Kant and the Possibility of Progress: From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) transformed the philosophical, cultural, and religious landscape of modern Europe. Emphasizing the priority of practical reason and moral autonomy, Kant's radically original account of human subjectivity announced new ethical imperatives and engendered new political hopes. This collection of essays investigates the centrality of progress to Kant's philosophical project and the contested legacy of Kant's faith in reason's capacity to advance not only our scientific comprehension and technological prowess, but also our moral, political, and religious lives. Accordingly, the first half of the volume explores the many facets of Kant's thinking about progress, while the remaining essays each focus on one or two thinkers who play a crucial role in post-Kantian German philosophy: J. G. Herder (1744-1803), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). This two-part structure reflects the central thesis of the volume that Kant inaugurates a distinctive theoretical tradition in which human historicity is central to political philosophy.

By exploring the origins and metamorphoses of this tremendously influential tradition, the volume offers a timely perspective on fundamental questions in an age increasingly suspicious of the Enlightenment's promise of universal rational progress. It aims to help us face three sets of questions: (1) Do we still believe in the possibility of progress? If we do, on what grounds? If we do not, why have we lost the hope for a better future that animated previous generations? (2) Is the belief in progress necessary for the maintenance of today's liberal democratic order? Does a cosmopolitan vision of politics ultimately depend on a faith in humanity's gradual, asymptotic realization of that lofty aim? (3) And, if we no longer believe in progress, can we dispense with hope without succumbing to despair?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812297799

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Kant and the Possibility of Progress

KANT AND THE POSSIBILITY OF PROGRESS

From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties

EDITED BY

Paul T. Wilford

and Samuel A. Stoner

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5282-8

To Richard Velkley—teacher, mentor, friend

Contents

Introduction. Modernity and Postmodernity: Our Temporal Orientation

Samuel A. Stoner and Paul T. Wilford

PART I. KANT ON PROGRESS

Chapter 1. Kant on Individual Moral Progress

Oliver Sensen

Chapter 2. Should We Believe in Moral Progress?

Kate Moran

Chapter 3. Respect, Moral Progress, and Imperfect Duty

Jens Timmermann

Chapter 4. Loneliness and Ambiguity in Kant’s Philosophy of History

Rachel Zuckert

Chapter 5. Kant’s Organic Religion: God, Teleology, and Progress in the Third Critique

Naomi Fisher

Chapter 6. Realizing the Ethical Community: Kant’s Religion and the Reformation of Culture

Samuel A. Stoner and Paul T. Wilford

Chapter 7. Kant as Soothsayer: The Problem of Progress and the Sign of History

Susan Meld Shell

PART II. PROGRESS AFTER KANT

Chapter 8. History, Progress, and Autonomy: Kant, Herder, and After

Karl Ameriks

Chapter 9. Language, Embodiment, and the Supersensuous in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation

Richard L. Velkley

Chapter 10. Hegel on the Conceptual Form of Philosophical History

Mark Alznauer

Chapter 11. Relocating the Highest Good: Kierkegaard on God, Virtue, and (This-Worldly) Happiness

Ryan S. Kemp

Chapter 12. Kant and Benjamin on Hope, History, and the Task of Interpretation

C. Allen Speight

Chapter 13. The Curious Fate of the Idea of Progress

Robert B. Pippin

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Modernity and Postmodernity

Our Temporal Orientation

Samuel A. Stoner and Paul T. Wilford

To be modern is to be up-to-date, to be with the times, to be in fashion or à la mode, as the French might say. Etymologically, modernity (from the Latin adverb modo, meaning just now or recently) is that state of being or condition of just-now-ness. Modernity is the age of the perennially new. Defined negatively in contrast to antiquity and the Middle Ages, the modern epoch is positively defined by continual and ceaseless change. If the age were to stop changing, if it were to reach some kind of stasis, modernity would cease to be.

