Inder S Marwah. Social Theory and Practice. Volume 38, Issue 3, July 2012.
In recent years, Kant’s works on anthropology, education, and history have received increasing scholarly attention, illuminating his views on human nature (rather than his better-known and more formalistic account of rational nature), moral psychology, and historical development. This scholarship has enriched our understanding of what we might call the embodied aspects of human life, which Kant increasingly explored in the post-critical writings of the 1790s. This turn to the “impure” side of Kant’s ethics has begun to draw attention to the human attributes that Kant himself recognized as critically important for any complete account of our moral nature. Kant claimed that “morality cannot exist without anthropology, for one must first know of the agent whether he is also in a position to accomplish what is required from him that he should do”; while these empirical dimensions of human life are not amenable to the systematization of Kant’s formal ethics, they nevertheless affect our capacity to realize our moral ends. This recent focus on the impure, particularly human side of our nature has challenged the view of Kant’s ethics as overly rationalistic, formal, and—in a word—unfeeling, initiating an important examination of an often-neglected side of his corpus.
This paper contributes to this literature by exploring, and hopefully clarifying, the role of culture in Kant’s moral and political philosophy. What is culture for Kant, and why is it important? Culture appears to occupy a privileged and rather particular position in Kant’s thought, appearing at the intersection of his writings on anthropology, history, pedagogy, and ethics. From his conjectural account of the origins of human societies, to his teleologically driven theses on history, to the most comprehensive discussion of the subject in the Critique of Judgment, Kant’s thoughts on culture are elaborated across a range of fields of inquiry. And yet his central contention—that culture bridges the space between nature and freedom—stands in need of unpacking if we’re to understand the role that culture plays in Kant’s broader account of humanity’s moral nature and development.
I begin by examining an influential recent commentary addressing Kant’s view of culture: Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire. In his broad-ranging examination of Enlightenment thinkers’ opposition to imperialism, Muthu turns to Kant’s writings on anthropology and history to argue that his concern for the preservation of different cultures and forms of social life led him to reject European expansionism. Muthu suggests that Kant saw human beings as constitutively cultural, and that his concern for “cultural agency” animated both his cosmopolitanism and his critique of European imperialism. While Muthu’s insights into Kant’s anti-imperialism are deeply informative, I argue that he misinterprets both Kant’s understanding of what culture is and his view of why we should value it at all. Where Muthu describes cultural agency as the expression of a particularly human form of freedom, and so, as a constitutive good, I argue that culture—in the sense that Muthu understands it, as a form of collective life articulating our freedom as “cultural agents”—is, for Kant, a transitory good, a necessary formative influence pushing humanity towards its natural end: the perfection of our moral capacities. Kant values culture only insofar as it contributes to the formation of morally progressive agents; thus, only a certain kind of culture—that which “prepare[s] [humanity] for a sovereignty in which reason alone is to dominate”—is good in Kant’s eyes. The first section of the paper considers two of Muthu’s central arguments regarding “cultural agency” to address what I see as a misperception of Kant’s view.
The second part of the paper both clarifies Kant’s conceptualization of culture as a sphere of individual and collective cultivation and fleshes out my own contention: that the value of culture is inextricably bound to Kant’s teleological understanding of humanity’s moral development. Where Muthu maintains that Kant values all cultures—understood, as Muthu does, in the contemporary sense denoting a particular form of social life—as constitutive conditions for human freedom, I argue that only particular social contexts are capable of, in Kant’s words, “bring[ing] about the perfection of the human being.” I consider the problems this presents for the “savage” societies that fail to acculturate their populations to properly moral ends, questioning whether and how these might participate in humanity’s broader moralization. Given this, the concluding section of the paper argues that Kant’s view of culture in fact presents far greater problems than prospects for theorizing an anti-imperial and cosmopolitan politics. Rather than turning to his writings on social life, anthropology and the “impure” dimensions of human life to recover a more culturally sensitive Kant, I argue that his formal, systematic account of right provides us with a much more robust anti-imperial politics.
Cultural Agency: A Particularly Human Freedom
Culture as a constitutive good
Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire contributes to a significant literature that has, in recent years, closely examined the relationship between imperialism and political philosophy. While theorists such as Uday Singh Mehta, Jennifer Pitts, Barbara Arneil and Karuna Mantena have explored seminal liberal theorists’ (such as Mill and Locke) complicity in the project of European imperialism, Muthu aims to recover a lesser-known line of Enlightenment thought (in the ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, and Kant) that resisted it. In so doing, Muthu joins a chorus of recent commentators in the English-language Kantian scholarship examining what Robert Louden describes as Kant’s “impure ethics.”
