1.2.1 Human Animals in the State of Nature

Several versions of the notes from Kant’s anthropology lectures include a section about the character of the human species, where we can find his speculations about the kind of animal the human being is qua a part of nature. This question is an appropriate question to ask, Kant ensures us, since “in the system of nature, the human being belongs to the animal kingdom.”Footnote ¹⁰ At times, this question is approached from a historical perspective and focuses not only on the animalistic aspects of our nature, but also on our supposed prehistorical existence in the state of nature, when we would have been merely animals.Footnote ¹¹ Given the similarities in these speculations across the notes from Kant’s anthropology lectures from different years, and given that these remarks are repeated in the published version of these lectures (1798), it is reasonable to believe that the views expressed in these notes are reliably Kant’s.

Kant draws on the scientific (biological, geographical, and archeological) findings available to him and claims that it is likely that the human being as an animal would have been determined by nature to walk on four feet, he would have been carnivorous, and he would have achieved sexual maturity and general independence around the age of thirteen.Footnote ¹² Next, Kant frequently considers the question whether the human being as animal would have been a predator or not, and admits that we do not have enough evidence to speculate about this, or – in the notes from later years and the published Anthropology – that he would have likely been a predator.Footnote ¹³

But Kant’s speculations about the prehistorical animal that would soon become a human being do not only concern its physical characteristics. In the Mrongovious transcription of his lectures (1784–85) Kant also mentions the possibility that the prehistorical ‘human’ would have not had to work due to only having needs and desires that can be easily satisfied by nature itself – something that shows a very significant influence of Rousseau’s second Discourse on him. Kant writes: “The crude state of nature was good in some respects, since human beings inclined toward noble simplicity and did not know any needs or desires (though only out of ignorance) … [H]uman beings nourished themselves from trees like apes and did not need to work due to a lack of needs.”Footnote ¹⁴ Next, in his lectures Kant frequently turns to the question whether the prehistorical ‘human’ would have been social or solitary. He admits that neither alternative seems quite right, at which point it becomes clear that the human being is a unique type of animal.Footnote ¹⁵

The Mrongovious transcription of Kant’s anthropology lectures dates from about the same time as “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (1786). In the latter, Kant similarly speculates about the nature of prehistorical ‘humans’ before they became humans proper. These prehistorical ‘humans,’ who belonged only to the animal kingdom, would not have had free will or the capacity to act rationally. They would have been fully guided – causally determined – by their natural instincts with regard to both actions and desires.Footnote ¹⁶ More specifically, they would have been guided by a strong sense of smell and its affinity with taste, and therefore they would have instinctively known what food is suitable and unsuitable for them.Footnote ¹⁷ Additionally (as in the Mrongovious lecture notes), Kant speculates here that the prehistorical ‘human’ would have been satisfied with his existence (“As long as the inexperienced human being obeyed this call of nature, he did well for himself”) and would have not been worried about his future.Footnote ¹⁸ Importantly, he would have also perceived himself as equal to others of his kind and equal to other species of animals.

Perhaps the most intriguing question when considering Kant’s speculative account of our animal nature before we became humans proper is: what allowed our species in particular (as opposed to other species) to make it possible for us to become rational animals? Kant speculatively provides several characteristics that might have allowed for such a transition – upright posture, walking on two feet, the position of our digits, and complex vocal communication.Footnote ¹⁹ However, he does not explain how these characteristics might have come about, but only speculates that they had to come about in order for this transition to take place. These features would have allowed us to learn several primitive technical skills that we could not do instinctually (such as swimming) and to teach these skills to our offspring.Footnote ²⁰

1.2.2 A Conjectural History of Reason’s Awakening

Interestingly, while Kant speculates about our prerational nature in a number of texts, he only speculates about the actual transition that our species made from mere animals to humans proper (to rational animals) in one place: in the “Conjectural Beginning” essay. According to Yovel, the central theme of this text is “not the history of reason proper but what may be called its pre-history; for it does not discuss the progress of reason toward maturation, but goes back to explore the more primordial and obscure stage, at which human reason had first broken away from ‘the womb of nature’ and established itself as an independent principle, higher than nature and opposing it.”Footnote ²¹ Chakrabarty, similarly, states that what is “at the heart of this essay” is “[t]he opposition between the animal life of the human species and its moral life.”Footnote ²² Before reconstructing this account, however, I want to set the stage for a proper understanding of this highly unusual text by providing a brief characterization of conjectural histories (something I will return to in more detail in Section 2).

“Conjectural Beginning” is written within the Enlightenment literary tradition of “conjectural histories” – a term coined by the first theorist of this genre, Dugald Stewart, in the early nineteenth century. This genre was very popular between 1750 and 1800, and all of the major Enlightenment thinkers from Prussia, France, and Scotland – such as Hume, Rousseau, Herder, Smith, and Ferguson – wrote at least one, and often more, conjectural histories.Footnote ²³ The aim of conjectural histories was to provide a speculative account of the prehistoric origins of human society and of the origins and developments of various cultural phenomena: language, the arts, social norms, or legal practices. Inspired by new reports from travelers to societies hitherto unfamiliar to Europeans, the Enlightenment thinkers attempted to work out the stages that humankind must have gone through in order to form the first societies and to gradually shape them into ones with recognizable political, religious, and economic institutions. This genre assumes that there is a series of identifiable transitional steps between primitive human existence and fully fledged society, and that human nature is universal (thus yielding itself to such theorization).Footnote ²⁴ For instance, Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence (1750s–1760s), which Dugald Stewart (the first theorist of conjectural histories who coined the term to define this genre) recognizes as a prototypical conjectural history, present a four-stage history of social life: hunting, herding, farming, and commence. Each of these stages is characterized by its own distinct institutions and modes of subsistence, developed based on the distinct needs of people living during a given stage.

As I have said before, while Kant presents his teleological view of human history in a number of texts, he only speculates about its very beginning – about the actual transition that our species made from mere animals to humans proper – in one place, and he chooses to frame these speculations as a conjectural history. In “Conjectural Beginning,” Kant wants to neither reconstruct the distant past in detail (which, as he explicitly admits, would be empirically impossible given the limitations of our knowledge of the history of primitive human beings), nor, on the other hand, provide us with an entirely imagined and implausible story (which he would regard as useless for his anthropological and ethical purposes).Footnote ²⁵ Rather, he wants to sketch a way in which our species’ rational capacities might have emerged and initially progressed – a way of presenting past events for which a conjectural history is perfectly suitable.

By sketching such an account, Kant wants to complement his teleological view of the progression of human history. His purpose in this text is not to claim that our rational capacities could have only emerged under the exact historical conditions sketched in this essay. Rather, the story presented in it is a possible way in which they might have emerged that, regardless of whether it is historically accurate, sheds light on the nature of these capacities. This method of acquiring and presenting knowledge about the world resembles the way in which the sciences are sometimes practiced. Specifically, Kant’s conjectural story resembles the kind of scientific explanatory models called “minimal models,”Footnote ²⁶ which present “a story about why a class of systems will all display the same large-scale behavior because the details that distinguish them are irrelevant” and are used to “explain patterns of macroscopic behavior across systems that are heterogeneous at smaller scales.”Footnote ²⁷

Since the “Conjectural Beginning” essay is mostly of use for Kant’s practical philosophy and since it is a conjectural exercise, it might be reasonable to put aside the question whether the story presented in it really took place in the far past, and view it instead as merely possible from the theoretical perspective, while useful from the practical perspective. In other words, we are permitted, from the practical philosophical standpoint, to think of our rational capacities as having emerged in a way described in this essay.

