Summary: Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Is there a sense of History? Or is history a random process?

For Kant, chance is only apparent. Indeed "human actions are determined exactly like any other natural event according to the universal laws of Nature. ¹

In fact, we recall that Kant established in the Critique of Practical Reason that there is phenomenal determinism, even if freedom exists as a noumenon.

History is nothing other than the phenomenal whole of man's actions, so it comes under determinism.

What seems disorderly and irrational in History from the point of view of the individual is revealed from the point of view of the species as a progressive and continuous, albeit slow, development of its original dispositions ².

Kant takes two examples to make us grasp this order, which is concealed beneath a surface irrationality. Deaths, births and marriages appear to occur irregularly, by chance or according to the fluctuating will of men. However, statistical tables show that, in the end, they occur according to constant natural laws. Similarly, rainfall, although irregular, always ends up being more or less the same over a given territory.

In fact, there is a sense of History, which Kant calls the design of Nature, pursued " unconsciously" by human beings:

Men taken individually, and even whole peoples, scarcely give a thought to the fact that in pursuing their particular ends each according to his own good pleasure, they are unwittingly following, like a common thread, the purpose of Nature, which is itself unknown to them, and are working to further its realization ³.

With so much absurdity and vice in everyone, we can assume no reasonable personal purpose, but perhaps a purpose of Nature.

Kant sketches the main thread of this History, by means of nine propositions.

Proposition 1: All the natural dispositions of a creature are destined one day to develop completely and in accordance with an end ⁴.

Thus, an unused organ is a contradiction in itself. This proposition is confirmed, from a biological point of view, by medicine (dissection). If this principle were false, we would no longer be dealing with a Nature that conforms to laws but with a Nature that plays without any purpose.

Proposition 2: man's natural dispositions to reason develop fully only in the species, not in the individual.

Kant defines reason as a power to extend far beyond natural instinct the rules and designs which command the use of all one's powers ⁵.

Proposition 3: Man will be able to take part in no other felicity or perfection than that which he has created for himself, independently of instinct, by his own reason ⁶.

It may be noted that man was born almost "naked", without any natural advantages. For his safety, he has neither the bull's horn, nor the lion's claw, nor the dog's fangs, only hands. Everything happens, then, as if Nature wanted man to owe his progress only to himself, as if Nature's design was not to make man happy, but worthy of happiness.

Proposition 4: The means Nature uses to bring about the development of all her dispositions is their antagonism in society ⁷.

The basis of this antagonism is, in Kant's famous expression, the unsociable sociability of men ⁸, in other words, their tendency to enter society, linked to a resistance to doing so that constantly threatens to split that society.

Man feels the benefit of society (in this state he develops better) but at the same time he has this unsociable character of wanting to regulate everything as he pleases ⁹, of resisting others, etc.

That is precisely this resistance that awakens all man's strength, that leads him to overcome his tendency to laziness.

¹ Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, Introduction
² ibid.
³ ibid.
⁴ prop.1
⁵ prop.2
⁶ prop.3
⁷ prop.4
⁸ ibid.
⁹ ibid.