As is well known, Kant’s critical philosophy conceives of humanity in abstract, formalistic terms, and for good reason: it accounts for our character as intelligible beings, as rational agents subject to the moral law. But, Muthu rightly points out, this addresses only a partial and incomplete conception of human nature; “[a]gainst the widespread view that Kant conceptualizes humans as fundamentally disembodied, metaphysical beings,” Muthu argues that “he understands humans as constitutively social and cultural agents.” In order to grasp this fuller conception of human agency and the broader range of freedoms to which human—and not just rational—beings are subject, Muthu draws upon Kant’s treatments of the empirical dimensions of human life. These fall outside the purview of unconditional duties, in the spaces that Muthu proposes Kant regards as distinctly human: between the impulsions of animality and moral obligation.
Drawing on several essays on history, and particularly on the Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History, Muthu describes Kant’s view of humanity as characterized by a shared sociality and a given set of aptitudes. These include capacities for reflection, imagination, rationality, the ability to anticipate and plan for future objectives, and an awareness of our basic equality with all other human beings. On the basis of these capacities, Muthu argues that “a being with culture is one who can create desires, values, and ideals, a being who can inscribe meanings and idealizations of beauty on the world, and one who can anticipate the future,” leading him to conclude that “‘humanity’, as a set of distinguishing and constitutive capabilities and powers, consists of cultural agency. In Kant’s view, human beings are fundamentally cultural beings.” Muthu understands these capacities to carve out a sphere of freedom that is distinctively human: the freedom to set our own ends and make choices in nonmoral contexts, which is to say, ends that are not morally compulsory. This “freedom of humanity (as cultural agency)” is a negative freedom, a sphere of choice conditioned neither by animal urges nor by moral duty, leading him to conclude that “[o]ur cultural character or identity, that is, the anthropological fact of our cultural strivings and activities, gives rise, though obscurely, to the idea of the moral respect owed to all humans simply as a result of their being human.” Cultural agency carves out a sphere of unconditioned choice and so of uniquely human activity, denoting a uniquely human freedom.
Given this view of humanity as constitutively cultural, Muthu argues that Kant regards cultural agency as requiring safeguarding and protection. From this perspective, Kant appears to issue a rather trenchant social critique: given that “[t]he object of our moral respect is our humanity, understood as our cultural agency,” we ought to protect the cultural sphere through which this freedom issues, which is particularly vulnerable to the abuses of “civilizing” nations. Kant sees “the difference between hunting, pastoral, and agrarian peoples as one rooted in human freedom—the freedom that characterizes ‘culture in general’,” Muthu asserts, leading him to respect “such collective lives … as equally legitimate forms of life that are neutral from the standpoint of a categorical morality.” This concern for cultural agency culminates in Kant’s cosmopolitanism, animating “his defence of non-European peoples’ resistance against European imperial power.” Kant’s valuation of cultural agency, as embodying a particularly human kind of freedom, commits him to defending the equal legitimacy of different forms of culture, understood in the contemporary sense: as a distinctive form of collective, social life. His cosmopolitanism, then, reflects his views as a social critic. Given the moral indifference of the sphere of culture, the incommensurability of cultural forms, and the dignity inherent in our cultural agency, Kant issues a sharp critique of European imperialism. Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal, Muthu concludes, “is a world in which agriculturalist, pastoral and nomadic peoples respect one another’s independence and collective freedoms.”
A different kind of freedom?
Does Kant understand culture in these terms? Muthu maintains that cultural agency comprises “a form of freedom—distinctively human freedom—that is neither wholly heteronomous nor autonomous,” a unique form of freedom distinguishable from others. This is important for his view; if the freedom of cultural agency is qualitatively different from that attributable to all rational agents, then Kant indeed provides the grounds for preserving diverse cultures as manifestations of a uniquely human freedom. As a particularly human freedom, cultural agency ostensibly stands between the imperatives of animality and personality, equally unconditioned by inclination or duty, inhabiting the fragile space between heteronomy and autonomy.
It is worth noting at the outset that at no point does Kant himself address a distinctive form of freedom manifested through human beings’ cultural strivings. But more problematically, the argument from cultural agency directly contradicts the systematic account of freedom that Kant does lay out in considerable detail in the Groundwork and the first and second Critiques. Muthu’s conception of a rarefied “human” freedom portrays the demands of the moral law as constraints on human beings, rather than as the condition for freedom properly understood. This suggests that the imperatives of autonomy in some sense impede the “human” freedom of cultural agency, or comprise an onerous burden required by a particular and different kind of freedom, rather than being the condition for freedom as Kant understands it at all. Muthu thus perceives our moral duties as fulfilling a “formal” conception of rational freedom, in contrast with a different, specifically human kind of freedom.