1.2.3 The Beginning of Human History

Having set the stage for understanding this essay and the epistemic status of claims made in it, I now want to reconstruct the account of our exit from the state of nature presented in it. Kant’s starting point when sketching the beginning of human history in “Conjectural Beginning” are creatures that are in a position to become rational beings. In other words, they live not in a completely crude state of nature, but in a position to exit it. These individuals are physically prepared for this transition by virtue of being able to stand and walk upright, communicate about abstractions, and teach themselves several primitive technical skills.Footnote ²⁸ Loosely (sometimes even ironically) drawing on the biblical book of Genesis,Footnote ²⁹ Kant also posits that these individuals are a heterosexual couple who do not live in physical proximity to other individuals of their kind, and who live in a temperate climate abounding in opportunities for nourishment and secured against predators.Footnote ³⁰ By virtue of belonging only to the realm of nature, this couple is fully “guided” or determined by “[natural] instinct, that voice of God which all animals obey.”Footnote ³¹

Once Kant has characterized the two individuals in a position to exit the state of nature, he proceeds to sketch a speculative account of their first use of reason (which, we will soon see, marks their exit from the state of nature). At some point in time, Kant writes, one of the soon-to-be humans recognized within himself the ability to notice other possibilities for acting than the ones given by instinct, and thus the ability to invent desires independently of his natural instinct. (Unfortunately, Kant provides no explanation why this happened exactly when it did or why it happened at all. But he posits the appropriate natural [physical, geographical] circumstances for this realization to take place.) Kant writes: “reason soon began to stir and sought through comparison of that which gratified with that which was represented to him by another sense than the one to which instinct was bound, such as the sense of sight, as similar to what previously was gratifying, to extend his knowledge of the means of nourishment beyond the limits of instinct.”Footnote ³² This ability to compare options for acting, the creation of new desires that go beyond nature (and even against it), and the ability to choose how to act in order to satisfy a particular desire was the first manifestation of the human faculty of reason and reason’s first step of elevating the human being above other animal species. Zimmer’s interpretation of this moment supports mine:

The success of the first attempt to act independently from nature made the human, as Kant puts it, “conscious of [his] reason as a faculty that can extend itself beyond the limits within which all animals are held.”Footnote ³⁴ The human noticed his reason’s purposive capacity to determine his ends – to act rationally, according to practical maxims chosen by himself. He “discovered within himself a faculty of choosing for himself a way of living and not of being bound to a single one, as other animals are.”Footnote ³⁵ This “first attempt at a free choice” marked the beginning of our species’ emancipation from the animal kingdom and the tutelage of nature into the “estate of freedom.”Footnote ³⁶ By having resisted the instinctive impulse (synonymous in this essay with the voice of God) to eat from the tree of life, the human being emancipated himself from the tutelage of nature.Footnote ³⁷

Kant’s speculative account of the first use of reason in “Conjectural Beginning” differs in style and form from his well-known critical works, but it can nonetheless be articulated in terms familiar from his critical philosophy. Doing so might help us see the conceptual connections between the ideas presented in this essay and those presented in his other works.

When Kant describes the first human’s becoming conscious of his reason as a faculty that can extend itself beyond natural instincts, this awareness can be understood as awareness of his capacity to act in accordance with the technical hypothetical imperative and in accordance with the pragmatic hypothetical imperative. Technical hypothetical imperatives are those grounded on any contingent end (means-end reasoning), whereas pragmatic hypothetical imperatives are grounded on achieving the assertoric end of happiness (prudential reasoning).Footnote ³⁸ Both of these abilities are exercised when the first human chooses to eat a piece of fruit against the guidance of his natural instincts. Kant’s depiction of the soon-to-be human in the condition of animality before the first use of reason makes it clear that such an individual lacked the capacity for prudential reasoning or reasoning by virtue of pragmatic hypothetical imperatives. This is the crucial capacity that is discovered, as it were, through and in the first use of reason. This discovery of the ability to invent desires independently of one’s natural instinct can be therefore understood as the discovery of the ability to reason prudentially.

It is less clear, however, whether the soon-to-be human in the condition of animality before the first use of reason also lacked the less advanced capacity for technical hypothetical imperatives (means-end reasoning), since Kant mentions that he had a degree of technical skill. Things get even more complicated if we look at what Kant says about the skills of the animals who were to become humans in his Anthropology. There, in the section “The Character of the Species,” Kant states clearly that human beings are distinguished from other animals by three predispositions: the technical predisposition for manipulating things, the pragmatic (prudential) predisposition for using others for their own purposes, and the moral predisposition.Footnote ³⁹ Given that he includes the first predisposition in the list of things that make us different from other animals, it would seem that this predisposition or capacity is unique to humans proper. But a more plausible interpretation, I believe, is that the animals who were to become humans were already different from other animal species even before they become humans proper by exercising reason. This idea makes sense in light of Kant’s characterization of the unique physical features of the soon-to-be humans, such as walking on two feet. So even if the soon-to-be human was able to act somewhat in accordance with the technical hypothetical imperative before the first use of reason, this does not mean that this ability was available to other animal species as wellFootnote ⁴⁰ – in fact, it is not even clear from Kant’s writings whether the technical predisposition can manifest itself in the absence of the pragmatic predisposition.

Kant’s speculative account of the first use of reason in “Conjectural Beginning” can also be articulated in terms of the familiar triad of the stages of human history – cultivation, civilization, and moralization – that Kant discusses in the third Critique, in the “Universal History” essay, and in several other places. Before the first use of reason, the soon-to-be human presumably had not even entered into the first phase of human history, the cultivation of reason, since this phase requires the use of reason. In Lectures of Pedagogy, for example, Kant characterizes cultivation as “the procurement of skillfulness … [which] is the possession of a faculty which is sufficient for the carrying out of whatever purpose.”Footnote ⁴¹ The first use of reason depicted in “Conjectural Beginning” can be therefore understood as the beginning of the stage of the cultivation of reason – a stage that comes before the other two.

However, this attribution is contentious, too. The technical predisposition in the human being and the ability to act in accordance with the technical hypothetical imperative are often associated with the creation of art and science, and thus with the cultivation of reason.Footnote ⁴² Kant talks about cultivation as the process of learning skillfulness of carrying out an end by finding suitable means, but without yet being able to set an end for oneself (LP 9: 450). If this is so, then we could perhaps describe the primitive technical skills that the soon-to-be humans from “Conjectural Beginning” possessed even before their first use of reason as a part of the process of humanity’s (early) cultivation.

The story of the first use of reason in “Conjectural Beginning” can also be articulated in the terms Kant uses in Religion to describe the three “elements of determination of the human being” or features of human nature, which are: “1. The predisposition to the animality of the human being, as a living being; 2. To the humanity in him, as a living and at the same time rational being; 3. To his personality, as a rational and at the same time responsible being.”Footnote ⁴³ The first predisposition, animality, is further characterized as a predisposition for which reason is not required and one that consists of the drives for self-preservation, for the propagation of the species, and for co-existence with others.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even though in Religion we find no suggestion about the chronological nature of learning to exercise these predispositions, we might understand them in this way in light of “Conjectural Beginning” (and Kant’s remarks about the progress of reason in his lectures of anthropology). This is because his characterization of the predisposition to animality in Religion comes very close to what he says about the soon-to-be humans in the state of nature in “Conjectural Beginning.” There, these individuals are also incapable of using reason and are also in possession of instincts that allow them to survive and procreate.Footnote ⁴⁵

Looking at the Religion passage about our three predispositions in light of the story of the first humans in “Conjectural Beginning,” we see that the characterization of our species through these three predispositions in Religion may have a temporal aspect to it. First, we could only exercise the predisposition to animality, for which reason does not have to be used and which match the picture of the soon-to-be humans in the state of nature when they belong solely to the animal kingdom. Second, after the first active employment of reason, we could exercise the predisposition to humanity and prudential thinking. And, third, we have been and still are continuously learning to be moral and responsible (i.e., to exercise our predisposition to personality).

Having articulated Kant’s speculative account of the first use of reason in terms familiar from his critical philosophy, I return to the story presented in “Conjectural Beginning” and to the four steps of reason’s awakening. After the first step of humankind’s emancipation from the state of nature, which – as we have seen – consisted in discovering the faculty of free choice (reason), Kant sketches three further ones. The second step consists in the human’s realization that he can manipulate the desires of the human being in order to dominate others.Footnote ⁴⁶ (Here Kant echoes Rousseau’s second Discourse once again.) Unlike the first step, which challenged the instinct of nourishment, the second step challenges the sexual instinct.

