Acciones que realiza el profesor-tutor con los padres de familia.

“What is man?” This question is the driving force of Kant’s anthropological project. It is, as well, the question undergirding all of philosophy, as Kant states in his Logic:

The field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan [weltbürgerlichen] meaning may be

summed up in the following questions: 1. What can I know?

2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

4. What is man? [Was ist der Mensch?]

The first question is answered by metaphysics, the second by morality, the third

by religion, and the fourth by anthropology. At bottom all this could be reckoned

to be anthropology, because the first three questions are related to the last. (28- 9/Ak9:25)

Anthropology thus holds an important place among the other disciplines, operating in Kant’s thought as a larger disciplinary container for all these questions about man.21 Thus, fundamental for Kant’s vision of a world philosophy is the question of the human and what we may see as its disciplinary arm, the complementary project of anthropology.

Well before the publication of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

(1798), an outgrowth of his popular anthropology lectures [Vorlesungen über

Anthropologie] given at the University of Königsberg for over two decades (1772-96),

21 _{Foucault in his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology describes Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic}

anthropological interests emerge in Kant’s work as early as his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). In this mystical essay, Kant expresses his teleological

concern over man’s unfinished nature and the difficulty in answering the question of what the human is:

It is not even known to us what the human currently is, even though

consciousness and the senses should instruct us; much less how we will be able to speculate on what it should one day become! Nevertheless, the human soul’s curiosity for knowledge snatches impatiently at this object, from which it is distanced, and aims at shedding some light amidst such obscure knowledge. (Ak1:366)22

Over the following decades Kant continues to snatch impatiently at this object of enquiry (the human) both in his critical philosophy and in his empirical investigations into physical geography and anthropology, the latter of which was an outgrowth of the former.23 Thus, during the same period that Kant was writing the three Critiques he was

22 _{Es ist uns nicht einmal recht bekannt, was der Mensch anjetzt wirklich ist, ob uns gleich das Bewußtsein}

und die Sinne hievon belehren sollten; wie viel weniger werden wir errathen können, was er dereinst werden soll! Dennoch schnappt die Wißbegierde der menschlichen Seele sehr begierig nach diesem von ihr so entfernten Gegenstande und strebt, in solchem dunkeln Erkenntnisse einiges Licht zu bekommen. (Ak 1:366). My translation.

23

I do not take up Kant’s geography here. I intend to do so in a future project. Alix Cohen in Kant and the Human Sciences explains that both physical geography and anthropology are pragmatic disciplines for Kant insofar as they provide useful knowledge for being in the world. Where they differ, however, “is in the object they study. The object of pragmatic anthropology is the human being considered as a free rational being, whilst physical geography studies him as one ‘thing’ on earth, independently of his intentionality” (63). Robert Louden, however, argues that these disciplines collapse in on each other, such that “no bright, clear line” can be drawn between them: “The most we can say is something like the following: in the geography lectures, human beings are treated primarily…as ‘things in the world’ that are ‘products belonging to the play of nature’ (Anth 7:120), whereas in the anthropology lectures, the human being is considered primarily…as ‘a citizen of the world’ (7:120) who is ‘a free-acting being’ (7:119)” (Kant’s Human Being 128).

continuously lecturing on the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, a convergence that is frequently overlooked in Kant scholarship in favour of calving away a cerebral, crystalline Kant of the Critiques from the more speculative and disorganized Kant of the

anthropological writings. This desire to inoculate Kant against his unruly anthropological work persists in the most recent scholarship, such as when Alix Cohen writes: “The benefit of this reading is that, by distinguishing between two essential dimensions of Kant’s system, the transcendental and the pragmatic, the former is preserved from any ‘empirical contamination’ by the latter” (145). Similarly, John Zammito relegates the anthropological interests of Kant to the limited sphere of the pre-critical writings, which he suggests Kant necessarily terminates because of his understanding and subsequent dismissal of anthropology as a popular philosophy [Popularphilosophie] – a project that

his once-prized student and later-day rival Herder continues. By focusing on the

“shadow” of Kant’s critical system, by examining the wobbly parts of his work prior to 1770, prior to Kant’s finding his proper philosophical legs and making the “critical turn,” Zammito inadvertently contains the anthropological interests, which renders the over two-decade long lecture course and subsequent publication of Anthropology from a

Pragmatic Point of View (1798) a blind spot in his argument. Because Zammito

conceives of anthropology in such a restricted way, he in effect contains it. Hence, contrary to Cohen and Zammito, who both parcel out the empirical from a transcendental Kant, or a precritical anthropological popular philosophy from the monumental critical system of the Critiques, I focus on the pervasive and contaminating gnawing of

anthropological interests in the lecture course as well as in Kant’s published writings during this period, such as his Review of Moscati (1771) and his essay Of the Different