But this clearly is not Kant’s perspective; Kant understands freedom as the will’s determination by an immediate respect for the moral law. This is what freedom, properly understood, consists in; the unique capacity to act from rational principles, rather than from sensible inclinations, is the source of—and not a burden upon—human freedom. Human beings make choices, both moral and morally indifferent, that draw on the same end-setting capacity. But this capacity doesn’t describe a different kind of freedom; it is, rather, a condition for all forms of action, both moral and nonmoral, free and conditioned. “Freedom of choice,” Kant argues, “is this independence from being determined by sensible impulses; this is the negative concept of freedom. The positive concept of freedom is that of the ability of pure reason to be of itself practical.” These are not discrete and distinct forms of freedom, but are rather the negative and positive dimensions of a single conception of freedom, each of which presupposes the other. Our freedom from sensible impulses enables the will to become determined by intelligible motivations. Only by acting on the rational capacities that define human nature as uniquely capable of autonomy are we capable of being free in the only sense that Kant understands freedom at all. Cultural agency, then, does not appear to have the value that Muthu ascribes to it.
Kant’s anti-imperialism: A matter of right
Muthu understands Kant’s opposition to European imperialism and his cosmopolitanism as reflecting his concern for the preservation of cultural agency and the different forms of social life of culture—that comprise its expressions. In his view, much of Kant’s thought on international right stems from the imperative to protect distinctive cultures.
Is Kant’s opposition to imperialism attributable to his concern for culture? A close examination fails to bear this out. The appeal to culture appears both unnecessary and unwarranted: unnecessary because Kant in fact rejects imperialism on purely principled grounds, and unwarranted because he provides little evidence to support the argument from cultural agency. It is not the value of culture that circumscribes the justifiability of imperialism, but rather a systemic commitment to the preservation of an existing condition of domestic public right. Kant opposes Europe’s incursions in foreign states on purely principled grounds: a generalized right to intervene in existing states’ affairs for paternalistic or self-interested reasons would leave no state free from the encroachment of its neighbors. To be sure, Kant does condemn Europeans’ civilizing ventures, asserting that “all these supposedly good intentions cannot wash away the stain of injustice.” However, this isn’t because, as Muthu suggests, Kant “respect[s] the incommensurable pluralism of both individual and collective lives,” but rather—as Kant directly argues—”this consideration [that force can be justified in imposing a civil condition on an already existing people] can no more annul that condition of right than can the pretext of revolutionaries within a state.” Kant’s critique of imperialism appeals to the same principles as his rejection of a right of revolution: to undo an existing condition of right in order to pursue a “better” one undermines the conditions required for civil existence at all. Furthermore, Kant understood imperialism as a fundamentally irrational form of international intercourse: by establishing relations of domination (rather than of commerce and trade) between peoples, imperialism impedes the prospect of sustained global peace. None of these criticisms, however, appeals to cultural agency or to the value of different forms of social life; they stand on purely principled grounds derived from the conditions for public right.
Kant’s cosmopolitanism is similarly built upon a larger, systematic account of external right that is entirely unrelated to matters of culture. Most simply, public right comprises “a system of laws for a people … which, because they affect one another, need a rightful condition under a will uniting them.” Given the bare facts of our shared innate right to freedom (as individuals) and our common existence within the bounded sphere of the earth’s surface, we require a system of public right to enable the coexistence of our equal entitlements to external freedom. Kant’s cosmopolitanism belongs to this broader account of public right, regulating the interactions between individuals (domestic right), between states (international right), and between individuals and states (cosmopolitan right). Cosmopolitan right is thus a systemic outgrowth of our individual rights to external freedom in conjunction with the inescapable fact of our coexistence, rather than a reflection of the value of cultural agency or of different forms of social life. The cosmopolitan “right to visit” stems from the conjunction of the innate right of freedom and the fact of a world divided into separate states. The right to visit preserves our inalienable entitlements to solicit the company of others, to act on the “right of citizens of the world to try to establish community with all and, to this end, to visit all regions of the earth.” This right does not depend on a recognition of all cultures as morally benign spheres of human freedom, and so as worthy of preservation; as Kant describes in section III of the Metaphysics of Morals, addressing cosmopolitan right, “[t]his rational idea of a peaceful, even if not friendly, thoroughgoing community of all nations on the earth that can come into relations affecting one another is not a philanthropic (ethical) principle but a principle having to do with rights.”
Culture, Cultivation, and Acculturation
History, teleology, and human ends
Muthu’s “freedom as cultural agency” thus misinterprets Kant’s conceptions of both freedom (as I argued above) and of culture. Let us turn from the former to the latter.
