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Introduction
In November of 1785, Kant published a highly unsympathetic review of the second part of Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind.1 Herder had once been Kant's pupil, and had greatly admired his teacher, but the content of this review shows how profound the philosophical differences between them had by then become. A central area of dispute emerging from the review concerns the nature of happiness, and its place within the 'destiny' or 'vocation' (Bestimmung) of the human race. Kant is responding, in particular, to a section of the Ideas entitled: 'The happiness (Glückseligkeit) of human beings is everywhere an individual good; consequently, it is everywhere climatic and organic, a child of practice, tradition, and custom.'2 Although Kant is not mentioned by name in this section, it clearly contains critical rejoinders, often quite harsh in tone, to aspects of his practical philosophy [End Page 515] and philosophy of history, as Herder understands them. Against any idea that happiness requires extrinsic justification, for instance, Herder insists that 'every living creature takes delight in its life; it does not brood and ask, why is it there? Its existence is to it an end and its end is existence' (Ideen, 330). Against the view that true happiness lies only at the end of a history whose completion belongs to European states, he writes: 'it would be ridiculously presumptuous to think that the inhabitants of all continents must be Europeans in order to live happily' (Ideen, 327), and he strongly opposes those who would see the destiny of the human race in the achievement of some final political condition. What, he asks, could it could mean to say that man is 'made for the state, as the end of his race and all of its generations, made in fact only for the last generation, which sits enthroned on the decayed frame of the happiness of all previous ones?' (Ideen, 332) For his part, Herder claims that happiness is an 'inner condition' whose measure must be sought 'in the breast of every individual being' (Ideen, 327).
These remarks are specifically directed at Kant's essay 'Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,' which had appeared the previous year, in 1784. Indeed, Kant's defensive response to Herder, in his review, emphatically reaffirms the position he had developed in that essay. In the first place, objecting to the worth Herder places on an individualistic and relativistic notion of happiness, Kant counters Herder's question about the state with a question of his own. 'What if the genuine goal of history were not this phantom of happiness, which everyone creates for himself,' he asks, 'but the continually progressing and increasing activity and culture that is thereby set into motion, whose maximum possible degree can only be the product of a state organized according to concepts of human rights, and thus the work of human beings themselves?' (AA 8:63) Kant also objects to Herder's suggestion that a happy existence is self-justifying, arguing that Herder needs to address the issue, not merely of the worth of a given condition among existing beings, but of the worth of their existence itself. At this juncture, Kant poses a second question to Herder:
Does the author mean to say that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti were never visited by more civilized nations, and were destined to live for thousands of years in their quiet indolence, one would receive a satisfactory answer to the question of why they exist at all, and whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been inhabited by happy sheep and pigs as with these people happy in mere enjoyment?
(AA 8:65)
In light of this exchange, some commentators have tended to assimilate Herder's position to that of the earlier Rousseau...