The human being learns to exercise power over the other human by prolonging and provoking the other human’s sexual drive with the use of the biblical fig leaf.Footnote ⁴⁷ The third step of reason’s awakening consists in the human’s newly emerged concern for his future and, in particular, realization that the future will bring many challenges and hardships.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the fourth and final step, the human “comprehended (however obscurely) that he was the genuine end of nature, and that in this nothing that lives on earth can supply a competitor for him.”Footnote ⁴⁹ This step is crucial because it consists in the realization that we are distinct from the other species and do not solely belong to the animal kingdom. It also involves the realization that we are equal to other human beings but not equal to other animals. Through this fourth step of reason’s awakening, Kant hints at the fact that the first humans must have had some – however crude and undeveloped – capacity for moral thinking and thus positive freedom:

This passage, described by Yovel as one where “[m]an’s actual humanization is … achieved,”Footnote ⁵¹ shows that Kant’s conjectural account of reason’s emergence is intended to be compatible with his transcendental account of freedom at least with respect to the idea that the ability to choose beyond natural determination entails a basic moral awareness. In its crude and undeveloped version from the “Conjectural Beginning,” this moral awareness amounts to (1) an awareness that the human has “a prerogative” over other living beings and (2) that the human must regard other humans as “equal participant[s] in the gifts of nature” or that he has an moral equal status as all other rational beings. Kant hastens to note that only the first thought – that the human has “a prerogative” over other, non-human living beings – is a clear one. The second thought – that the human must regard other humans as “equal participant[s] in the gifts of nature” – is an obscure thought that only constitutes “a preparation from afar for the restrictions that reason was to lay on the will in the future in regard to his fellow human beings.” He is suggesting here that the newly emerged moral awareness or capacity for moral action will only be properly exercised by the human beings in years to come.Footnote ⁵² For now, the moral awareness is not something the human being will actually act on (even though he, theoretically speaking, could act on it). This is why the first use of reason, choosing to eat from the tree of knowledge, consisted merely in exercising the pragmatic capacity of reason, not the moral one. We here witness a mythical beginning of the slow moral progress of our species – a progress with regard to how often and how consistently we act from the moral law – toward which we will strive for millennia to come. As Yovel aptly puts it, “with the end of the pre-history of reason, its history proper only begins.”Footnote ⁵³

1.2.4 The Human Being as a Unique Member of the Animal Kingdom

Once reason awoke and emancipated the human being from the tutelage of nature, the uniqueness of our species within the animal kingdom became clear.Footnote ⁵⁴ The principal and overarching reason for this uniqueness is, of course, that the human being is the only animal that belongs not only to the system of nature (the animal kingdom), but also to the “world system”Footnote ⁵⁵ or the “rational” and “spiritual” kingdom.Footnote ⁵⁶ By virtue of belonging to these two realms instead of solely to the realm of nature, we are able to manipulate and surpass our animalistic instincts, acting freely from them. In other words, we are able to think and act independently from the causal laws of nature. This is because we are capable of manipulating things (technical predisposition) and of creating culture and developing unequal relations with others of our kind (pragmatic predisposition).Footnote ⁵⁷

Non-human animals fully rely on their natural instincts and, as a result, do not have to train and teach their offspring anything they need for their survival and happiness. They also do not have to take care of them beyond a short period after their birth. But the human being – who creates, builds, and invents things useful to him – requires being trained and taught by other people, and requires a longer period of time during which he is under their care and nourishment.Footnote ⁵⁸ The human being is the only animal who needs certain external factors, such as appropriate education and political institutions, to develop his natural propensities and to improve his nature: “Every animal already knows through instinct what it has to do … . The main difference with human beings is that they must be taught.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Given that one’s education and formation necessarily require the input of other human beings, it comes as no surprise that Kant emphatically states that the human being cannot develop his predispositions and reach his vocation by himself, but only in a social setting.Footnote ⁶⁰ I will return to this topic in Section 2.

While the fact of our belonging to both the animal kingdom and the spiritual kingdom is well known in Kantian scholarship, it will be valuable to explore the ways in which this fact is discussed in the anthropological context. In the Friedländer transcription of Kant’s 1775–76 lectures on anthropology, he states that “[the] human being has two determinations [Bestimmungen], one with regard to humanity, and one with regard to animality.”Footnote ⁶¹ In the later Mrongovious transcription of his 1784–85 lectures, he similarly says: “Here we have only spoken of the animal determination [Bestimmung] of the human being. But now we must speak also of the spiritual determination [Bestimmung] of the human being.”Footnote ⁶² In Friedländer, as in the transcriptions of his later lectures – Menschenkunde (1781–82) and Mrongovious (1784–85) – what immediately follows the remark about our dual nature is the observation that our humanity and animality are fundamentally in conflict.Footnote ⁶³ To achieve the perfection of humanity, we would have to “do violence” to our animality.Footnote ⁶⁴

But the fundamental conflict between our two determinations is a productive one. As we read in Mrongovious, “this opposition between the animal and spiritual nature of the human being itself ultimately contributes to the production of the final destiny of the human being.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In Menschenkunde we find a similar thought: “animality and freedom … are the sources of the incentives of everything evil and the origin thereof.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This thought is echoed frequently in Kant’s writings whenever he discusses his vision of humanity’s progress. What Kant means is that the effects of our freedom of thought and action – gradual socialization and creation of culture – inflame our animalistic desires and inclinations, developing ever more unrealistic and overblown needs whose fulfillment requires competing with other people for social status, power, and natural resources. This opposition between our animal and spiritual determination is fundamentally about our relation to other humans, and is well known under the term “unsociable sociability” from “Universal History.” This term is introduced in the Fourth Proposition and is characterized in the following way:

Unsociable sociability is the feature of our nature that describes the unique relationship we have toward living in the condition of sociality. It is responsible for our capacity for forming comparative judgments: assessing our wellbeing and our needs in light of what others have.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is exactly what Kant hints at when he answers the question “Is the human being created for society or not?” in the Mrongovious anthropology lectures by saying:

(These lectures were given in the same year that Kant published the “Universal History” essay where he explicitly formulates the term “unsociable sociability.”)

In the Menschenkunde lectures on anthropology Kant even hints at the thought that prior to the awakening of reason, our nature could not have been characterized by the principle of unsociable sociability. The second element of this term, sociability – the drive to live in a social condition – was simply not a part of our psychology: “In the crude condition [the state of nature] a great unsociability also takes place with the human being, which springs from fear, a fear which prevails over each person within; hence the point in time when the talents of the human being can properly develop actually only arises in a civil constitution.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The awakening of reason and becoming humans proper, depicted speculatively in the “Conjectural Beginning,” put into action unsociable sociability – nature’s means of ensuring the development of our predispositions. The entrance into sociality and frequent interactions with others thus caused the reliance on others when it comes to one’s assessment of one’s worth and happiness. The fact that what characterizes prehistorical humans in the state of nature is a simple unsociability, as the quotefrom Menschenkunde suggests, stands in conflict with Wood’s suggestion that human sociability belongs to our predisposition to animality, while our unsociability to our predisposition to humanity.Footnote ⁷¹

1.3.1 Reason’s Egoism

According to Kant’s conjectural story of humankind’s beginning in the “Conjectural Beginning,” the initial use of reason for setting ends that go beyond nature had enormous consequences for our species’ further development. Most immediately, it was the cause of our feeling discontent for the first time and of the development of a vicious side of humans: the “evil” that hence became a part of our nature.Footnote ⁷³ This happened, Kant speculates, because the pleasant feeling of being superior to other living beings that are unable freely to choose their desires and act independently of their instinct was soon replaced by the negative feelings of “anxiety and fright … concerning how he [the human being] … should deal with this newly discovered faculty. He stood, as it were, on the brink of an abyss.”Footnote ⁷⁴ From there, the realization that particular desires can be controlled (increased, decreased, or changed altogether) led to the emergence of evil desires, such as the desire to be comparatively better off than others around one and to gain control over others; these, as I will show, led to the development of unequal and unjust social relations.