The central problem with Muthu’s view of culture is that he elides the distinction between our understanding of culture and Kant’s, attributing the current usage of the term—denoting a particular, given form of social or collective life—to Kant. In the (relevant) contemporary sense, culture describes “the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society; the attitudes and behaviour characteristic of a particular social group.” Despite variances in the forms of collectivity to which culture might refer (queer culture, Afro-Caribbean culture, drug culture), the contemporary usage refers to the customs or behaviors characterizing the social life of given groups. This is precisely how Muthu understands Kant’s anti-imperialism: as stemming from a concern for the preservation of particular forms of life against the incursions of imperialist aggression. As the sphere within which “agriculturalist, pastoral and nomadic peoples” express their “cultural character or identity,” culture clearly refers, in Muthu’s account, to distinct forms of collective life, as we would commonly employ it today.
And yet, this bears little connection to Kant’s understanding and employment of the term (Kultur or Bildung, depending on the context). How, then, does Kant understand culture? To get a clearer sense of his view, and of the important differences distinguishing it from our own, we must turn away from the determinative, transcendental arguments of the Groundwork and the first and second Critiques, and towards the teleological, historical perspective that Kant adopts in describing our collective movement from animality to personality.
As is well known, Kant understands humanity as fundamentally progressive; history, writ large and from a philosophical perspective, shows our collective advancement, tracing our species-wide movement from nature to freedom. Kant conceives of nature (and of humanity’s place within it) in teleological terms, as a purposively organized system of ends in which all creatures are bound to develop their naturally given capacities. Humanity is in the unique position of only being able to do so on a species-wide, rather than individual, level. This is a result of the kind of being that we are: rational and finite. Our capacity for reason compels us to perfect our rational faculties, and our finitude inhibits us from doing so as individuals; we are thus bound to improve ourselves collectively, over generations, moving towards an ever-greater realization of our shared capacity for autonomous moral action. While we are naturally endowed with a rational faculty, Kant asserts, “those natural capacities which are directed towards the use of his reason are such that they could be fully developed only in the species, but not in the individual.” The Groundwork and the second Critique address the determination of the moral good on purely transcendental grounds, realized in the good will; Kant’s historical and anthropological writings, conversely, attend to the distinctly human task of developing the capacities that attune us to that good and enable us to pursue it. Our natural end—the perfection of our rational capacities—anchors a teleological conception of historical progress that conceives of humanity as advancing towards its moral realization.
As imperfectly rational creatures, human beings thus need to develop their sensitivity to, and resolve in pursuing, their moral obligations; in light of our fallibility, Kant tells us, “[t]he human being must therefore be educated to the good.” While the good is determined on objective, transcendental grounds, our subjective propensity to act on it—as Paul Guyer puts it, our moral character and disposition—requires cultivation. Kant addresses this developmental dimension of moral agency in his anthropology, which examines “the subjective conditions in human nature that hinder people or help them in fulfilling the laws of a metaphysics of morals. It would deal with the development, spreading, and strengthening of moral principle.”
How, then, does culture relate to these teleologically given ends, and to our historical progress towards them? Kant describes “nature’s plan, of a supreme and, to us, inscrutable wisdom: to bring about the perfection of the human being through progressive culture.” Culture, in Kant’s usage, refers to cultivation, to the development and ultimate “perfection of the human being”; culture is only comprehensible in relation to the acculturation required to push us towards our natural end. Most generally, culture describes “the procurement of skillfulness [Geschicklichkeit]” enabling human beings to engage in purposive action, and ultimately, to set and pursue moral ends. This acculturation incorporates both individual and social development; as Louden observes, culture “is often used in a double sense by Kant: sometimes it refers to the general formation of humanity out of animality in the human race as a whole; sometimes it refers to more specific educational processes directed at particular groups as well as individuals.” Broadly speaking, then, culture describes both human beings’ development towards their moral ends and the more particular processes drawing us towards them. But how exactly are we to understand the relationship between individual formation and collective advancement?
Culture and cultivation, individual and collective
At the individual level, culture refers to a course of positive instruction within Kant’s broader account of moral education. In his Lectures on Pedagogy, Kant outlines a three-stage educational program aiming at the formation of moral agents, consisting of discipline, culture, and moral training. All education begins with discipline, which Kant describes as “negative” instruction; given the volitional primacy of our natural drives and sensible urges, an education aiming at rational self-possession starts by mitigating the influence of our inclinations. Discipline tames the subject’s animality, reining in human beings’ natural drive for unconstrained freedom and self-indulgence. It thus provides a foundation for all positive instruction by inculcating obedience and self-control, and by curbing the natural instincts that dominate an uncultured mind. “Discipline,” Kant asserts, “prevents the human being from deviating by means of his animal impulses from his destiny: humanity … [it] is therefore merely negative, that is to say, it is the action by means of which man’s tendency to savagery is taken away.” By restraining the instinct to pursue the heteronomous freedoms to which human beings are naturally impelled, discipline lays the foundation for true, rational freedom—that is, for autonomy.
