1 - Teleology and history in Kant: the critical foundations of Kant's philosophy of history

Summary

Although the title of Kant's essay Idea for Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim indicates its central theme, it reveals little or nothing about its underlying methodology and its connection with the emerging critical philosophy. Indeed, as far as the title is concerned, the only hint of a connection with the latter is provided by the inclusion of the term “Idea.” This is a technical term for Kant referring to concepts of reason, which, as distinct from concepts of the understanding, whose legitimate use is restricted to possible experience, involve the thought of an absolute totality or completeness that can never be met with in a possible experience and is, therefore, “transcendent” with respect to the latter. In the first Critique, Kant's appealed to the Platonic republic and a constitution that provides for “the greatest human freedom according to laws that permit the freedom of each to exist together with that of others” as examples of such ideas (A 316/B 372–3); but his focus was on the “transcendental Ideas” (the soul, the world, and God), which arise from extending certain concepts of the understanding to the “unconditioned,” thereby producing the thought of a complete systematic unity. While illusory, in the sense that no real object corresponds to them, these Ideas nonetheless play an essential regulative role in guiding the understanding in its endemic search for unity in experience.