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Kant's Teaching of Historical Progress and Its Cosmopolitan Goal
- The University Press of Kentucky
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Mary P. Nichols Kant’s Teaching of Historical Progress and Its Cosmopolitan Goal Immanuel Kant provides a philosophical justification for cosmopolitanism in education and for internationalism in foreign policy. Like today’s internationalists, Kant asks teachers to promote universal perspectives in their students, educating them in “love toward others” and “feelings of cosmopolitanism.” Children should be made acquainted with their interest in “the progress of the world,” Kant concludes his work On Education, “so that it may give warmth to their hearts.” And so they will “learn to rejoice at the world’s progress, although it may not be to [their own] advantage or that of their country.”1 So too does Kant’s political teaching provide “preliminary articles for perpetual peace among states” so that we “can hasten this happy time for our posterity.”2 Kant’s recommendations for education and international organization are supported by his teaching of historical progress toward “a universal cosmopolitan condition” and “an international government for which there is no precedent in world history.”3 This historical progress is the argument of his “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” While Kant does not imply that there can be a complete coincidence between morality and politics, or that politicians who advance international goals do so for moral reasons, Kant argues that a good international order is necessary for the moral order of a people (IUH 21; see also PP 112–13). Kantian morality, of course, is not based on feelings of cosmopolitanism or love of humanity. Rather, it is based on “the idea of humanity.” Human beings act morally when they guide their actions by maxims that they are able to will as a universal law binding all rational beings.4 In abstracting from all “private ends” that distinguish them from other rational beings (MM 51), those who follow Kant’s famous categorical 120 Mary P. Nichols imperative act morally, regardless of whether it is to their advantage or that of their country. In this sense they are cosmopolitans, something for which education according to Kant’s recommendation prepares them. In this essay, I explore Kant’s teaching of historical progress by examining his “Conjectural Beginning of Human History.” This work clearly suggests that history intends humanity’s moral as well as political progress. Here Kant speaks not merely of “a perfect civil constitution,” but also of humanity’s “progressive cultivation of the disposition toward goodness.”5 Kant’s description of this progress, I argue, suffers from difficulties that he himself recognizes. But even so, he presents his teaching on history as our best hope, given the two options he faces, early modern liberalism and what he regards as Rousseau’s inadequate attempt to correct it. By studying Kant’s teaching on history, we learn not only the dangers of embracing his cosmopolitanism but also the difficulty and desirability of finding a satisfying alternative to it. Kant’s Account of the Origin of History: Its Scope and Purpose At first sight, “Conjectural Beginning” does not appear to be a weighty undertaking. Kant himself depreciates his work as “a mere pleasure trip,” “at best only . . . a permissible exercise of the imagination guided by reason undertaken for the sake of relaxation and mental health” (CB 53). It is not “serious business,” he implies, since it presents conjectures rather than records of actual occurrences (CB 53). Kant later claims that the recorded events of history, appearing to human beings as an endless panorama of pointless suffering and injustice, lead them to a despairing dissatisfaction with Providence (CB 68). It is this despair that his teaching about history— its progression toward a perfect condition—attempts to relieve. The “mental health” he is trying to effect is not merely his own, but that of humanity as a whole. His “conjectures,” far from having less worth than the recorded events of history, will counter the baneful influence that those recorded events have on the human psyche. Under Kant’s ironic self-depreciation lies the importance of “Conjectural Beginning.”6 As an account of the origin of the human race, “Conjectural Beginning” resembles both Genesis and Rousseau’s Second Discourse. Indeed, it explicitly refers us to both works. Kant claims at the outset that he will follow the biblical account and even take Scripture as his guide. He is in need of a guide, he says, since his goal, knowledge of human origins, cannot be as certain as knowledge of the [18.234.232.228] Project MUSE...