Discipline thus clears the ground for the positive instruction encompassed in practical education, “by which the human being is to be formed so that he can live as a freely acting being”; this includes basic instruction, pragmatic instruction, and moral training. Culture, in the narrower sense, refers to this course of positive instruction, through which human beings acquire the technical and prudential skills enabling them to set their own ends. Through basic instruction, human beings develop the technical skills required by any end-setting being. These skills constitute the means by which purposive activity is carried out, whose ends are given by the various goals that human beings set themselves. Pragmatic instruction attends to what Kant describes as prudential skills, “skill in the choice of means to one’s own greatest well-being,” responding to imperatives of happiness. This instruction imparts and develops an understanding of the social rules within which agents learn to seek their ends; Kant describes prudence, which this education fosters, as “using other human beings for one’s purposes.” Pragmatic training educates the subject in the social graces and refinements of civilized interaction, making him “well suited for human society, popular and influential. This requires … manners, good behavior and a certain prudence in virtue of which one is able to use all human beings for one’s own final purposes.”
In total, then, culture—in the narrow sense, referring to the particular course of positive instruction in Kant’s moral pedagogy—comprises the sphere of individual formation in which human beings develop the skills that all purposive action requires, enabling us to set ends of all kinds, including moral ones. As Kant asserts in the third Critique, “[t]he production in a rational being of an aptitude for any ends in general of his own choosing (consequently of his freedom) is culture.”
Yet, as we saw, we develop not just individually, but collectively: culture also refers to the formation of humanity writ large, to our progress through stages of social development. In this second sense, culture refers to a point of social achievement, a given stage of collective advancement. In this context, Kant understands culture in roughly similar terms to the more familiar, contemporary sense: as a particular form of social life. And yet, it is important to note that Kant understands this “collective” iteration of culture as equally related to cultivation: culture does not refer to any form of social life (as Muthu, importing the contemporary usage of the term, understands it), but rather, to the particular form of social life characteristic of a given stage of sociohistorical development. As Louden notes, “Kant often makes a further distinction between general culture and ‘a certain kind of [gewisse Art von] culture, which is called civilization’ (9:450).” In this second—and related—sense, culture refers to the realm of our social lives as the sphere within which we develop the technical and prudential skills, aptitudes, and dispositions required to set our own ends. Culture, for Kant, concerns the development of our basic capacity to exercise reason and to set ends, which is inexorably connected to our social existence. Civilized culture, then, refers to a particular form of social life that enables the development of particular skills and aptitudes.
There is thus an intimate connection between individual and collective dimensions of culture: given forms of social life develop (or fail to develop) our rational faculties. Our capacities and propensities are not only fostered through moral education, but also through the broader institutions of social life; as Barbara Herman asserts, “autonomous moral agency is realized in and through a certain form of social life with others.” As Herman, Muthu, and Thomas McCarthy point out, moral agency relies on a backdrop of cultural resources; individual autonomy depends on a social context. And yet, only particular social, cultural, and political contexts are, in Kant’s view, conducive to moral progress; “cultures” are not valuable in themselves, as Muthu claims, but only in light of their role in our historical progress from a lesser to a greater state of moral perfection. Certain social contexts are more capable of producing morally progressive agents than others, and some appear incapable of forming them at all. Moral agency requires particular dispositions, fostered by particular social and cultural institutions; as Herman maintains, “[t]he right social institutions are the background of sound moral judgment.”
These social institutions are an historical achievement; only modem, civilized cultures push us towards the realization of our moral nature. We progress both as societies and in societies; Kant regards progressive social stages as reflecting stages of collective advancement, tying our individual rational growth to the developmental level of our social context. Collective and individual dimensions of progress are inexorably intertwined and mutually reinforcing; as we emerge from our self-incurred immaturity, we develop social and political institutions that increasingly depend on the exercise of our rational faculties. These successive social stages are analogous with the stages of individual development outlined in Kant’s moral pedagogy. Early, or “savage,” societies stand in need of discipline, in much the same way as do children; “culture” represents an intermediary point in our collective development, a preparatory stage enabling us to hone the skills required for properly moral action; and “moralization” comprises our collective end. Kant identifies these stages of social development with distinctive achievements in our moral capacities:
We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilized to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and proprieties. But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves morally mature. For while the idea of morality is indeed present in culture, an application of this idea which only extends to the semblances of morality, as in love of honour and outward propriety, amounts merely to civilization.