On occasion it is said that we live in a postmodern age, that we live in the age that is beyond being up-to-date. According to this hypothesis, we’re past living on the cusp of the future—not because the future has arrived, not because we’ve finally caught up with ourselves, but because we no longer expect it to arrive. We no longer anticipate a future beyond and better than the present. Yet rather than a description of our situation, the declaration that we live in a postmodern age is often pronounced in moralistic tones, as if asserting the thesis with sufficient force would make it a reality. We have ostensibly become so disillusioned with the modern age and its wicked ways that we, like the Puritan settlers in America, can declare to the Old World: Get behind me, Satan. And yet, in our very rejection of modernity, we remain beholden to the deep-seated mode of thought that affirms the temporality implicit in modernity’s attempts at self-orientation by what is not-yet. We still take our bearings from the new, defined as the negation of the past, and we imagine a future full of possibility. The as yet unsullied prospects of what is to come serve as the standard by which we judge the present—change is the measure, present reality the measured. Years after Jean-François Lyotard announced the collapse of all meta-narratives and the dawn of our postmodern condition, we still seem uncertain as to where (and when) we stand.¹ We still seek to locate ourselves by some diachronic determination, asking ourselves whether we’re on the right side of history and wondering how posterity will judge our actions—how the future will judge the present; for the judgments of our descendants are altogether righteous. Our temporal orientation remains the source of the yardstick for our collective self-understanding.²

It turns out that it is remarkably difficult to attain critical distance on this temporal orientation to the world, on this chronological mode of self-understanding. Living in light of the future has become second nature to us. It is so deeply interwoven in our collective habits of thought, in our shared discourse of praise and blame, that evaluation and explanation of the present often take the form of appeals to the future without explicit awareness that they do so.³ This volume of essays is intended as a contribution to understanding this orientation. It wrestles with the peculiar fact that modernity, having banished teleology from the realm of nature, discovers that it must employ a modified form of teleology in order to make sense of its philosophic, scientific, and political project.⁴ Even as reductive materialism explains more and more of the external world, the inquiring agent’s own activity becomes more and more opaque to the inquirer herself.⁵ The premise of this volume is that Kant recognizes this problem and that he responds to it in and through an investigation of the conditions for the possibility of progress.

Kant’s critical philosophy is thematically concerned with uncovering the conditions for the possibility of human experience.⁶ Indeed, Kant’s philosophical project as a whole can be understood as an attempt to discover the grounds of the various deployments of reason’s faculties in order to justify reason in its various specific activities, especially in its veridical and its normative judgments.⁷ This search for foundations must be undertaken because reason is subject to an intractable drive to transcend its limits—to imagine itself capable of leaving behind its conditions and rising above the delineated domain appropriate to its operation. In order to bring philosophy down from the heavens, Kant puts reason in the dock, convening a court to scrutinize reason and to demand of reason that it justify itself and its own activity. Kant’s famous tribunal of reason should be understood in both the objective and subjective senses: reason plays judge, jury, prosecutor, and defendant, asking itself by what right it performs a particular activity. The rights of reason turn out to be powers of reason. In reason’s case, might makes right. That is, reason is justified in the performance of an operation if reason can perform such a feat. But determining whether reason is capable of performing a function requires more than pointing to one successful instance of a given rational act. Consider, for example, our capacity to perform mathematical operations: successfully demonstrating one of Euclid’s propositions is insufficient evidence to count as a deduction of the capacity or a justification of our trust in mathematical reasoning; for reason must prove that all of the operations it performs in the mathematical demonstration are indeed its own. That is, reason must identify the means or, more precisely, the faculties by which it performs the operation. Reason must uncover the conditions of the possibility of apodictic judgments in mathematics. When Kant describes the Critique of Pure Reason as an exercise in self-knowledge, it is a knowledge of what is possible for human reason and on what basis human reason actualizes its possibilities. As the Critique of Pure Reason demonstrates, this means that all knowledge claims about the objective world must have a touchstone in experience. Science must not trespass the boundaries of experience.

However, the operations of reason are not limited to empirical judgments or the discursive operations of scientific reasoning. Not all the works of reason have an objective referent or adequate representation. When reason operates in a domain where there is no analogue to the successful mathematical proof, reason is justified in extending itself beyond the limits of experience only if it does not mistake its postulations for knowledge. Kant understands himself to have succeeded in removing all those errors that have so far put reason into dissension with itself in its nonexperiential use.⁸ Accordingly, reason is justified in the construction of ideas or formation of conceptions of totality insofar as they are adequate to the task at hand and conducive to the fulfillment of reason’s vocation—the realization of a moral world.