Kant’s anthropological view of evil implies that the first occurrences of evil coincided (non-incidentally) with the entrance into the condition of sociality. Within the condition of sociality, the human being saw himself as having to pay attention to others because they posed, or at least could potentially pose, a threat to the realization of his own desires and needs. Moreover, paying attention to others resulted in the emergence of comparative judgments and competitive inclinations, which led to evil intentions and actions. My interpretation of the Kantian conception of human evil is thus compatible with Allen Wood’s, according to whom the evil that humans are capable of “pertain[s] to us insofar as we are social beings” and is “closely bound up with our tendencies to compare ourselves with others and compete with them for self-worth.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Wood’s claim that, for Kant, the condition of sociality is the source and the necessary condition of humans’ evil actionsFootnote ⁷⁶ has been challenged by Jeanine Grenberg. Grenberg claims that there are certain types of evil actions that can be committed without interaction with other humans.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, she understands “the condition of sociality” in moral terms: “the social for Kant is thus the realm within which we share specifically moral purposes with other persons.”Footnote ⁷⁸ However, I disagree with Grenberg on these two points, in favor of Wood’s interpretation of Kantian evil. Firstly, Kant’s anthropological account of the historical emergence and evolution of our practical capacities shows that our moral capacities in general emerged after the entrance into the condition of sociality (see Section 1.2.3). Therefore, we cannot define the notion of sociality in moral terms, since we enter the condition of sociality significantly before we develop our moral capacities, which is a lengthy process spanning many generations. Secondly, while Grenberg is right to claim that it is not the case that any evil action is only possible in a situation of sociality, it is the case, for Kant, that sociality was a necessary condition for the emergence of the very possibility of moral wrongdoing. Rational evil emerges when people begin social interactions beyond those intended for procreation and for securing the survival of the individual and the species: the entrance into the condition of sociality conditions the emergence of the capacity for moral evil. Thus Grenberg’s argument against Wood’s claim that the condition of sociality is the source and the necessary condition of humans’ evil actions seems misguided because it overlooks Kant’s historical-anthropological account of the development of our practical rational capacities.

This interpretation of the Kantian evil poses the question about the moral responsibility for the evil humans caused at the earliest stages of our species’ development: given that this evil took place before the proper development of our moral capacities, can Kant maintain (as he does elsewhere) that early humans were responsible for their wrong actions? To answer this question, I return to a crucial passage from “Conjectural Beginning” quoted in Section 1.2.3 (at 8: 114). In this passage, Kant claims that the first act of using an animal for one’s own purposes carried with it simultaneously the (however crude) realization that another human being cannot be used in this way because of the fundamental equality shared by all human beings (an equality that animals, by contrast, do not share with humans). This realization, Kant goes on to suggest, amounted to an obscure awareness that all human beings are ends in themselves and are not to be used as means to other ends. Kant thus believes that even the early humans must have had some primitive capacity for moral thinking and thus positive freedom. Given this, he can also coherently maintain that they were morally responsible for their evil actions. That the proper development of our moral capacities was to take place in later stages of human history does not mean that these capacities were not present at all early on, nor does it mean they were not responsible for their evil actions. Rather, it means that early humans had less socio-political and educational resources to develop their moral character and hence that regularly conforming to the moral law – being morally virtuous – was more challenging for them. Kant’s account of reason’s development tells us not how morality is created at some point in time, but how moral demands and principles gradually become fully understood by humans – a phenomenon that is, as Kleingeld reminds us, compatible with the timeless and universal validity of the moral law.Footnote ⁷⁹

The conceptual relation between the evil in our nature and the gradual development of our predispositions can be understood in the following way. Sociality is a condition for the very possibility of human, as opposed to purely animal, development.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, human sociality necessarily involves unsociable sociability, from which all kinds of evil are derived. Nevertheless, unsociable sociability (being a condition of human development) is also the condition for the development of the goods of human life, such as the sciences and the arts. As Schneewind puts it, “The energies we devote to showing others how much stronger and smarter we are lead us to create ingenious inventions and brilliant new ideas that gradually enrich and enlighten our strife-ridden common lives.”Footnote ⁸¹ Therefore, as Kant argues in “Universal History,” a just political order is needed in order to have these goods while minimizing the evils of unsociable sociability (such as greed, competition, and envy). The evolution of our juridical order is driven by the need to minimize the extent to which we are motivated by our propensity to evil – and so by the very existence of evil.

These ideas also echo Rousseau’s second Discourse (itself a conjectural account of the origins of sociality and morality). According to Rousseau, when our species existed within the state of nature, everyone was independent from one another and all of our needs were satisfied. This happiness and independence ceased after the human being exited the state of nature and entered a preliminary condition of civility. This made us timid, feeble, and servile.Footnote ⁸² In particular, we developed new, excessive desires that could only be satisfied with the help of others, and, due to commodities that they enjoyed by living in small groups with others, we became dependent on other human beings.Footnote ⁸³ Rousseau effectively claims that, in Schneewind’s words, “sociability develops with a vengeance: the struggle for social distinction makes us slaves to our need to impress others in whatever ways we can.”Footnote ⁸⁴ According to Rousseau, moreover, the entrance into the condition of sociality or civility was the first step towards inequality among humans because it provoked interpersonal comparisons, jealousy, shame, and the importance of public esteem. People became greedy and competitive, and thus started trying to use others for their own purposes.Footnote ⁸⁵ This picture closely resembles Kant’s vision of the initial condition of sociality that led to the emergence of new – self-interested – desires correlated with comparative judgments and to the treatment of others as means to one’s ends. Furthermore, according to Rousseau (as well as Kant), the direct cause of the development of egoism in the human being was man’s realization that the species he belongs to is better and more important than other species.Footnote ⁸⁶ This, of course, is reiterated by Kant in the “Conjectural Beginning” essay.Footnote ⁸⁷ Finally, Kant’s view from the “Conjectural Beginning” that non-human animals, by contrast with human beings, are limited to their natural instincts and thus do not have free will, can also be traced back to Rousseau, who claims: “while nature alone activates everything in the operations of a beast, man participates in his own actions in his capacity as a free agent. The beast chooses or rejects by instinct, man by an act of free will. … Nature commands all animals, and the beast obeys. Man receives the same impulsion, but he recognizes himself as being free to acquiesce or resist.”Footnote ⁸⁸

But Kant’s account of human nature is more positive in the main than Rousseau’s account. According to Kant, our propensity to evil is not just the cause of numerous bad things that happened to mankind, but also the indirect cause of everything good. In Yovel’s words, “it is not by renouncing reason but by the power of reason itself that its ills and conflicts with nature are to be finally resolved.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Most importantly, our propensity to evil has an indirect impact on the gradual development of the juridical order, whose rules, however unjust initially, slowly develop into ever more just and egalitarian ones. As Guyer puts it, “Human beings living in close contact with one another will apparently be forced by mere prudence to discover and adhere to just laws.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The gradual improvement of our juridical order results from minimizing our unsociable sociability, and this happens because we realize that a lawful condition will protect our individual self-interests.Footnote ⁹¹ However, as Deligiorgi points out, the establishment of a just constitution does not require a complete eradication of this antagonism.Footnote ⁹² We may perhaps think of the regulative ideal of establishing an ethical community composed of perfectly moral citizens (see Section 1.3.2) as synonymous with a complete eradication of unsociable sociability from our nature (which, of course, can never actually happen). The progressive development of social relations, therefore, is closely connected to the attempts to minimize the evil individuals are capable of via socio-political means – attempts that, however, are motivated by individuals’ self-interest and competitiveness, not by considerations of the well-being of others. The phenomenon of unsociable sociability can be also observed at the level of international relations: while national self-interests drive individual states to war, their interest in commerce and trade lead them to the gradual establishment of peaceful relations.Footnote ⁹³

As Kant writes in “Universal History,” “Thanks be to nature … for the incompatibility, for the spiteful competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess or even to dominate! For without them all the excellent natural predispositions in humanity would eternally slumber undeveloped.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Without unsociable sociability and competition between human beings, the development of the arts, sciences, or any complex rationality at all (including moral rationality) would not take place. But even though unsociable sociability can indirectly lead to a just juridical state, this passage makes it clear that before such a state can be established, unsociable sociability leads to gross and terrible inequalities and injustices between people – a situation that can only be solved by establishing just rules of conduct. Despite the general progressive character of our sociopolitical development, this development is not exactly a straightforward, linear process. As Louden writes, “On Kant’s view, humans are by no means causally determined to achieve unilinear cultural progress. Rather, we pursue progress as free beings who can and do change our minds. Cultural regress and nonprogressive cultural change are thus always present as distinct possibilities.”Footnote ⁹⁵