Culture is inextricable from the historical trajectory by which Kant gauges humanity’s progress towards moralization. Our movement through these stages of moral improvement is enabled by particular social and political conditions; only advanced, civilized societies produce the habits, dispositions, and propensities orienting us towards our moral ends. “The human being,” Kant argues, “is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself by means of the arts and the sciences.” We are bound to develop our moral nature and capacities in society, through our interactions with others. Culture, then, refers to the individual and collective cultivation of moral faculties and dispositions enabled by progressive, civilized societies.
Through our immersion in such civilized social contexts, we internalize the “small” virtues, which Kant associates with the duty “to use one’s moral perfections in social intercourse.” The exercise of these social virtues “cultivate[s] a disposition of reciprocity—agreeableness, tolerance, mutual love and respect.” Civilized, European cultures “promote a virtuous disposition,” the pursuit of which Kant includes in the “many duties of virtue,” the imperfect obligations that help to construct a moral character. In the Anthropology, Kant discusses the moral value of everything from fashion to good living, to luxury, to fine art; moderate alcohol consumption, dinner parties, writing and reading poetry all comprise morally edifying activities. While none of these constitutes an irreplaceable pillar of moral life, they do demonstrate the particularity of Kant’s conception of morally progressive culture, and of the kinds of social institutions, habits, affects, and proprieties that sustain and develop our moral consciousness. In a passage in the Anthropology tellingly entitled “On permissible moral illusion,” Kant maintains that
the more civilized human beings are, the more they are actors. They adopt the illusion of affection, of respect for others, of modesty, and of unselfishness without deceiving anyone at all, because it is understood by everyone that nothing is meant sincerely by this. And it is also very good that this happens in the world. For when human beings play these roles, eventually the virtues, whose illusion they have merely affected for a considerable length of time, will gradually really be aroused and merge into the disposition.
While duplicity and affectation have no place in genuinely moral action, they comprise important mechanisms for fostering a moral disposition; the social graces of civilized societies “arouse” our moral sensibilities. Socially necessary attitudes, such as “affability, sociability, courtesy, hospitality and gentleness … promote the feeling for virtue itself by striving to bring this illusion as near as possible to the truth.” These social virtues perform two invaluable functions: they draw us towards true moralization by cultivating moral feelings and sensibilities, and they develop the social habits sustaining progressive social and political institutions. It is through our participation in social proprieties, in the arts and sciences—in short, in civilized culture—that we shed the crudity of our animal natures and learn to develop the habits, dispositions, and character of self-governing agents.
Pathologies of freedom: The problem of bad cultures
Culture, then, serves a very particular end; the dispositions and skills that we develop in civilized societies prepare us for, in Kant’s words, an autocracy of the mind. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant explicitly describes culture as the bridge between nature and freedom: the refinements and moralizing influence of civilized culture enable humanity’s progressive enlightenment. Culture is not an incidental artifice that certain societies might side-step, but is rather an unavoidable dimension of our collective moral education. But, problematically, not all forms of collective life stand equally capable of moving us towards our moral improvement; non-European societies appear incapable of fulfilling this critical moral-developmental function. While Louden’s treatment of Kant’s impure ethics provides a great depth of insight into his conceptualization of culture, he fails to note the consequences of Kant’s view for those who develop the wrong kind of “culture.” He observes that “Kantian moralization … necessarily presupposes the preparatory steps of culture and civilization”; how, then, are we to think of people(s) who fail to undergo this cultivation, who lack the right culture?
As Allen Wood argues, “savage” societies foster an unmitigated, uncontrolled desire for freedom; without the “ennobling” effects of discipline and culture, this impulsion manifests itself through the savage’s natural drives, rather than through his rational capacities. Such forms of social life directly inhibit the development of our moral faculties by pandering to our natural inclinations, rather than cultivating our capacities for rational self-determination. Civilized culture constitutes an invaluable learning tool, turning this pathological drive for unconstrained freedom into an ennobled desire for rational self-control—Kant’s conception of true freedom. Savage peoples have the wrong kind of culture—collectively and individually—exacerbating rather than mitigating their unrestrained drive for freedom:
Now by nature the human being has such a powerful propensity towards freedom that when he has grown accustomed to it for a while, he will sacrifice everything for it. And it is precisely for this reason that discipline must … be applied very early … It is also observable in savage nations that, though they may be in the service of Europeans for a long time, they can never grow accustomed to the European way of life. But with them this is not a noble propensity towards freedom, as Rousseau and others believe; rather it is a certain raw state in that the animal in this case has so to speak not yet developed the humanity inside itself … If he is allowed to have his own way and is in no way opposed in his youth, then he will retain a certain savagery throughout his life.