Races of Human Beings (1775); these publications reveal, as Susan Shell argues, that

“anthropological concerns, during this crucial period of Kant’s intellectual formation, were close to the center of his thinking” (“Kant’s ‘True Economy’”195), rendering it impossible to think of Kant’s transcendental thinking as occurring in a space-time set apart from the empirical. Where the three Critiques take up the question of man’s

cognition and the seemingly limitless powers of the mind, the anthropological lectures unwork this framing of man, not least when Kant remarks on the impossibility of knowing our species: 24

The highest species concept may be that of a terrestrial rational being; however,

we shall not be able to name its character because we have no knowledge of non-

terrestrial rational beings that would enable us to indicate their characteristic

property and so to characterize this terrestrial being among rational beings in general. – It seems, therefore, that the problem of indicating the character of the human species is absolutely insoluble, because the solution would have to be made through experience by means of the comparison of two species of rational

being, but experience does not offer us this. (Anthropology 225)

Not only does Kant’s discussion of man detour through the inhuman, but the very ability to know man is precariously twinned to the (in)ability to know the inhuman. This curious

24 _{Although Allen Wood suggests that despite the uncertainty over the human that Kant periodically voices}

throughout the duration of his early to late work, the human is never truly at risk of categorical or

ontological contamination, he contradictorily admits that “Kant also thinks it is impossible to define what is peculiar to the human species. For, he says, this species is only one possible variant of rational nature, yet we are acquainted with no other variants with which to compare it and arrive at specific

differentia…Whatever we say about human nature, its predispositions and its propensities, can have only a provisional character” (“Kant and the Problem of Human Nature” 47).

remark in the final pages of Kant’s Anthropology unsettles the text’s earlier claims about

man, while simultaneously opening up man and anthropology to the inhuman, to the possibility of something other than human.

Where Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), typically called the first Critique, develops his theoretical philosophy (theory of knowledge and science) by examining the necessary (a priori) conditions of theoretical experience, the Critique of Practical Reason

(1788), the second Critique, is the cornerstone of his practical philosophy (ethics,

politics, religion), and considers the necessary conditions of moral experience. The

Critique of Judgment (1790), the third Critique, takes up the necessary conditions for the

experience of aesthetic phenomena and judgments of taste. This concern for a priori

conditions is how the human is supposedly severed from the nonhuman, with whom we share the empirical, a posteriori elements. “In Kant’s view,” notes T. K. Seung, “we can

elevate our existence beyond the brute animal condition by transforming the a posteriori elements into rational experience through the a priori elements” (vii). Together, by examining the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic experiences of man, and showing how man is bounded off from the nonhuman by understanding, reason, and judgment, the first two Critiquesplace certain limits around man. The third Critique, however, breaches the

limits set up by the previous two, a line of thought that we find in the Kant of Lyotard or Deleuze. Indeed, as Deleuze suggests, in the Critique of Judgment we find a “deeply

romantic Kant” and the “foundation of Romanticism” (Kant’s Critical Philosophy xi-xii). In Deleuze’s framing of the architectonic of the three Critiques, Kant first privileges the understanding, and its governing role over imagination and reason in the Critique of Pure

Judgment, Kant reveals how the faculties “are capable of relationships which are free and unregulated, where each goes to its own limit and nevertheless shows the possibility of

some sort of harmony with the others” (Deleuze Kant’s Critical Philosophy xi-xii). In Deleuze’s reading, Kant’s exploration of the Sublime in the third Critique becomes a way to articulate the shattered subject, and bursts open the limits that the first two Critiques

posited:

it [the Sublime] brings the various faculties into play in such a way that they struggle against one another, the one pushing the other towards its maximum or limit, the other reacting by pushing the first towards an inspiration which it would not have had alone […] It is a terrible struggle between imagination and reason, and also between understanding and the inner sense […] It is a tempest in the depths of a chasm opened up in the subject. The faculties confront one another, each stretched to its own limit, and find their accord in a fundamental discord: a discordant accord is the great discovery of the Critique of Judgment, the final

Kantian reversal. (xii-xiii)

Unlike the first two Critiques – though closer in spirit to the “Romantic” Kant, that is, the

Kant interested in the discord of the subject that Deleuze finds in the third Critique – the

anthropological writings move in the opposite direction, running against their definition of the human. Like the Foucauldian counterscience, Kant’s anthropological discourse stands in an intimate proximity to them, clamouring beneath them in a relation that is more haunting than simple adjacency. The “obscure knowledge” surrounding the human that Kant first remarks on in Universal Natural Historyand Theory of the Heavens

Logic, and the OpusPostumum, such that he never does adequately answer the

fundamental question of anthropology: what is man? Put differently, Kant’s

anthropological interests produce a common signature of unsettledness as they unwork the stability of the concept of man and its disciplinary extensions.