When in the “Conjectural Beginning” Kant (similarly to Rousseau) describes the first use of reason and the resulting activation of our propensity to evil as well as the tendency to compete with others for self-worth, he seems to be suggesting that the standpoint of an individual who has just entered into the condition of sociality – of an individual who uses reason to create new desires and find means to satisfy them – is self-interested, for such an individual is not capable of considering his own desires as on a par with the desires of others. Without fully fledged sociality, the individual portrayed in the “Conjectural Beginning” is not able to have a clear understanding that other human beings are his equals, but only an obscure one (see Section 1.2.3). As both “Universal History” and “Conjectural Beginning” suggest, every human being, having noticed the egoism of his companions and having suffered from anxiety and fright concerning his future, was inclined to set up regulations or laws that enforce just and fair behavior, so that the self-interested others do not impede the realization of his goals and desires.Footnote ⁹⁶ Kant suggests therefore that humans entered the condition of sociality for self-interested reasons, since sociality started with self-interested and competitive individuals who wanted to exploit others to satisfy their own ends. Specifically, the original reasons for setting up and developing sociopolitical arrangements and a juridical order, caused by nonrational emotions such as anxiety as well as by increasing knowledge about the capacities of others, were self-interested.

The first use of reason exercised by an individual who on the brink of exiting the state of nature, therefore, led the human being to become what Kant calls in the Anthropology a “practical egoist”: someone who

Kant’s anthropological description of the practical egoist suggests that such a person acts solely in accordance with the technical-hypothetical imperative (he “sees no use in anything except that which is useful to himself”) and the pragmatic-hypothetical imperative (he “puts the supreme determining ground of his will simply in utility and his own happiness”), but not in accordance with the categorical imperative. The practical egoist knows which means will satisfy which goals and is capable of determining or pursuing his own happiness. (While this term can be used to describe the mental capacities of the human being right after his first use of reason, it can also be used to describe a morally blameworthy individual in a more advanced society.) However, Kant suggests, the practical egoist does not regard himself as a citizen of the world [Weltbürger] or as a member of a community of all human beings in which every member is subject to the same law.Footnote ⁹⁸ The concept of happiness is not universally valid since every person can decide for himself what counts as happiness; by, contrast, the concept of duty is universally valid (the same for everyone), but to comprehend it would require seeing things from other people’s standpoints.

1.3.2 Reason’s Gradual Development

The picture that emerges from “Universal History” and “Conjectural Beginning” is that the first use of reason led the human being to enter into the condition of sociality, and this in turn led to his becoming a practical egoist. However, as “Universal History” goes on to explain, reason was not just the cause of this one feature of our moral psychology: once appropriately developed, reason can be also used to guide us to minimize our competitiveness and the evil in our nature. Living in the social condition first makes us rational, competitive, and self-interested, but it can eventually, through appropriate political and institutional arrangements, resolve the problems created by unsocial sociability and thus change our way of perceiving one another.Footnote ⁹⁹

As Philip Kain has argued, referencing “Universal History” and Perpetual Peace, self-interest, conflict, and war slowly lead toward the same end that moral reflection would have dictated if it governed our actions from the beginning of humankind.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, Kain has failed to observe that “Conjectural Beginning” is also a text worth discussing in this context, as it contains valuable remarks about the way in which conflict leads to gradual moralization.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Kant writes:

The progress of the human being and humanity as a whole can be described as consisting in eliminating within oneself the standpoint of a practical egoist (discussed in Section 1.3.1) and striving to adopt the opposite standpoint – that of an enlightened individualFootnote ¹⁰³ or, as Kant puts it in the Anthropology, of a “pluralist.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The progress of any individual, as we have seen, requires the help of others and the existence of appropriate institutional structures. More specifically, there are three means to human progress: education, legislation, and religion,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ education being perhaps the most important and fundamental one.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These three ways of one’s rational and moral progress, as I will show here, all emphasize the need to regard and conduct oneself as a citizen of the world [Weltbürger]. Of course, while legal and political arrangements can only teach us to behave in conformity with the law, the step to begin obeying the law for the sake of it is a step each individual has to decide to take for himself. The institutional (legal, educational, religious) arrangements in place are supposed only to aid each individual in making this choice. Education, moreover, can provide us with materials for maxims, give us examples of virtuous actions, and make us realize the importance of moral resolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As Yovel notes, nature can further human progress “only in the external sphere of legality; it can also remove external obstacles to the spread of morality; but it cannot contribute anything to the creation of the moral-historical end itself.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

For Kant, the intellectual achievements of one generation are a baseline, as it were, for the education and development of the generation that is to follow. The maturing of people from the next generation depends on how enlightened the individuals in public roles – especially teachers, political leaders, and religious leaders – currently are. This is why “the correct concept of the manner of education can only arise if each generation transmits its experience and knowledge to the next, each in turn adding something before handing it over to the next.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ If a critical number of generations succeeds in this regard, then “education will get better and better and each generation will move one step closer to the perfection of humanity.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ For one generation collectively to take a step toward enlightenment, therefore, is a necessary condition of the enlightenment of individuals who will live in the future.

The role of the teachers, specifically, is to design and execute the right plan of education for the schools – a plan whose aim is to improve the human condition. Kant notes in the Lectures on Pedagogy:

The role of the teachers, Kant adds, is to promote not only technical skilfulness, but also to instil the ability to think in an enlightened way. The best teachers and other public figures try not only to develop the technical and prudential skills of the individuals under their governance, but also their morality, thus “bring[ing] posterity further than they themselves have gone.”Footnote ¹¹²

In addition to teachers, political leaders and religious authorities also play a key role in the maturing of the generation that follows them. The role of enlightened political leaders and the state in general is the protection of rightful freedom of its citizens. The state, for example, guards us against civil compulsion and compulsion over conscience.Footnote ¹¹³ It also ensures the freedom, equality, and independence of each of its citizens.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It thereby removes the obstacles to adopting the three maxims of good thinking – thinking for oneself, from the standpoint of others, and consistently – and encourages participation in the public domain and law-making. Here Kant’s idea of a “moral politician” from the Perpetual Peace – of a leader whose political principles and decisions are compatible with moralityFootnote ¹¹⁵ – can serve as an illustration of what kind of political leaders would be needed so that the country in question can progress toward enlightenment. The role of enlightened religious leaders, in turn, is to encourage their own and one another’s moral progress and the cultivation of moral virtue, so that our behavior can transform from merely empirically good to intelligibly good (i.e., stemming from moral motives).

The development of the political, religious, and educational institutions and the development of our moral psychology are closely related. The disposition to practical egoism, which (as the “Conjectural Beginning” may suggest) characterized the first humans who started using reason, led to the emergence of an unjust juridical order, motivated by individual self-interest and competitiveness of its members. And, in the same way, the gradual improvement of our juridical order seems to be coupled with a psychological disposition that opposes practical egoism – a disposition Kant labels “pluralism”: “The opposite of egoism can only be pluralism, that is, the way of thinking in which one is not concerned with oneself as the whole world, but rather regards and conducts oneself as a mere citizen of the world [Weltbürger].”Footnote ¹¹⁶ As a pluralist, Kant further explains, “[I would] have reason to assume, in addition to my own existence, the existence of a whole of other beings existing in community with me (called the world).”Footnote ¹¹⁷ On this anthropological picture, the pluralist – unlike the practical egoist – is capable of seeing things from other people’s standpoints and of taking part in universally valid judgments (such as determining the concept of duty). These passages from the Anthropology suggest that a necessary condition for the existence of a juridical order composed of correctly motivated (not merely correctly behaving) people is that it consists of members who are “pluralists” in the Kantian sense, that is, who assume and accept their coexistence in a community with others (as citizens of the world), and hence regard themselves as governed by the universal, collectively and unanimously agreed upon law that governs the pursuit of their conceptions of happiness.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The definition of the pluralist from the Anthropology describes this individual as a Weltbürger – citizen of the world. This term is important for Kant’s teleological view of humankind’s progress. He does not only use it to describe what kind of standpoint of reason an individual should strive to achieve, but also to describe ideal political and juridical relations. Kant uses a cognate of this term in “Universal History” to define the ideal “cosmopolitan [weltbürgerlicher] condition” between states. As Kant writes in the Seventh Proposition, the condition of unsociable sociability among nations, “through destruction or at least dismemberment of all of [the nations] to form new bodies, … partly through the best possible arrangement of their civil constitution internally, partly through a common agreement and legislation externally” sets up a condition “which resembl[es] a civil commonwealth” (i.e., the condition of cosmopolitanism).Footnote ¹¹⁹ The notion of a cosmopolitan condition is then clarified in the Eighth Proposition, which focuses on connecting the development of our human predispositions to developing a perfect state constitution, where it is called “the womb in which all original predispositions of the human species will be developed.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Thus the Eighth Proposition explicitly connects the political condition of cosmopolitanism with the development of other predispositions of our species – including, we may add, the psychological standpoint of pluralism discussed in Anthropology. In Anthropology, Kant explicitly says that the gradual progress of our species is only possible by a progressive formation of all citizens of the world into a cosmopolitan system: “one cannot expect to reach the goal [of our species] by the free agreement of individuals, but only by a progressive organization of citizens of the earth into and toward the species as a system that is cosmopolitically united.”Footnote ¹²¹ The right treatment of others within a large community – the telos of humankind’s progress – has to be achieved via two separate, but mutually reinforcing, processes: one internal (arriving at the disposition to pluralism within every human being) and one external (arriving at the political condition of cosmopolitanism).