The question that confronts us here is the question of the grounds on which reason’s progress toward its proper telos is possible. But identifying the a priori structures of reason that secure the possibility of progress is a far cry from demonstrating its inevitability or actuality. Kant formulates the decisive question in his reply to Moses Mendelssohn’s apprehensions over the potentially misanthropic effects of reflection on the spectacle of human history. Kant asks whether there are in human nature predispositions from which one can gather that the race will always progress toward what is better and that the evil of present and past times will disappear in the good of future times?⁹ This question points us to the third of the three questions that Kant believed exhausted critical philosophy: What may I hope for?¹⁰

Kant’s third question runs like a guiding thread throughout this book. One of the book’s premises is that we must understand Kant’s philosophical revolution in the broad context of early modern philosophy in order to grasp the conceptual and historical significance of this question for Kant’s political-cum-philosophical project and its subsequent ramifications for German philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We believe that situating Kant in relation to his modern predecessors illuminates the problem motivating Kant’s transcendental idealism. The central conceit of this volume is that the whole edifice of Kant’s critical philosophy is an attempt to respond to Rousseau’s critique of the deleterious effects of modernity while preserving the emancipatory aspirations of modern philosophy and the Baconian aim of ameliorating our condition. We can come to grips with the philosophic foundations of our concern with the possibility of progress only once we recognize that Kant’s critical project is an attempt to provide new foundations for the modern project.

* * *

In what follows, first we provide a synoptic account of the origins of modernity in the self-conscious attempt to master nature and sketch the contours of some of the central debates in modern philosophy from Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). We intend this account of the history of early modern philosophy to introduce the problems that Kant and his followers seek to resolve. Second, we attempt to illuminate the various interwoven strands of reflection that run through the thirteen essays in this volume by clarifying some of the deepest questions and themes that underlie and motivate modern German philosophy.

Mastery of Nature: Machiavelli, Bacon, and Descartes

Machiavelli announced to the world, Truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and wish to do it anyway, here lie the error and the blame.¹¹ It may seem bold to suggest that Machiavelli is the origin of modernity, but the principle of acquisition without limit is given a robust defense not only in The Prince but also in Discourses on Livy. Machiavelli may gesture at a revival of ancient forms of civic republicanism, but it is a renaissance of an ancient order radically transformed. For at the heart of ancient political philosophy, in both its Greek and its Roman guises, was the idea of natural limits. Though Ciceronian exhortations were more honored in the breach than in practice, it is nevertheless the case that there existed a general consensus among ancient philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Cicero and the Stoics that limitless acquisition was in some sense unnatural.¹² One ought rather to reform one’s desire and rein in the temptation to pleonexia that lurks in the heart of every man and that gives birth to the tyrannical soul.¹³ Accordingly, although they are often subtle, criticisms of empire or the goal of expansion are a constant refrain in ancient authors.¹⁴ In Machiavelli, however, what matters is success: if one is effective, one is justified—or at least escapes censure. Nature does not provide a standard for one’s actions; nothing stands in judgment over one’s deeds save posterity. In Machiavelli’s language, the most heinous deeds cannot be called virtue because they may enable one to acquire empire, but not glory.¹⁵ The outcome or the projected future result is the measure, and thus the bold prince brings the measure of his deeds into being with his deed. To liberate himself from the standards of nature and of religion, man must be his own judge, his own authority, his own source of value. Machiavelli, we must remember, was a teacher, and in distinguishing himself from Savonarola, he taught the true source of man’s troubles.¹⁶ With an adequate understanding of his place in the cosmos, man may make for himself a better dwelling—the key element of which is understanding our relation to fortuna, or at least postulating a new one.¹⁷

Opposed to those who have claimed that worldly things are so governed by fortune and by God, that men cannot correct them with their prudence, indeed that they have no remedy at all; and on account of this … that one need not sweat much over things but let oneself be governed by chance, Machiavelli offers an alternative teaching. Even though on occasion he finds himself in some part inclined to their opinion, he resists the temptation to think such enervating thoughts, declaring, Nonetheless, so that our free will not be eliminated, I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half of our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.¹⁸ Machiavelli elaborates this teaching with a suggestive metaphor. Fortuna is like those violent rivers, which when in flood are unstoppable and sweep everything before them, causing havoc and destruction. One ought therefore to relate to fortuna as do those industrious and prudent men who in quiet times provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging. Fortune proves to be powerful only where virtue has not been put in order. By planning ahead and anticipating the possibilities of fortuna, one limits her destructive potential. One should take one’s bearings from the future, be active in the present, and thus control the future. Prudence is prospective—wise princes ought to be directed at limiting the range of possibilities, circumscribing the indeterminacy of the not-yet. As the Romans taught, one must have regard not only for present troubles but also for future ones, and avoid these with all [one’s] industry…. For time sweeps everything before it and can bring with it good as well as evil and evil as well as good.¹⁹ Given the mercurial nature of fortuna, of time, and of nature herself, it is best to take matters into one’s own hands, to rely solely on one’s own arms.²⁰ That is Machiavelli’s teaching.

