ABSTRACT

Kant’s fourth question-“What is man?”—has a special status not only because it is omitted from the list of questions presented in the first Critique, but because it is singled out in Kant’s lectures on logic as somehow encompassing the other three (L 29). Insofar as it is an empirical science, anthropology falls outside the purview of transcendental philosophy. But Kant suggests that there is a “higher” anthropology that has as its object not empirically existing “men” but “man” (PW 119; cf. 91). This suggests that, in contrast to the empirical question, “What are men like?,” the question, “What is man?” is a properly transcendental one. By abandoning Kant’s distinction between the transcendental and empirical dimensions of human experience, his successors were forced to rethink the relationship between an anthropology of man and an anthropology of men. Hegel resolved this difficulty by treating individuals as accidental shapes that spirit happens to take throughout human history. The first thinker to rebel against this idea was Kierkegaard, who insisted on the irreducibility of individuals to any overarching universal category. For Kierkegaard, only individuals exist; “man” as such does not. Therefore, instead of addressing Kant’s question about the being of man, he urges his readers to ask themselves the existentially personal question, “Who am I?” Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche also abandons transcendental reflections about the nature of man in favor of psychological analyses of individuals, emphasizing the importance of becoming oneself. But unlike Kierkegaard-for whom becoming oneself ultimately means relating to oneself in such a way as to rest in a relation to God-Nietzsche insists that overcoming man and overcoming God are one and the same thing. The existential humanism of Sartre and Beauvoir has its roots in this Nietzschean idea, while Heidegger’s call for a more authentic humanism represents a retrieval of Kierkegaard’s position. A different approach to the question of humanism is opened up by thinkers such as Fanon, Lévi-Strauss, and Foucault, for whom the peculiarly European sense of the category of man comes into question. By connecting the advent of the “sciences of man” with the problem concerning the transcendental and the empirical, Foucault is able to clarify the complicity of humanism with power. This assessment leads him to criticize psychoanalytic accounts of sexuality. Irigaray shares these concerns, but she suggests that the problems concerning “man and his doubles” bear first and foremost on the repression

of sexual difference. Habermas attempts to circumvent Foucault’s empiricotranscendental doublet through a more encompassing reflection on the “betweenness” of relations between the members of a shared lifeworld.