Without the formation, education, and influence of civilized culture, human beings’ primordial inclination towards freedom inhibits the development of their rational faculties. In contrast with the moral sentiments and virtues to which European societies acculturate their populations, “barbaric” peoples treat women as property; they express themselves through symbol, as they lack the capacity for clear conceptual thought; they “show few traces of a mental character disposed to the finer feelings.” Savage nations clearly comprise “bad” cultures, forms of sociality that mis-educate and cultivate “raw” human beings whose capacities for moral progress are stunted. Improperly acculturated people(s) remain incapable of adopting European forms of life; their early lack of discipline condemns them to a lifetime of moral ineptitude. Even more problematically, Kant argues that some societies—specifically, Amerindian peoples are incapable of any culture at all.
Not all forms of social life, then, are equally capable of drawing us towards our moral ends; only refined, advanced societies train us to subject our natural drive for freedom to the authority of the rational faculty. Uncivilized, non-European nations fail to inculcate the discipline required for an autocracy of the mind to take hold; they fail to bridge nature and freedom, indulging the former to the detriment of the latter. European culture, conversely, comprises the social and individual conditions developing the capacities of autonomous, end-setting beings. In the third Critique, Kant directly addresses the unique role that advanced, civilized cultures play in our moral development:
[N]ot just any culture is adequate for this ultimate purpose of nature. The culture of skill is indeed the foremost subjective condition for an aptitude to promote purposes generally … Th[e] other condition could be called the culture of discipline [Zucht (Disziplin)]. It is negative and consists in the liberation of the will from the despotism of desires, a despotism that rivets us to certain natural things and renders us unable to do our own selecting.
Only certain kinds of culture develop the subjective capacities and propensities orienting us towards our moral ends. This is precisely why Kant describes cultures of discipline and skill as conditions for this “ultimate purpose of nature”: civilized societies alone incorporate both negative (discipline) and positive (skill) forms of instruction preparing us for purposive activity, for “an aptitude to promote purposes generally.” Discipline and skill are, as we saw in Kant’s moral pedagogy, the preparatory foundations for properly moral action: a culture of discipline liberates us from our animal drives and impulses, while a culture of skill develops the technical and pragmatic talents required for all purposive activity.
These “cultures” of discipline and skill these forms of cultivation—are absent in uncivilized, non-European societies. Savage peoples, nomadic peoples, and non-European peoples fail to arrest and mitigate the influence of their animal natures, of their sensible impulses; they remain too close to nature to actualize themselves as free beings. They fall back into what nature makes of them rather than developing the discipline and skills required for self-creation. Barbaric social forms fail to cultivate the dispositions, skills, and social graces that draw us “if not to morality itself, to that which is its cloak, moral decency.” This is a matter of enculturation; we cannot progress towards the ultimate end of moralization without the discipline, self-mastery, and sociality characteristic of European societies. Culture—the right culture—Kant tells us,
mak[es] room for the development of our humanity, namely, by making ever more headway against the crudeness and vehemence of those inclinations that belong to us primarily as animals and that interfere most with our education for our higher vocation … [For we have] the fine art[s] and the sciences, which involve a universally communicable pleasure as well as elegance and refinement, and through these they make man, not indeed morally [sittlich] better for [life in] society, but still civilized [gesittet] for it; they make great headway against the tyranny of man’s propensity to the senses, and so prepare him for a sovereignty in which reason alone is to dominate.
Conclusion: Rethinking the Value of Culture
How, then, are we to evaluate Kant’s view of culture in relation to his broader moral and political philosophy? Muthu aims to recover a “cultural” Kant from behind the widely shared view of his almost inhuman formalism; since Hegel’s early jabs, Kant’s ethics have been persistently criticized for providing little or no space for affect or contextual judgment, for the distinctly human dimensions of moral life. Muthu draws to light a different side of Kant, beyond the critical account that so often overshadows and obscures his treatments of the phenomenal facets of human life. It is this Kant, in Muthu’s view, that rejected imperialism for a law-governed cosmopolitanism that embraced the value of different cultures as expressions of human freedom. Yet, while Muthu’s illumination of Kant’s “empirical” philosophy fleshes out a fuller picture of his ethics, we ought to be wary of marshalling a “cultural” Kant to recover an unwarranted sensitivity to plurality in his thought. There are, in my view, at least two problems with this.