As Francis Bacon explicitly acknowledges, he is much beholden to Machiavelli and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.²¹ Bacon’s transformative appropriation of Machiavelli’s teaching can be encapsulated in the idea that he took the metaphor literally: fortune was nature and nature could be controlled. However, humanity needed a new tool for this new relation to nature. As its title indicates, Bacon’s New Organon is intended to replace the old organon of Aristotelian logic, for the entire fabric of human reason which we employ in the inquisition of nature is badly put together and built up and like some magnificent structure without any foundation.²² As Oakeshott notes, the central feature of Bacon’s new epistemology is the sovereignty of technique.²³ Thus, in accord with Machiavelli’s emphasis on effect, Bacon declares: Human knowledge and human power meet in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed, and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.²⁴ Knowing is confirmed by ruling, by having the power to command nature in action.²⁵ Bacon devises what he calls his new machine for the benefit of the human race.²⁶ As with the prohibition on empire, classical philosophy’s teaching on the relation between artifice and nature, technē. and phusis, is one of moderation—with nature providing a standard, measure, or guide.²⁷ Hence Aristotle’s observation that art perfects nature (or at least ought to).²⁸ However, the old form of the commerce of the mind of man with the relation of things yielded few tangible results. As Bacon reminds us, if a tree is known by its fruit, then the scholastic and Aristotelian approaches to nature, being barren of works, were worthless. Bacon summarizes his reasons for this new approach: That the state of knowledge is not prosperous nor greatly advancing and that a way must be opened for the human understanding entirely different from any hitherto known and other helps provided in order that the mind may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it.²⁹

The aim of establishing the authority of mind over nature is furthered by a transformation of theological virtues, whereby faith, hope, and love (charity) are redirected toward effecting change in this world. Hence, to cultivate truth in charity is, according to Bacon, to recognize that the true ends of knowledge are for the benefit and use of life.³⁰ However, by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science … [is] that men despair and think things impossible.³¹ Accordingly, Bacon must prepare men’s minds for belief in this new science. An integral component of such preparation is to give hope; for without it the rest [of Bacon’s teaching] tends rather to make men sad (by giving them a worse and a meaner opinion of things as they are than they now have, and making them more fully to feel and know the unhappiness of their own condition) than to induce any alacrity or to whet their industry.³² Thus, Bacon’s New Organon is not only a description of the method to be employed for mastering nature, but also an account of how the minds of men must be reoriented and rehabituated in order that the project be realized. That is, the mind’s authority over the nature of things can only come about if authority over other men’s minds is first achieved. Only if mankind is appropriately oriented to the future, which requires being dissatisfied with the present but hopeful of improvement, can Bacon’s project succeed. Motivation to industry is spurred by the stick of the keenness of present ills and the carrot of imagined benefits; anticipation of the future has become the expectation of some benefit. The creative energy previously squandered on imaginary republics can become effective by imagining an abundant future full of technical marvels. Bacon’s new method requires an ambitious dream and it is precisely this that Bacon describes in what has been called the first work of science fiction—The New Atlantis.³³

When Descartes provides a mathematical method for this new science, he concurs that the new method will make us masters and possessors of nature (tacitly displacing the former master, for whom we acted as steward). Such mastery will yield innumerable benefits, and Descartes presents an almost unimaginable wish list of goods, reminiscent of the garden of delights of Bacon’s New Atlantis. According to Descartes, if we substitute a practical philosophy for the speculative philosophy taught in the schools, we will be able to make ourselves like masters and possessors of nature. This is desirable not only for the invention of an infinity of artifices that would enable us to enjoy, without any pain, the fruits of the earth and all the goods to be found there, but also and principally for the conservation of health, which is without doubt the primary good and the foundation of all other goods of this life.³⁴ Through advancements in the arts and sciences, especially medicine, Descartes foresees an era in which we could be spared an infinity of diseases, of the body as well as of the mind, and even also perhaps the enfeeblement of old age, if we had enough knowledge of their causes.³⁵ With Descartes’s invention of analytic geometry, Galileo’s claim that the book of nature is written in mathematics becomes plausible and the Baconian project is joined to mathematical physics.³⁶ The new science thereby takes a substantial step toward greater efficacy, for the quantitative proves to be the calculable and prediction becomes possible. Atomistic reductionism works in tandem with quantification to focus natural science on the mathematical—the eminently knowable proves to be eminently manipulable. Successful prediction becomes the measure of knowing, and the object of knowledge is no longer the form or the what of the being, but the process or how of the becoming.

