In Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide, Alix Cohen brings together a team of leading Kant scholars to offer a comprehensive assessment of Kant’s lectures on anthropology.
Kant lectured on anthropology every winter at the University of Königsberg from 1772 until his retirement in 1796, culminating in his published Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in 1798. The lectures proved extremely popular with students, but the published work was met with a disappointing reception. Despite their initial popularity, the lectures suffered a similar fate and were largely ignored by philosophers and social scientists until their publication in Volume 25 of Kant’s Schriften in the Prussian Academy Edition (1997). The Lectures on Anthropology contains seven distinct texts based on the transcriptions of note-takers and auditors who attended Kant’s lectures. As Cohen points out in her introduction, the recent surge of interest in Kant’s anthropology, especially among Anglo-American scholars, makes the Critical Guide a timely work.
The Critical Guide has three goals. First, it charts the evolution of Kant’s philosophical views. The lectures are especially illuminating in this regard since they span a period of 25 years, including Kant’s ‘silent decade’ (1771-1781), in which Kant modified and refined various aspects of his thought. Second, it re-evaluates the relationship between Kant’s anthropological work and his critical philosophy. As to be expected, the nature of the relationship remains, even amongst the book’s contributors, a highly contested matter. Finally, the volume contributes to our understanding of Kant’s philosophical system as a whole by shedding light on its empirical dimension, one that is often overlooked or conveniently understated by Kant’s detractors.
The Critical Guide consists of 13 contributions structured thematically along the divisions in Kant’s Anthropology and the Lectures on Anthropology. The first eight essays deal with the Anthropological Didactic, which includes the cognitive faculty, the feelings of pleasure and displeasure and the faculty of desire. The remaining five essays fall under the Anthropological Characteristic and focus on education, civilization and cosmopolitanism. The contributions draw from all seven texts of the Lectures, citing each by abbreviation and name (e.g., VA-Friedländer), followed by the standard volume and page number in Kant’s Schriften. They are clearly written, well-organized and accessible to non-specialists without sacrificing scholarly rigor.
After some orienting remarks by Werner Stark, the first set of essays deals with Kant’s anthropology of cognition. Although these cover a lot of the same expository ground, they draw revealing connections between Kant’s empirical theory of cognition and other features of his thought. The most interesting of these relates to Kant’s promotion of sociability. For instance, in “Self-Cognition and Self-Assessment,” Rudolf Makkreel devotes a significant portion of his discussion to Kant’s idea that individuals should attend not to their person, but to their social interactions with others (25-29). Makkreel cites Kant’s repeated warnings that a fixation on inner sense can lead to egoism, hypochondria and misanthropy. In another contribution on Kant’s account of cognition, Tim Jankowiak and Eric Watkins emphasize Kant’s classification of sight and hearing as “noble” senses because these make objects mutual for us and hence intersubjectivity possible (63).
Alix Cohen, who edited the Critical Guide, also contributes an excellent survey of Kant’s anthropology of cognition in which she argues that we need an empirical account of how we cognize as embodied beings in order to help us become better, more efficient knowers.
One the best treatments of the evolution of Kant’s thought in the Lectures on Anthropology can be found in Patrick Frierson’s essay which traces the development of Kant’s account of the affects and passions. Frierson shows how Kant’s views change from the early lectures through his published Anthropology. Kant begins by using the terms ‘affect’ and ‘passion’ interchangeably. As the lectures progress, however, he develops a faculty-based distinction which identifies affects with feelings and passions with desires. In later lectures, the distinction is developed further along temporal lines: affects are rooted in the present and transitory while passions are oriented towards the future and long-lasting.
Readers will be especially interested in the second half of the Critical Guide in which the disagreement surrounding the significance of Kant’s lectures and their relationship to his critical philosophy is more pronounced. While some of the contributors, like Allen Wood and G. Felicitas Munzel, maintain that Kant’s moral and critical philosophy must be read alongside his anthropology, others point to discrepancies and tensions between the two. Commendable care is taken by all the contributors to avoid misplaced defensiveness on Kant’s behalf.
In “Kant on Civilisation, Culture and Moralisation,” Catherine Wilson finds Kant’s anthropological treatment of human nature, gender and race radically at odds with his moral injunction to treat humanity as an end in itself. Assessing Kant’s views in light of his peers, she argues trenchantly that “Kant stands apart from a number of his contemporaries, who considered women and non-Europeans candidates for development and who took social progress to imply the broadening of entitlements” (206).
John Zammito arrives at a similar conclusion. Accusing Kant of complacency, he maintains that Kant’s invariant vision of anthropology is far less attractive than its rivals, especially “when we compare the richness of comparative cultural history and ethnography offered by Kant’s peers—in Germany and beyond” (247). Zammito draws from this the hasty conclusion that Kant’s anthropological project “led nowhere” and that “Kant’s true importance lay in other areas” (248).
A more nuanced approach is taken by Robert Louden who, while refusing to gloss over Kant’s more problematic views, shows that Kant is fully aware of the difficulties involved in establishing cosmopolitical unity. Through a careful analysis of Kant’s concepts of Keime (‘germs’), Anlagen (‘predispositions’) and Bestimmung (‘destiny’), Louden demonstrates how struggle and discord throughout history lead to a precarious cosmopolitan society. Although Kant rejects historical pessimism, his account of the development of the human species is gradual and laborious, applicable only to the species as a whole, spurred by conflict and constantly threatened by disunion. Louden argues that this has direct ethical implications for Kant’s practical philosophy, and thus provides a compelling case for the role of anthropology in Kant’s philosophical system.
Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology: A Critical Guide is a major contribution to Kantian scholarship. It sheds new light on some well-trodden areas and provides crucial insight into the development of Kant’s philosophical thought. In assessing the importance of Kant’s lectures and their relationship to his critical project, it manages to survey some of the most complex and nuanced themes of Kant’s anthropology with remarkable clarity. I highly recommend the Critical Guide for both students and scholars of Kant as well as social scientists.