First, the argument from cultural agency misrepresents not only Kant’s views on culture, but also his broader theorizations of autonomy, freedom, cosmopolitanism, and anti-imperialism. Furthermore, it imports a contemporary usage of culture (designating different forms of collective social life) that resembles one of the two dimensions of Kant’s view that I have tried to draw out (a particular form of collective social life associated with an equally particular stage of historical development), but fails to note the distinctive ways in which Kant understands and employs the term. This misperception closes us off from the persuasive and systematic reasons that Kant does offer for opposing imperialism. Kant both rejected European expansionism and defended the ideal of a law-governed cosmopolitan federation on grounds of pure principles of right. The argument from cultural agency circumvents the very good and systematic justifications that he advanced, obscuring a rich repository of intellectual resources and philosophical argumentation upon which we might draw to criticize and resist imperialism and neo-imperialism. It closes us off from one of Kant’s most compelling and important arguments: the ideal of a law-governed, cosmopolitan federation of states can be defended on the basis of individual rights, and not only as a matter of collective protectionism.
Second, the argument from cultural agency misinterprets Kant’s understanding of culture by ignoring its acculturative function, and in so doing, misses the ways in which it appears to narrow the range of social lives that he considered morally progressive at all. Far from expressing a sensitivity to the internal worth of different cultures, Kant in fact explicitly attributes value to a singular form of social life alone, as imparting the skills, developing the capacities, and strengthening the dispositions pushing us towards our moral end, our “natural perfection.” Culture is a matter of cultivation; cultures, in this case, are only valuable insofar as they contribute to this moral formation—and precious few of them do. Given this, Kant’s view of culture appears poorly poised to support any anti-imperial or cosmopolitan politics; if anything, it appears to contradict the “formal” arguments for moral and political equality for which he is better known.
Kant’s writings on culture belong to his broader account of the conditions under which inexorably imperfect human beings develop their moral capacities. While the transcendental grounds of our freedom remain unaffected by any anthropological fact, our ability to realize this moral potentiality remains accordingly imperfect, an ongoing project rather than a foreseeable accomplishment. We share in an equal dignity as moral beings—Kant unambiguously recognizes the inalienable humanity in us all as commanding respect. But we are not all equally capable of moving from the crude animality of our origins to realizing, to the greatest degree to which we are capable, the humanity in ourselves. This slippage, between transcendental and developmental views of our moral nature, points to what McCarthy describes as “a lack of fit between how things look from the normative point of view of morality or right and how they look from the functional point of view of human progress” in Kant’s thought. This speaks to the kind of moral beings that we are: unlike the rational angels whose wills cannot help but conform to the moral law, our constitutive phenomenality commits us to perpetually approximating virtue and developing ourselves as moral beings. Human beings are peculiar creatures, bound by moral obligation and yet always subject to sensible impulses; as a result, man must “develop his predispositions toward the good. Providence has not placed them already finished in him; they are mere predispositions.” Our particularly human moral task, then, lies not in achieving a moral perfection of which we are in fact incapable, but in continuously striving to develop our moral faculties, strengthen our moral resolve, and cultivate our moral sensibilities.
If this is the case, then we are bound to recognize the moral quandary facing the vast swaths of people who lack the right culture, who are either “naturally” or circumstantially inhibited from developing these moral faculties. As we have seen, these capacities, skills, and dispositions are cultivated by given social and cultural conditions: only civilized societies comprise the cultures of discipline and skill that prepare us for Kant’s autocracy of the mind. On these grounds, Robert Bernasconi argues that Kant’s treatment of non-Europeans—spanning both his racial theory and his conception of civilized culture—throws their very capacity for moral progress into question; in his view, non-Europeans face the prospects of either becoming Europeanized or fading into obscurity, with all of the sinister implications that this carries.
Without suggesting (as Bernasconi and other critics such as Charles Mills and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze do) that Kant’s teleological account of human development irreparably impugns his moral theory, we ought nevertheless to be wary of an ethics whose developmental dimensions appear to constrain, or at least qualify, its universalism. While all human beings are entitled to an equal measure of respect, the failure of non-Europeans to develop the subjective capacities realizing the object of this respect must strike us as morally problematic. We are bound to critically assess the moral challenges facing those people(s) who are unable to become worthy of their humanity, to develop the rational, end-setting capacity in which our dignity inheres. In a word, we ought to be critical of an ethics that perceives certain kinds of people(s) as unable to develop the capacities bridging the gap between nature and freedom. If, as imperfect, phenomenal creatures, our moral task is to continually approach virtue, to develop and strengthen our moral dispositions and resolve, then the inability to cultivate these capacities at all signals a failure of our particularly human moral vocation. Kant’s moral and political philosophy provides a deep well of resources upon which to draw in arguing for the equality of all cultures; his own view of culture, ironically enough, is not among them.