The Liberal Appropriation: Locke and Montesquieu on Property and Commerce

In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government we learn that the world is given to the industrious and rational, who contract among themselves to escape the state of nature—that natural condition, which, though far less harsh than Hobbes had supposed, is nevertheless sufficiently inhospitable to provoke the development of those human faculties needed for the transformation of stepmotherly nature through labor into useful property directed to and justified by the preservation of life.³⁷ But how then to justify property beyond the simple bare necessities? How can self-preservation justify acquisition without limit? For this, further innovations of convention are required; for absent the invention of money, the products of labor are subject to spoilage—and such wastefulness is tantamount to the greatest of sins, profligacy. Thankfully, mankind discovers a means for preserving the acquisition of labor beyond current use. Money is our tool for hedging against the future—that realm of uncertainty over which fortuna once ruled so capriciously without regard for men and their interests.

Locke’s innovations in political economy operate in tandem with a new teaching as to the proper role of philosophy in relation to the natural sciences. Echoing Descartes’s prescription that philosophy become practical, Locke presents philosophy in the humble role of research assistant to the great natural scientists of his age—those master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but since everyone must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters, as the great Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, … ’tis ambition enough to be employed as an under-laborer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge; which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavors of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms.³⁸ Philosophy appears once again in the guise of a hand-maiden—but not to theology and its pursuit of eternity. Rather, philosophy is the servant of the masters of the new science, especially the marvel of mathematical physics.³⁹ Philosophy now justifies itself by contributing not to the project of saving men’s souls but to the project of ameliorating their condition and assuring that science can proceed along a smooth and clear path. Locke thus furthers in both political economy and natural philosophy the Baconian aim of assuring to the mind of man authority over the nature of things for the relief of man’s estate.⁴⁰

According to Montesquieu, science and commerce, operating in tandem, appear to offer mankind a means of escaping not only the deprivations of natural barbarism but the harsh cruelties of despotism. Commerce, which is materially motivated, proves to have spiritual consequences, for the history of commerce is that of communication among peoples.⁴¹ Such communication fosters reciprocal examination and self-reflection on customs, mores, manners, habits, ideas, and virtues. Commerce thereby cures men of destructive prejudices. Like the very act of studying Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, commerce exposes one’s own practices to the view of others, and enables one to become aware of one’s own prejudices, which Montesquieu defines as what makes us ignorant of ourselves.⁴² Such awareness need not rise to the level of self-conscious critical evaluation to be efficacious. Rather, Everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce, and everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores…. One can say that the laws of commerce perfect mores for the same reason that these same laws ruin mores. Commerce corrupts pure mores, and this was the subject of Plato’s complaints; it polishes and softens barbarous mores, as we see every day.⁴³ Through this softening or corruption of mores, the differences between nations become less acute, and a principal source of hostility loses its force. In diminishing prejudice and promoting mutual dependence, the natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace.⁴⁴ Montesquieu thus identifies in commerce an analogue to what Bacon and Descartes expected from the spread of the new natural science. In fact, according to Montesquieu, one of the principle benefits of the sciences is that they are very useful in that they cure peoples of destructive prejudices.⁴⁵ Yet commercial society, while it might make nations more docile and pacific, is not without its drawbacks. As Montesquieu writes: But, if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not unite individuals in the same way. We see in countries where one is affected only by the spirit of commerce, there is traffic in all human activities and all moral virtues; the smallest things, those required by humanity, are done or given for money.⁴⁶

