Kant After Kant: Towards a History of the Human Sciences from a Cosmopolitan Standpoint

Abstract

This chapter considers the history of the human sciences as propaedeutic to humanity’s future self-understanding. Immanuel Kant is pivotal in this context, not merely as someone whose views about the human have been influential, but more importantly as someone who deeply problematized what it means to be “human” in ways that remain relevant. In particular, Kant updated his understanding of the Judaeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions to project an indefinitely extendable vision of humanity, which is captured by the Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism. So, how would Kant define humanity today? The chapter explores the question largely by drawing on Kant’s fertile appeal in his later “critical” writings to the distinction between the “Stoic” and “Epicurean” worldview, both of which acknowledge the centrality of chance to the cosmos, with the Stoic adopting the more hopeful and even risk-embracing approach to such existential uncertainty. The overall import of Kant’s Stoic cosmopolitanism is to undermine the intuitiveness of the “sentimentalism” associated with the animal-based conceptions of humanity favoured by the Epicurean approach. In this respect, Kant opens the door to what transhumanists call a “morphologically free” conception of humanity that is in principle open to membership by both extraterrestrials – a prospect Kant himself entertained – and artificially intelligent machines, a move with significant implications for what the history of the human sciences has been about and might be in the future.