Kant's Anthropology from a Foucauldian Point of View

Abstract

<p>The last of Immanuel Kant's texts to be published in his lifetime, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [Anthropology in Pragmatischer Hinsicht] (1798) has gone virtually undiscussed in twentieth-century English scholarship. In fact, Susan Meld Shell appears to be the only English scholar to provide even a marginal account of its position in Kant's oeuvre. Part of my thesis will address why the Anthropology -- a rather strange and anomalous text in that it easily betrays the anxieties behind one of the most guarded, rigourous, and determined thinkers of the Enlightenment -- is such a marginalized text. Why are critics of Kant so willing to dismiss it? With this question in mind, I aim to reveal some of the more critical interests and investments motivating the text's fundamental query: who is the anthropos of anthropology, that is, who or what is "man"? Although Kant concedes that the question is ultimately insoluble, that the I definition of man is ostensibly circumscribed by the absence of an ontologically equivalent external other, he insists on problematizing "man" as the stage or site on which the dramatic contest between reason and unreason or concord and discord takes place. Whereas Shell limits her brief discussion of the Anthropology to consider how Kant ls personal experience with hypochondria determines the scope and emphasis of his pragmatic anthropology, I will argue that the text's hypochondriacal resonances stem from a larger concern for what Foucault calls the "cultivation" or "care of the self." Consequently, I will read the Anthropology as a kind of conduct book that traces the manner in which the subject, in its relationship to itself: styles and maintains its own self-sovereignty. I argue, moreover, that Kant ls text reflects an ideological shift in emphasis in the history of ethics, a shift in which the bourgeois subject redefines its relationship to itself in order to preserve its differential value as the central or privileged figure in the semiotics of the health of the body and of the soul.</p>