Rousseau’s Crisis and Kant’s Critique

Within two years of the publication of The Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau began his assault on that new human type which Locke and Montesquieu had sought to promote: the industrious and ambitious go-getter—the bourgeois. Rousseau’s term of abuse would prove to have staying power (despite Hegel’s best efforts); for Rousseau had discovered that with the advent of civil society modern man was living a divided existence—preoccupied with the economic activity of the marketplace, he had neglected the foundations of political life and failed to recognize the incompatibility of individual egoism and political cohesion.⁴⁷ Modern European man lacked both the natural wholeness of the noble savage and the artificial wholeness of true citizenship. Unable to identify with the common good of the whole, motivated by his private interests, he sought his satisfaction in that social realm defined by insidious comparison and thereby suffered the irony of living only for himself but always in the eyes of others—hence Rousseau’s assault on the supposed benefits of science and technology, industry and commerce. Rather than curing destructive prejudices, as Montesquieu had hoped, modern commercial society so exacerbates human vanity that, absent correction, mankind is destined to live forever outside of himself, variously ambitious and anxious, never content with his lot, and afflicted by an ineliminable inquietude. Far from the sure path of progress toward the utopian future imagined in Bacon’s New Atlantis, man’s presumed authority over nature leads only to misery—all simplicity lost in pseudosophistication, all depth sacrificed to superficial concerns and fleeting pleasures. Bacon’s dream had become Rousseau’s nightmare.

The natural goodness of man, so vividly revealed to Rousseau on his return journey to Paris from visiting his friend Diderot in the fortress at Vincennes, had been terribly distorted by the arts and sciences.⁴⁸ In the prominent image of his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, the natural core of man had been covered over with historical accretions like the statue of Glaucus covered in barnacles.⁴⁹ Any adequate response to the perceived ills of the present or the anticipated ills of the future required, therefore, scraping away the historical accretions and deformations of man’s original nature. Yet what Rousseau uncovered in his discourse on inequality is that man’s nature is indeed highly flexible, subject to an infinite diversity of laws and mores, as Montesquieu taught. Rousseau’s discovery of perfectibilité seemed only to confirm the central teaching of his predecessor, and yet in conjunction with the discovery of originary wholeness, it raised the question of whether the malleability of human nature could be directed to wholeness. The image of prehistorical man, man before society, provided a standard for considering and evaluating the possible inflections of perfectibilité. However, all the possible remedies to contemporary ills explored by Rousseau require the most artificial means to achieve the desired end—whether the extraordinary pretense of Jean-Jacques as tutor acting in conjunction with the Savoyard Vicar’s natural theology that defends conscience (a modern version of scholastic synderesis) or the tremendous identification of part with whole envisioned in the Social Contract, supported by the very different theology of a civil religion. Given the incompatibility of these two remedies, one wonders what hope Rousseau really had for rectifying modernity’s self-undermining form of rationality. And yet his diagnosis was, as Richard Velkley has demonstrated, the origin of the problem governing German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger.⁵⁰

The tremendous importance of Rousseau for Kant is confirmed by a striking autobiographical note found in the margins to Kant’s own copy of his early work Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime: "I myself am a researcher by inclination. I feel the entire thirst for cognition and the eager restlessness to proceed further in it, as well as the satisfaction at every acquisition. There was a time when I believed that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the rabble who knows nothing. Rousseau has set me right. This blinding prejudice vanishes, I learn to honor human beings, and I would feel by far less useful than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart a value to all others in order to establish the rights of humanity."⁵¹

It appears that reading Rousseau provoked a radical change in Kant’s self-understanding, setting him upon a new philosophical path, guided by this intimation of the priority of the practical.⁵² Having undergone a kind of metanoia, Kant spent the latter half of the 1760s and the 1770s in relative silence as he rethought modernity’s presuppositions and postulations, addressing the twin critics of the modern project, Rousseau and Hume, and seeking to return to the roots of that project and make good on its original intention.⁵³ On the one hand, Kant seeks to further a prominent line of early modern epistemological inquiry into subjectivity and the relation between the certainty of the mental and the truth of the world, that is, the movement from the epistemically privileged first-person perspective to the third-person objective perspective.⁵⁴ The desire for clear and distinct ideas, for an indubitable foundation, for apodictic certainty, and for an Archimedean point remains. Concomitantly, he also continued a line of reflection on the foundations of the state, the legitimacy of sovereignty, and the coherence of representation. Hence, like Hobbes, he believes no man is obligated to that which he has not obligated himself, and yet like Rousseau he worries that if reason is silent regarding ends, then man is bereft of the one thing needful. Long before Max Weber spoke of the disenchantment of the world (die Entzauberung der Welt), the problem that reason might be merely instrumental loomed large in the minds of the most thoughtful individuals. On the other hand, Kant self-consciously returns to the beginnings of this tradition and queries its most foundational assumption—namely, the independence of man from nature and from God. Kant’s discovery of rational autonomy as moral autonomy proves to be the key to refounding modernity. Kant suggests this interpretation of his project by quoting from Bacon’s Great Instauration as the epigram to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: Of our own person we will say nothing. But as to the subject matter with which we are concerned, we ask that men think of it not as an opinion but as a work; and consider it erected not for any sect of ours, or for our good pleasure, but as the foundation of human utility and dignity. Each individual equally, then, may reflect on it himself … for his own part … in the common interest. Further, each may well hope from our instauration that it claims nothing infinite, and nothing beyond what is mortal; for in truth it prescribes only the end of infinite errors, and this is a legitimate end.⁵⁵