Developing the political condition of cosmopolitanism is supposed to happen alongside the gradual moralization of its citizens, which, as Kant notes in “Universal History,” would “transform a pathologically compelled agreement to form a society finally into a moral whole.”Footnote ¹²² For Kant, forming the cosmopolitan condition is a necessary condition of people’s achieving as virtuous a character as is humanely possible, just as forming individual states is a necessary condition of the beginning of our process of moralization. It would seem that a pathologically compelled agreement is the national juridical order, while a moral whole would be a community of virtue (an “ethical state” in the terminology of the Religion), which perhaps aligns with the cosmopolitan condition. Such a community (also called an “ethical state” in direct contrast with the “juridico-civil state”) would only need an ethical legislation (one that is freely accepted by all its members), not a coercive legislation.Footnote ¹²³ The community of virtue would be composed of perfectly moral citizens who always choose to act on duty. This community is a regulative ideal thatwe must strive toward, even though we can never fully achieve it.Footnote ¹²⁴ The rational development of our species, as Kleingeld puts it, “is ultimately to culminate in the self-transformation of society into a moral community.”Footnote ¹²⁵ At the very end of Anthropology, Kant similarly reminds us that, as he had already argued in “Universal History,” human beings “feel destined by nature to develop, through mutual compulsion under laws that come from themselves, into a cosmopolitan society” – a progressive idea that “is only a regulative principle.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The idea of an infinite moral and political progress toward a successful formation of the ethical community or the cosmopolitan state is central to the idea of virtue. This progress can never be fully completed, however, because human beings will never be able to have a holy will devoid of any nonmoral inclinations.

Unfortunately, the relation between an ideal cosmopolitan condition (which would presumably require some coercive laws) and an ideal ethical community (which would not require them) does not emerge clearly from Kant’s writings. The Religion expands Kant’s ideas about the moral progress of a human community that we find in a more preliminary form in “Universal History.” Unlike “Universal History,” Religion (as well as “Doctrine of Virtue” from Metaphysics of Morals) are concerned with people’s moral education and development aside from political or legal means of furthering itFootnote ¹²⁷. Religion and Metaphysics of Morals do not draw a distinction between national state and cosmopolitan state when discussing the ethical community. It is thus unclear whether an ideal cosmopolitan state composed of pluralistically minded citizens needs juridical regulations – whether moralizing involves making a collective effort which is also a political effort. While “Universal History” and Perpetual Peace indeed suggest that moralizing involves a collective political effort, Religion, with its notion of the “ethical state,” detaches the idea of collective moralizing from any political or juridical arrangements.Footnote ¹²⁸

1.3.3 The Beginning of Human History in Light of Its Later Stages

Having sketched Kant’s view of human progress and of the gradual realization of human vocation, I want to conclude this Part of the Element by showing how it is complemented by the conjectural account of the beginning of human history, which I presented in Section 1.2.

When Kant speculates about the way we became rational in the distant past, he puts an emphasis on the new uncertainties that the newly emerged human being had to face once he realized he can think and act independently of nature’s causal laws. Kant portrays this human being as faced with “anxiety and fright … concerning how he … should deal with this newly discovered faculty” and imaginatively depicts the position this human being is in as standing “on the brink of an abyss.”Footnote ¹²⁹ The human is uncertain about how to use reason in the right way. But because his reason is not a part of the natural world, he cannot rely on his innate instincts in order to know how to rightly use it. He also lacks training in this regard because he belongs, by assumption, to the first generation of rational human beings.

The history of humanity is, then, the history of learning how to exercise reason in the right way. Consequently, given the conflict between rationality and animality, the history of humanity is also the history of learning how to polish and tame our animality or “crudity.”Footnote ¹³⁰ To do so, the human being needs to slowly teach himself – and others around him – how to do this. Hence the human being “can only become human through education.”Footnote ¹³¹ But this process of learning to exercise reason in the right way and to overcome natural inclinations is slow and gradual because it is filled with numerous failed attempts and mistaken choices.Footnote ¹³² Kant illustrates this point in “Universal History” by saying that the human being needs a “master” who will teach him how not to misuse his freedom and how to obey the universal law, but the only people who can perform such a role are other human beings who are in need of a master themselves.Footnote ¹³³ Unlike in the case of other animals, then, realizing our human predispositions and becoming the best version of ourselves requires social, political, and pedagogical experiments: “With the human being, the species first reaches the destiny of humanity from generation to generation, since a generation always adds something to the enlightenment of the previous one.”Footnote ¹³⁴ It is impossible to learn to make a fully fledged, mature use reason in isolation from other humans or over a short period of time. This impossibility is already evident in the story of the first use of reason that begins human history from “Conjectural Beginning”: the first use of reason does not bring any positive changes to the life of the individual who uses it; nor does it make evident how reason should be used to his benefit and the benefit of his species.

3.2.1 “Think For Oneself”

Kant considers the ability to think freely as a crucial requirement for being a pluralist. In Kant’s view, thinking freely is equivalent to adhering to the first maxim of common human understanding, which is “think for oneself.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Kant describes this maxim in most detail in his “Enlightenment” and “Orientation” essays as well as in several other texts.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

This first maxim is arguably the most foundational maxim enabling rational autonomy. A person who thinks freely or thinks for herself is able critically to reflect on her beliefs and desires instead of blindly following the prescriptions of others. The maxim “think for oneself” or the requirement to think freely is described in the “Enlightenment,” “Orientation,” the third Critique, and Anthropology as a negative principle: one must not rely (unquestioningly) on the authoritative claims of others – a kind of behavior that characterizes private uses of reasonFootnote ¹⁹⁸ – but rather on the authority of one’s own rational and critical capacities. In third Critique, Kant describes this maxim as “the maxim of the unprejudiced way of thinking”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ adopted by people who do not rely on the opinions of others (heteronomy of reason). Adopting this maxim therefore requires that we think of ourselves as deliberative agents capable of making sound judgments independently of others.Footnote ²⁰⁰ As Deligiorgi puts it, “The change from submission to external authority to submission to the authority of one’s own reason is a condition for undertaking what is required to make good this claim to authority, namely, the commitment to autonomous reasoning.”Footnote ²⁰¹ Only then, O’Neill suggests, will we be able to hear and debate a plurality of viewpoints expressed by people whose thinking is independent.Footnote ²⁰²

The ability to think independently or freely is closely linked to the second requirement of being a pluralist – thinking from the standpoint of others or using public reason. This refers to the appropriate method of structuring our rational deliberation and communication with others. However, the condition of free thinking, or thinking for oneself, emphasizes the importance of arriving at the decision to reason in a public way on our own, rather than being coerced or convinced by someone else. Therefore, our motivation to reason publicly and communicate with others in an appropriate manner must arise from an autonomous process of deliberation, or free thinking, that is not influenced by external intellectual constraints. As Kant writes in Anthropology, as a child, I “let others think for [me] and merely imitated others or allowed them to guide [me] by leading-strings.”Footnote ²⁰³ However, at some point I must exit this immaturity and adopt the maxim of thinking for myself. If an adult chooses to remain in a state of immaturity even when she possesses the ability to overcome it, it is considered “self-incurred”Footnote ²⁰⁴ and blameworthy; this state of affairs differs from the natural and unavoidable immaturity of a child.

