Acciones que realiza el profesor-tutor con el alumno.

Scathingly described in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s review in the Athenäum as a collection of “trivial matters […] of the most peculiar confusion” (qtd. in Kuehn

“Introduction” x), Kant’s Anthropology is a curious mixture of observations on topics as diverse as boredom, eating alone, distraction, pain, aging, the arts and sciences, “non- terrestrial rational beings” (Anthropology 225), and even material that he acknowledges

does not belong under anthropology. As eclectic as the text itself, so too is Kant’s understanding of anthropology. Indeed, as I want to suggest, the heterogeneity of Kant’s

Anthropology actually contaminates his desire to delimit a pragmatic anthropology as

separate from other anthropologies, such as physiological anthropology. Upon closer examination of what pragmatic anthropology is in theory and what it is in practice – or, to put it in Godwin’s terms, to compare the text’s moral (what it intends to do) and its tendency (what it actually does)25 – we see how the unruly text of the Anthropology

transforms Kant’s so-called pragmatic anthropology against his intention into a general anthropology that includes those physiological elements he claims it must exclude.

Kant envisions pragmatic anthropology operating on a global scale, and intends it to stand apart from the “local anthropology” that remains grounded in the geo-temporal

25 _{In his essay “Of Choice in Reading,” Godwin distinguishes between the moral and the tendency of a text,}

particulars of a group of human beings. As a “general knowledge of the world” [Weltkenntniß] that provides the grounds for localized knowledge (Lectures on

Anthropology 262/Ak25:734), pragmatic anthropology is a study not “of human beings

but of human nature” (48/Ak25:471). Pragmatic anthropology as the study of what man “can and should make of himself” (Anthropology 3/Ak7:119) purports to distinguish itself from other early forms of anthropology, such as physiological anthropology, which studies “what nature makes of the human being”(Anthropology 3/Ak7:119). Kant had strong feelings about physiological anthropology, which he expressed in his

Anthropology but also in private. In 1772, the same year Kant began teaching his

anthropology course, German physician Ernst Platner (1744-1818) published his

Anthropology for Physicians and Philosophers, a seminal work of physiological

anthropology which Kant dismissed in a 1773 letter to his student Marcus Herz as “eternally futile inquiries as to the manner in which bodily organs are connected with thought” (Correspondence 141/10:145). As Christoph Wulf observes, pragmatic anthropology calls attention to the fact that “in order to survive, human beings, unlike animals, are forced to lead their lives in various different historical and cultural environments and to design themselves” (2). While Kant’s pragmatic anthropology differs from physiological anthropology, it is different again from the comparative

anthropology of Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, which emphasizes the cultural and historical nature of anthropology with its focus on the comparative characteristics of societies, cultures, and individuals, and is marked by the ideological drive towards finding the ideal man and by the ambitions of Bildung.

Implicit in Kant’s pragmatic anthropology are both the responsibility and obligation of the human being to reach his full humanity, something that can only be actualized through various processes of enculturation: “A human being can become human only through education. He is nothing but what education makes of him” (qtd. in Wood 41). Kant’s belief in the humanizing power of education resonates with the

thinking of other philosophers of his time, such as Godwin, who writes in his 1797 essay, “Of an Early Taste for Reading,” that “Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms” (31). Enabling this capacity to become human, however, is the latent germ of reason within man that fundamentally distinguishes him from animals, his “old comrades” as Kant elsewhere calls them (“Review of Moscati” 81/Ak2:425). While Kant shares the Rousseauvian ideal of humanity’s inevitable goal of self-perfection, he is hesitant about the outcome, much like the ending of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound with the fragility of the newly realized Promethean Age hanging in the balance. Not only is the human merely the creature

capable of becoming rational (it is not a given), there is lodged within him a darker,

painful “seed of discord” (Anthropology 226/Ak7:322) that propels human activity: “Nature itself has arranged things so that pain creeps in, uninvited, between pleasant sensations that entertain the senses, and so makes life interesting” (57/Ak7:164).

Pragmatic anthropology is also envisioned as a generalized “knowledge of the world” [Weltkenntniß], a knowledge that is gained through experience and interaction with others, and it is set against scholastic knowledge, the latter of which involves a more peripheral, superficial knowing of the world. To put it in Blakean terms, it is the

perception of it (The Book of Thel). As Kant writes, “the expressions ‘to know the world’

and ‘to have the world’ are rather far from each other in their meaning, since one only

understands the play that one has watched, while the other has participated in it”

(4/Ak7:120). Indeed, Kant’s metaphor of the stage, in which the spectator has either passively watched or actively participated in a play, to frame the difference between a

Weltkenntniß and a scholastic knowledge, finds a similar expression in the role of a closet

drama, or a drama to be performed in the imagination, as in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, wherein one must participate more intimately as all the drama unfolds within

one’s own imagination. For both thinkers, new organizations of knowledge – pragmatic anthropology for Kant, and mental drama for Shelley – are formal solutions for accessing a more intimate knowledge of humanity.

Kant’s pragmatic anthropology is imagined to combine both experiential, pragmatic “real-world” knowledge and simultaneously to apply it to the entirety of the human species:

Such an anthropology, considered as knowledge of the world, which must come

after our schooling, is actually not yet called pragmatic when it contains an

extensive knowledge of things in the world, for example, animals, plants, and

minerals from various lands and climates, but only when it contains knowledge of the human being as a citizen of the world. (Anthropology 4/Ak 7:120)

In addition to being a Weltkenntniß, anthropology is imagined by Kant as something

accessible and useful to the public:

An anthropology written from a pragmatic point of view that is systematically designed and yet popular (through reference to examples which can be found by

every reader) yields an advantage for the reading public: the completeness of the headings under which this or that observed human quality of practical relevance can be subsumed offers readers many occasions and invitations to make each particular into a theme of its own, so as to place it in the appropriate category. (5- 6/Ak7:121-122)

Thus, anthropology for Kant is a hydra-headed science. Unlike scholastic philosophy, which has only watched the play, anthropology “has participated in it” (4/Ak7:120) – and

it is an actor that plays at least four roles. It is a Weltphilosophie that is 1) a knowledge of

the world as cosmos (as different from “local anthropology”), 2) knowledge of the world (of man as citizen), 3) a praxis (experience of the world) and 4) a popular philosophy

(accessible to the public). Kant’s ubiquitous variety of anthropology is what I call a

general anthropology, that is, an anthropology that retains its waste or those elements

that it would otherwise expel.