After years of toiling away, Kant announced to the world a comprehensive overhaul of modern philosophy, transforming epistemology, metaphysics, theology, and morality, while laying the groundwork for a rethinking of our socioeconomic and political lives as well as our historical and aesthetic modes of self-understanding. The ambition is stupendous and yet it is directed toward realizing the original intention of modernity. It is directed to assuring that reason can guide itself, independently of nature, tradition, or revelation. It proves the self-sufficiency of reason for the proper tasks of reason, for our reason’s natural vocation.⁵⁶ With adequate self-knowledge, reason need not be self-undermining. Its activity can be directed to salutary ends, toward universal happiness (allgemeine Glückseligkeit).⁵⁷ As long as reason remains on the critical path, it need not fear falling back into the anarchic turmoil of past ages with their endless controversies and fruitless debates that inevitably lead from bellicose disagreement to skepticism and then eventually to apathetic indifference.⁵⁸ If reason submits to a salutary discipline, metaphysics can avoid those pitfalls that have hitherto hindered its progress, and once again claim its rightful place as queen of the sciences. Yet this bold endeavor comes at a high price, and the Critique earned Kant the sobriquet all-destroyer (alles Zermalmender)—and not from a hostile critic, but from a fellow Aufklärer, Moses Mendelssohn.⁵⁹

To say that Kant plays for the highest stakes is to put the point rather mildly. The demure, staid professor of logic and metaphysics, who never left his native Königsberg, was to have a profound and lasting impact on European civilization.⁶⁰ As we find ourselves questioning the legitimacy of modernity, the sovereignty of reason, and the value of autonomy, we would do well to return to the source of these ideas, not only because knowledge of origins is integral to self-knowledge, but because the arguments put forward by Kant for the coherence, desirability, and possibility of enlightenment—famously defined as the courage to use one’s own reason—remain unsurpassed in their depth and subtlety. Only in light of this difficult task can we really ask if our current malaise is the product of the pursuit of progress or a failure to understand ourselves and to act in accordance with what we once understood.

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Whereas Bacon had stressed the authority of the human mind over the natural world and Descartes had proclaimed man master and possessor of nature, Kant believed man’s successful dominion over nature rested on the prospects of man’s capacity for self-rule. For Kant, the foremost question is whether human reason, having elevated itself above nature, could successfully govern itself, that is, whether it can guide its own activities toward a moral purpose. Self-rule would require not only the imposition of limits but the postulation of a highest end, a unifying project for man’s endeavors. As Kant soberly observed, however, "the human being is an animal which, when it lives among others of its species, has need of a master," but there exists no source of authority higher than himself, no court of appeal other than his own reason.⁶¹ Having destroyed the false idols of the mind—that set of beliefs and practices that rendered man dependent on something other than himself—the question became whether man was up to the task of using his freedom wisely.⁶² In the terms of Kant’s What Is Enlightenment? essay, the question was whether mankind was sufficiently mature not merely to use reason as a tool or instrument but to recognize reason as the source of normative authority. Was human reason up to the challenge of believing in itself, of having faith in itself? Could reason pronounce a moral law that would, like God’s commandments of old, proclaim itself without qualification? In other words, could reason construct from the crooked timber of humanity an orderly dwelling, a local habitation for the finite rational being?

Kant’s philosophical project is, like Bacon’s, concerned with transforming the world, but Kant’s insistence on the priority of the practical is an insistence on the primacy of morality—evident in man’s spontaneous