But Kant stresses that the process of exiting immaturity also has a social and cooperative aspect, as it can only occur in a social setting. While other people may influence an individual’s decision to endorse the maxim of thinking for oneself and provide opportunities for developing reasoning skills and motivations, it is ultimately up to the individual to make the autonomous decision to use these opportunities and cultivate these skills and motivations. Therefore, leaving behind immaturity is a crucial first-personal decision in an individual’s life, and the first step toward enlightenment – or, as Kant writes in Anthropology, “the most important revolution from within the human being.”Footnote ²⁰⁵

The ability to use autonomous reasoning is a fundamental aspect of our humanity that we develop throughout our lives. It entails making our own reasoning the source of the rules and principles that direct our thoughts and behaviors. This responsibility is linked to the fact that we possess positive freedom, which means that our will is structured in a way that compels us to adopt principles of action that are acceptable to all rational beings. Our freedom is not merely negative (i.e., the ability to act independently of external causes like the laws of nature) but also positive, in that we are motivated to act on universally acceptable maxims.Footnote ²⁰⁶ (This is what Kant calls in the Groundwork “the will’s property of being a law to itself.”Footnote ²⁰⁷)

Kant discusses the potential for autonomous thinking and the attainment of enlightenment also in his “Orientation” essay. There, he posits that this is linked to the ability to communicate freely with others, asserting that maintaining the freedom to engage with rational individuals is essential for preserving our capability to think autonomously: “the same external constraint that deprives people of the freedom to communicate their thoughts in public also removes their freedom of thought.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ Similarly, in “Theory and Practice” he connects freedom of expression with the public use of reason:

Freedom of expression, Kant claims here, is important during any communication with the sovereign and for improving any issues within a commonwealth. The final sentence of the cited passage can also be interpreted as a warning that freedom of expression does not equate to the freedom to engage in any behavior or join any (political) movement – the liberty to deliberate on reasons does not imply the freedom to act on those reasons.

Chronologically speaking, “Orientation” is the first place (1786) where Kant presents all three maxims of common human understanding as a coherent set of maxims. Prior to 1786, there is no mention of the three maxims as such. Of course, in “What is Enlightenment?” (published two years earlier) Kant talks about a principle that he will later label the first maxim, calling it “the propensity or calling to think freely”Footnote ²¹⁰ or “the calling of each individual to think for himself.”Footnote ²¹¹ But this principle is discussed in isolation from the other two and it is not explicitly called a maxim. On these grounds, one may suspect that Kant did not come to terms with the three maxims of common human understanding until 1786, even though they (especially the first one) were implicitly in the background of his theorizing about rational development and interpersonal communication.

3.2.2 “Think from the Standpoint of Others”

In the “Orientation,” Kant concludes that the standard for following the first maxim “think for oneself” is to reason based on principles that could be considered valid for all rational beings: “Thinking for oneself means … no more than to ask oneself, whenever one is supposed to assume something, whether one could find it feasible to make the ground or the rule on which one assumes it into a universal principle for the use of reason.”Footnote ²¹² This formulation of the first maxim shows how it leads to the second one: “think from the standpoint of others.” As formulated in Critique of Judgment, the second maxim consists in one’s capacity to “set [one]self apart from the subjective private conditions of the judgement, within which so many others are as if bracketed, and [to] reflect on his own judgement from a universal standpoint (which he can only determined by putting himself into the standpoint of others).”Footnote ²¹³ This maxim of liberal, enlarged, or broad-minded thinkingFootnote ²¹⁴ emphasizes the difficulty of using one’s reason properly after becoming accustomed to relying solely on one’s own reasoning instead of that of others. The second essential condition for being a pluralist is thus adhering to this maxim: a person is a pluralist if she thinks from the standpoint of others.

The maxim of thinking from the standpoint of others or of making public use of one’s reason governs the following aspects of being a pluralist: (i) thinking as though one was about to address the entire “society of citizens in the world,”Footnote ²¹⁵ (ii) actually addressing the world at large, and (iii) in so doing regarding oneself as a member of the community of all human beings. To show why this is the case, I will draw primarily on Kant’s discussion of the function of making public use of reason from the “Enlightenment” essay. In this essay, Kant defines the public use of one’s reason in the following way:

This definition of the public use of reason presupposes the intellectual autonomy of the individual who makes the public use of her own reason, which is already established by the first maxim. The ability to critically reflect on one’s beliefs and desires is a prerequisite for making public use of reason. Blindly following intellectual, political, or religious authorities (referred to as “guardians” by Kant) is thus incompatible with making public use of reason.

Kant’s definition of the public use of reason suggests that to make such a use of reason means to address the entire world at large (“the society of citizens in the world,” “a whole commonwealth”) instead of specific people. As O’Neill makes clear, “[t]he notion of a public use of reason is … defined in terms of the audience whom an act of communication may reach.”Footnote ²¹⁷ For example, public intellectuals aiming at influencing the public opinion by expressing themselves in popular media should exercise reason in a public way. (Kant himself wrote numerous pieces of this kind, including his Essays regarding the Philantropinum.) This means that Kant poses certain constraints on the way one can communicate to the entire community of human beings: one should only say things that could be understood by (rendered intelligible to) the world community. The pursuit of an unrestricted audience is meaningful only if we can communicate in ways that are generally understandable. A real debate requires mutual comprehension, rather than hostile speaking past one another or dependence on some external authority.

It is worth noting that Kant’s distinction between the public and private spheres of reasoning does not align with modern usage of these terms. Typically, the private sphere denotes thought that is unconstrained by external factors, while the public sphere may be governed by law. However, for Kant, individuals in public positions must only use reason in a private sense, meaning their reasoning is limited by an authority outside of reason itself, and therefore not grounded in universal principles of reason. In contrast, public use of reason involves being free from non-universal principles imposed by an external authority and being free from lawlessness and arbitrariness.Footnote ²¹⁸ To use reason publicly means to focus on the formal and necessary features of human rationality rather than on one’s specific situation in the world, and considering possible judgments others could make rather than their actual contingent judgments. Public reason is only constrained by its own autonomous principles that are shareable among all humans and fundamental to human reasoning.Footnote ²¹⁹ These principles are not guided by a local authority, as there is no external authority accepted by all rational thinkers.

The requirement to address the entire world at large is thus the requirement to structure our reflection in a way that takes into account whether our reasons can be considered as universally valid. This requirement connects the public use of reason with the ethical requirement to treat all human beings as autonomous rational agents with equal claims to freedom. In the “Orientation” essay Kant redescribes this aspect of making public use of reason in a way that suggests a ‘universalizability’ criterion:

According to Kant, therefore, engaging in regular public use of reason involves, among other things, arranging our rational deliberation in a manner that could be comprehended and approved by all rational deliberators. This is what it means to give proper consideration to other rational deliberators.

