Chapter 13 - What a young man needs for his venture into the world: the function and evolution of the “Characteristics”

Summary

Immanuel Kant's pedagogical concern most directly informed the second part of his course in anthropology, what he termed Characteristics. The contrast between philosophy, according to the academic concept, and philosophy, according to the world concept, developed by Kant early in his logic lectures and replicated virtually verbatim in the first Critique, stood at the core of Kant's sense of his pedagogical mission from the very beginning of his university teaching career. According to the terse Pillau notes of 1777-8, Kant began with temperament, and then went on to character, physiognomy, national character, sexual difference, and finally the character of the species, including a (dismaying) discussion of races. The organization of Kant's Characteristics in the lectures was hodgepodge. He described the entire second part of his Anthropology Lectures in terms of cognizing the interior of the human being from the exterior.