second phase, which occurs in the mid-1760s, Kant re-orients his vindication of providential reason around a Rousseauian philosophical anthropology that emphasizes the unique capacity of moral freedom to provide the human being with an entirely self-given final end. Despite the artificial evils unleashed by human freedom in the advance of the species from nature to civilization, Kant holds that civil society makes possible a course of political, educational, and religious progress that will ultimately lead to the attainment of the moral vocation or destiny (Bestimmung) of humanity. As a result, Kant shifts the terrain of the Enlightenment response to the challenge of skepticism on the question of the final end of the human being from theoretical to practical reason.
While Kant’s understanding of history and historical progress continues to evolve after 1765/6, I conclude by showing that his mature philosophy of history retains the basic interpretation of Rousseau and the purposiveness of practical reason adopted in the mid-1760s. If so, contemporary evaluations of Kant’s theory of history (and its successors) must account for the specific intellectual context that informs and determines his view.
Keywords: Kant, Rousseau, philosophy of history, reason, theodicy.