Furthermore, regularly making public use of reason describes a certain way of thinking as well as a certain way of speaking or communicating. These two are closely related: as Wood puts it, “[t]hinking itself is a social activity because it must be critical, testing what is thought from a plurality of standpoints in order to achieve unity.”Footnote ²²¹ Regularly making public use of reason describes a certain way of thinking because it needs to pass the hypothetical test of being understandable and intelligible to the entire world of rational deliberators. But it also pertains to a particular mode of communication, as pluralism demands a specific approach to interacting with others, which sets boundaries for interpersonal communication. This approach assumes that others are also autonomous rational agents who possess the same entitlement to freedom as I do, by virtue of our shared humanity, and thus must be respected accordingly. If a deliberative agent regularly makes public use of her reason and thereby examines whether her beliefs and claims could be accepted by others (considered as universally valid), then she is ready to actually (instead of merely hypothetically) engage in the right kind of interpersonal communication. Actually communicating in such a way is crucial to the project of collectively clarifying, and learning about, moral principles that ought to guide us all. This is because exchanging opinions is a necessary step in testing and comparing them, which in turn allows us to arrive at better practical norms as a group. Kant emphasizes repeatedly that our human capacities can only develop and improve in a social context. In Anthropology, for example, he writes: “with all other animals left to themselves, each individual reaches its complete destiny [Bestimmung]; however with the human being only the species, at best, reaches it.”Footnote ²²²

Kant’s understanding of the public use of reason differs from contemporary accounts of public reason and pluralism, such as those put forth by Rawls and Gaus. Kant’s notion of public use of reason is not limited to regulating political participation or government decision-making processes. Rather, it refers to the ability to reason in a way that can be comprehended and debated by a community of public intellectuals interested in the topic, regardless of whether their opinions are popular in such a community. This ability to make public use of one’s own reason applies to public discussions beyond strictly political matters. Furthermore, it requires both freedom of consciousness and freedom of expression.

For Rawls, Gaus, and other contemporary public reason theorists, pluralism is a problem for democratic theory: that people have different reasonable conceptions of the good and that they face reasonable disagreement about their beliefs are facts about our society, and we need a system that enables all people to engage in political participation despite this pluralism. For Rawls, public reason is a solution to the challenge of pluralism: it is a standard for decision-making in the political sphere and for political legitimacy that is acceptable to all reasonable members of the community.Footnote ²²³ Gaus’s conception of justificatory liberalism takes this standard to be the epistemic criterion of reasonability that applies to individual beliefs, not to comprehensive doctrines or sets of beliefs endorsed by reasonable individuals.Footnote ²²⁴ (As Gaus has argued, even reasonable people often hold some unreasonable beliefs.Footnote ²²⁵) Kant’s pluralism acknowledges the existence of multiple ideas of happiness and the need to distinguish between morality, which is universally valid, and happiness, which is contingent, to construct a moral universe in which everyone has an equal place. When Kant speaks of making public use of reason, he refers to the ability to express and debate one’s opinions in writing, rather than equal political participation or decision-making. His approach is more aligned with Gaus’s justificatory liberalism than Rawls’s political liberalism because both frameworks encompass a broader range of beliefs than solely political beliefs and focus on how specific opinions are formed rather than an individual’s entire set of beliefs.

Furthermore, Kant posits that using reason in a public manner entails recognizing oneself as a member of the community of all human beings when addressing the world as a whole. This aspect of thinking from the standpoint of others and utilizing reason publicly builds on the previous aspect: in order to ensure that my reasoning can be comprehended and embraced by all other human beings, I must also view myself as an active participant in the human community. Shaping my rational deliberation in a public manner necessitates acknowledging myself as a constituent of this community. This element of the public use of reason, just like Kant’s notions of cosmopolitanism (from “Universal History”) and of pluralism (from Anthropology), presupposes the agent’s regarding herself a world citizen. In all three definitions – of pluralism (in Anthropology), of cosmopolitanism (in “Universal History”), and of public use of reason (in “Enlightenment”) – Kant makes use of the same term: “citizen of the world” [Weltbürger].

3.2.3 “Think Consistently”

The third necessary condition of being a pluralist is abiding by the maxim “think consistently” or, as Kant terms it in the third Critique, “always to think in accord with oneself”Footnote ²²⁶: a person is a pluralist if she thinks in a consistent manner. Unlike the preceding two maxims of common human understanding, this maxim embodies a broader commitment to rationality as a means-end coherence and a manner of thinking that is unified by shared principles, as mandated by reason. In essence, it is a repudiation of arbitrariness and lawlessness.

Deligiorgi has argued that the maxim “think consistently” represents only the need to apply the previous two maxims in a consistent and regular manner: “Consistency is here [in the third maxim] put to the task of joining together the negative moment of intellectual emancipation, the throwing off of the ‘yoke of immaturity’, with the positive moment of autonomy through which we seek to override the narrowly subjective conditions of our judgement.”Footnote ²²⁷ In a similar vein, G. Felicitas Munzel has interpreted the maxim of consistent thinking as “the union of the first two maxims”Footnote ²²⁸ and “the consummation of the first two.”Footnote ²²⁹

In my view, interpreting Kant’s third maxim of common human understanding solely as a call for the consistent and regular application of the first two maxims is a mistake. This is because the first two maxims already contain within them the requirement of regular adherence, as they are intended to guide the development of practical rationality and intellectual flourishing through normative principles of good thinking. Additionally, the third maxim should have a unique and separate meaning, rather than simply serving to direct the application of the previous two maxims, given its equal standing with them. The maxim of consistent thinking requires holding noncontradictory beliefs that are unified under reason’s common principles. The beliefs one holds have to be not only logically consistent, but also systematic in the sense described in the “Architectonic” of the first Critique.Footnote ²³⁰ Since reason’s end is unity under principles,Footnote ²³¹ thinking must be consistent if it is to count as the exercise of a skill and if it is to achieve reason’s end. Consistent thinking includes being accountable to oneself as a rational autonomous being as well as to others with whom one may enter into a discussion. As the Kingdom of Ends formulation of the Categorical ImperativeFootnote ²³² suggests, being rationally autonomous already involves accountability to one’s community.

Deligiorgi and Munzel are therefore incorrect in their understanding of the third maxim, which suggests that it only combines the first two and emphasizes the importance of applying them consistently. Although this interpretation may have some textual basis in Kant’s analysis of the maxim in the third Critique, it is mistaken. In the third Critique, Kant writes: “The third maxim, namely that of the consistent way of thinking, is the most difficult to achieve, and can only by achieved through the combination of the first two and after frequent observance of them has made them automatic.”Footnote ²³³ I do not think that this remark of Kant’s supports Deligiorgi’s and Munzel’s interpretation. Kant asserts in this excerpt that the third maxim, which is the most challenging to follow regularly, can only be implemented after mastering the regular application of the first two maxims. It is possible that learning to consistently abide by the first two maxims is a prerequisite for learning the third. Nevertheless, Kant is not affirming in this passage, as proposed by Deligiorgi and Munzel, that the third maxim solely involves the consistent and regular application of the first two maxims.

Taken together, the three maxims of common human understanding, as O’Neill writes, “are presented as exemplifying the requirements for preserving lawlikeness without assuming a lawgiver.”Footnote ²³⁴ They are supposed to guide our use of reason in thinking and acting so that we can be fully fledged, mature members of the human community. Tying it to the notion of “pluralism” from the published Anthropology, these members are pluralists who endorse “the way of thinking in which one is not concerned with oneself as the whole world, but rather regards and conducts oneself as a mere citizen of the world.”Footnote ²³⁵ To regard and conduct oneself as a citizen of the world means to guide one’s reason only by the principles that are common to all human beings.

The three maxims of common human understanding are also relevant to Kant’s conception of what it means to see the world with a philosophical eye and hence to participate in what he views to be the development of the proper history of philosophy.Footnote ²³⁶ Unfortunately, his vision of what it means to do philosophy is racially exclusive and limited to the work of the Occidental white thinkers.Footnote ²³⁷ As Lu-Adler explains, Kant contributed to the eighteenth-century debate about whether philosophy originated in Greece (and hence in the West) or in the “Orient” (Egypt or India) by drawing a contrast between a learned “Cyclops” and a person who sees the world with the systematizing “eye of true philosophy.” He characterizes the former as being engaged in a descriptive historia of the various empirically known contributions to philosophy, and the latter as developing “a philosophical Geschichte in accordance with an idea of reason, so that it includes only those philosophizing attempts that manifest a teleologically oriented history of reason’s self-development.”Footnote ²³⁸ Now, Kant presents a racially exclusive account of who is capable of contributing a philosophy in the latter sense.

The conditions include the capacity to orient one’s thinking in accordance with the three maxims of common human understanding. But Kant suggests that only the Occidental whites were capable of such a way of thinking and that only them lived in societies that enabled such a way of thinking. Consequently, he claims that philosophy must have originated in Greece and that philosophy proper is limited to the philosophy developed in the West.