Critical Eurocentrism and cosmopolitanism in Kant's anthropological and political thought

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to focus on a contradiction which those who read Kant’s writings are faced with confronts, and also, to point out how it can be illuminated and perhaps solved if the different levels present in Kant’s philosophical discourse are taken into account. Indeed, in the first place, one can identify the descriptive discourse, structured on an empirical basis, typical of Kantian writings on physical geography and anthropology. In these writings we find judgments about the different races and peoples, giving a voice to prejudices which were also shared by other philosophers, where primacy and superiority is assigned to the white race over other races and to the Europeans over other peoples. But, on the other hand, there is also the rational discourse of Kantian ethics and philosophy of law with its expressed presumption of universality, which unequivocally suggests the unity of mankind and the equality and dignity of all human beings. This contradiction of discursive enunciations seems to be solved by a third level of discourse, the teleological discourse, which dominates the Kantian writings on the philosophy of history and politics. The teleological discourse bridges up the descriptive and the rational discourses, and it inscribes the empirical and historical human diversity on a global plan of organic rationality of nature in relation to the human species. In this plan, the antinomies between the unity of the human species and the diversity of the biological and cultural expression are overcome, not statically but in an historical process, as well as the antinomies between a speech coming from the point of view of an European man and a cosmopolitan point of view which is proposed by the philosopher as the task which gives meaning to human history and which corresponds to the “secret plan” of nature regarding the fulfilment of the destination of mankind.