ABSTRACT
Kant’s moral philosophy, his aesthetics, and his teleology have all culminated in the claim that we must be able to conceive of our moral goals, the preservation and promotion of freedom in accordance with a universal law and universal happiness achieved through freedom, as being realizable in the world of nature. That means that these goals must be realized in time, the most fundamental form of nature, and therefore in history. And that in turn means that we must conceive of these goals as being realizable in the history of the human species as a whole, rather than in the natural life or supernatural afterlife of individual human beings. Kant had already made this point clear in his 1784 essay on “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (UH) thus at the outset rather than at the end of his publications in moral philosophy:
(UH, Second Proposition, 8:18-19)1
This passage suggests that we must be able to see the complete moral development of humankind not merely as realizable in its natural history but as the goal of its natural history. But this immediately raises an obvious question, parallel to one raised in the previous chapter: if mankind’s ultimate goal is universal or “cosmopolitan” freedom, how can that possibly be achieved by nature? Isn’t Kant’s idea of freedom that of a supersensible and therefore non-natural power, which might itself determine the laws of nature but cannot be determined by the laws of nature? Is there an outright contradiction between his philosophy of human history and his vision of human freedom and autonomy?
